Papers by Li Du
Feature Extraction and Steering for Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve reasoning and mathematical problems using the Chain-of-Thought technique, but require costly and long CoT data and fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses Sparse Autoencoders to extract interpretable features from vanilla CoT and use them to steer the LLM's internal states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method uses Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to extract interpretable features from vanilla CoT and steer the LLM's internal states during generation. |
OOP: Object-Oriented Programming Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | None Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as a key tool for automated programming. |
| Approach: | They compare performance of None Large language models with language understanding models on functional programming and object-oriented programming benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The models perform relatively well on functional programming (FP) and object-oriented programming (OOP) benchmarks, while exhibiting poor performance on OOP benchmarks. |
A Measure-Theoretic Characterization of Tight Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Language modeling is a core task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize leakage onto the set of infinite sequences by a measure-theoretic approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model families are tight, meaning they will not leak . the proposed language models are based on the 'sequence leakage' hypothesis . |
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiming Zhang, Qingyao Li, Xinyi Dai, Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for natural language generation are pre-trained on text-only corpora, resulting in visual commonsense. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that makes pre-trained language models learn to imagine for visually-augmented natural language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with Transformer-based architecture. |
Learning Event Graph Knowledge for Abductive Reasoning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for abductive reasoning based on formal logic lack commonsense knowledge and effective reasoning mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative text-based abductive reasoning task NLI with a latent variable to capture commonsense knowledge from event graph for guiding the abductive reasoning task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods on the abductive reasoning task. |
Penetrating Linguistic Disguises: A Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework for Fine-Grained Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Flexible word boundaries and linguistic obfuscation, particularly slang, challenge precise span-level hate speech detection in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework that maps slang to explicit hate semantics and uses task-specific branches to mitigate feature interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces ambiguity by mapping obscure slang to explicit hate semantics. |
S2S-Arena: Evaluating Paralinguistic Instruction Following in Speech-to-Speech Models (2026.acl-long)
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Feng Jiang, Zhiyu Lin, Yiyang Liu, Liumeng Xue, Fan Bu, Yuhao Du, Xiangying Chen, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks rely heavily on text-based evaluation and largely ignore paralinguistic cues such as prosody, emotion, and speaker traits. |
| Approach: | They propose a speech-native benchmark for evaluating instruction-following S2S models with explicit assessment of both semantic understanding and paralinguistic expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system enables more natural, robust, and human-aligned speech agents. |
Language Models as Inductive Reasoners (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to induce natural language rules from natural language facts using natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. |
CogBERT: Cognition-Guided Pre-trained Language Models (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods fine-tune pre-trained models on cognitive data, ignoring the semantic gap between texts and cognitive signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into pre-trained language models by adaptively adjusting the weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into BERT by adaptively adjusting weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Causal chain reasoning models suffer from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses exogenous variables to represent causal pairs and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions using structural causal recurrent neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on Chinese and English CCR datasets. |
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. |
RSMeM: Knowledge-Enhanced Memory Evolution for Remote Sensing Agents with Systematic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Bingxian Wu, Yu Zhang, Zonghao Guo, Tang Liu, Chen Qian, Yuxiang Lu, Xingbo Du, Yanghao Li, Yidan Zhang, Chi Chen, Ling Yao, Chenghu Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing RS agents built on general-purpose LLMs are domain-agnostic, resulting in brittle and error-prone workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced memory evolution mechanism that bootstraps RS agents with pre-distilled domain knowledge and iteratively integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the new model improves tool-use performance and accuracy . iteratively, iteration of the model integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution . |
Zero-shot Sharpness-Aware Quantization for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot quantization methods are based on overfitting problem in adversarial learning process, leading to sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot sharpness-aware quantization framework for the quantization of various PLMs by optimizing a minimax problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve significant performance gains on discriminative and generative PLMs. |
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. |
VideoEraser: Concept Erasure in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that VideoEraser outperforms prior methods regarding efficacy, integrity, fidelity, robustness, and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that prevents T2V diffusion models from generating videos with undesirable concepts even when explicitly prompted with those concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in erasure, celebrity erasion, and explicit content erasing tasks. |
Weight Distillation: Transferring the Knowledge in Neural Network Parameters (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation is an effective method for model acceleration and compression. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parameters to distill knowledge from large neural networks to small ones . they propose to do this by using a parameter generator to transfer the knowledge to a small neural network . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method learns a small network 1.88 2.94x faster than the large network but with competitive BLEU points. |
Reflect-RL: Two-Player Online RL Fine-Tuning for LMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a limited offline dataset does not yield good performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-player system to fine-tune an LM using SFT and online RL . they use negative example generation to enhance error-correction ability of the reflection model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms SFT and online RL without reflection on a GPT-2 XL 1.56B model. |
GIFT: Guided Fine-Tuning and Transfer for Enhancing Instruction-Tuned Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiwen Ruan, Yichao Du, Jianjie Zheng, Longyue Wang, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Jinsong Su, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
| Challenge: | Existing adapter-based transfer methods treat instruction-tuned models as passive targets . direct fine-tuning can disrupt this delicate balance and lead to instability or performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates instruction-level guidance into task adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms direct fine-tuning and representative transfer-based baselines while maintaining robust generalization and favorable test-time scaling behavior. |
A Formal Perspective on Byte-Pair Encoding (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is a popular algorithm used for tokenizing data in NLP, but the underlying optimization problem that BPE seeks to solve has not yet been laid down. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm which is a 1/sigma*(1-e(-sigma))-approximation of an optimal merge sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves the runtime complexity from O(NM) to O(N log M) and the lower bound of the approximation is approx0.37. |
Distantly Supervised Course Concept Extraction in MOOCs with Academic Discipline (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract knowledge concepts from MOOCs are noisy and incomplete because of the limited dictionary and diverse MOOC. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically extract course concepts using distant supervision to eliminate the heavy work of human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods with 7% absolute improvement in F1 score. |
Revisiting Knowledge Distillation for Autoregressive Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models (LMs) are expensive and memory intensive, preventing the development of industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive teaching approach to improve the KD of autoregressive language models by distilling knowledge into a small student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve consistent and significant performance gains across all model types and sizes. |
FaithScore: Fine-grained Evaluations of Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) lack the capacity to handle multimodal inputs effectively. |
| Approach: | They introduce a reference-free and fine-grained evaluation metric that measures the faithfulness of the generated free-form answers from large vision-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric measures the faithfulness of free-form answers from large vision-language models. |
Differential Privacy for Text Analytics via Natural Text Sanitization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text sanitization mechanisms provide low utility, as cursed by the high-dimensional text representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sanitized texts to samaritize training data . they propose to retrain and fine-tune the senitization-aware language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables privacypreserving natural language processing over the BERT language model with promising utility. |
Add-One-In: Incremental Sample Selection for Large Language Models via a Choice-Based Greedy Paradigm (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on individual quality and do not assess the value of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a choice-based sample selection framework that evaluates sample quality . they use LLMs to evaluate the value of each option during the selection process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the full dataset and recent studies on a larger medical dataset. |
Learning SQL Like a Human: Structure-Aware Curriculum Learning for Text-to-SQL Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle with complex queries, especially multi-table joins and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a model with synthetic training samples and a structure-aware curriculum learning framework for enhancing SQL generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the existing model on the Spider and Bird benchmarks. |
Relation-Aware Question Answering for Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based approaches to solve multihop Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) fail to utilize information from head-tail entities and the semantic connection between relations to enhance the information capturing of relations in KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dual relation graph to find the answer entity in a knowledge graph . they use primal entity graph reasoning, dual relation grafitment and interaction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant performance gain over the prior state-of-the-art on two public datasets, WebQSP and CWQ. |
AlphaFin: Benchmarking Financial Analysis with Retrieval-Augmented Stock-Chain Framework (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, ML&DL methods fail to provide reasons for stock trend predictions, lacking interpretability and reasoning processes. large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and are unable to keep up with the latest information. |
| Approach: | They develop a method to train large language models to handle financial analysis tasks . they use AlphaFin datasets to compare performance with traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves stock trend prediction and financial question answering tasks. |
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. |
Hidden State Variability of Pretrained Language Models Can Guide Computation Reduction for Transfer Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to transfer a pretrained language model include fine-tuning all the parameters in the language model and adapting all its subsets. |
| Approach: | They propose to select layers based on the variability of their hidden states given a task-specific corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the computational cost of transfer learning methods without sacrificing performance. |
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. |
A Simple and Effective Approach to Robust Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has questioned the robustness of unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction methods on distant language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative dimension reduction method to bridge this gap . they propose a method that initializes and self-learning and inducing a dictionary . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 13.64 55.53% accuracy between English and four distant languages. |
Towards Generalizable and Faithful Logic Reasoning over Natural Language via Resolution Refutation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in various natural language reasoning tasks, but struggle with performing first-order logic reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which introduces the paradigm of resolution refutation to solve first-order logic reasoning problems by extending reasoning rules and employing the principle of proof by contradiction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models while maintaining performance in simple scenarios. |
Coreferential Reasoning Learning for Language Representation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing language representation models cannot explicitly handle coreference, which is essential to the coherent understanding of the whole discourse. |
| Approach: | They propose a language representation model that captures coreferential relations in context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve significant improvements on downstream NLP tasks while maintaining comparable performance to baseline models on other common NLP task. |
Atoxia: Red-teaming Large Language Models with Target Toxic Answers (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are still vulnerable to generation safety vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that A**tacks LLMs with target "toxi" given a particular harmful answer, the method generates a user query and a misleading answer opening to examine the internal defects of a given LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects safety risks in open-source models and state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o. |
Refusal-Aware Red Teaming: Exposing Inconsistency in Safety Evaluations (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require rigorous safety evaluations to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a red teaming framework that detects internal model refusals and contrasts them with judgments from an external safety evaluator to generate test cases that expose such discrepancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing reinforcement learning-based approaches in generating diverse test cases and achieves a substantially higher discovery rate of refusal gaps. |
Large Language Models for Automated Open-domain Scientific Hypotheses Discovery (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on hypothetical induction is limited by the observation annotations in the dataset and the ground truth hypotheses are mostly commonsense knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a first dataset for social science academic hypotheses discovery using raw web corpus as observations and propose valid, useful scientific hypothese . they propose 'a multi-module framework' that includes feedback mechanisms to boost performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset generates valid, novel, and helpful scientific hypotheses, even new to humanity, using open-domain data and a web corpus as observations. |
ZSEE: A Dataset based on Zeolite Synthesis Event Extraction for Automated Synthesis Platform (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Automated synthesis of zeolite holds great significance for attaining economic and environmental benefits. |
| Approach: | They propose an event extraction task to mine structural synthesis actions from experimental narratives for modular automated synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can significantly expedite automated synthesis of zeolites owing to its machine readability. |
MIKE: A New Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Entity Knowledge Editing (2024.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Li, Miaozeng Du, Chuanyi Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Nan Hu, Guilin Qi, Haiyun Jiang, Siyuan Cheng, Bozhong Tian
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks focus on coarse-grained knowledge, leaving the intricacies of fine-grounded knowledge unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and dataset specifically designed for FG multimodal entity knowledge editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark underscoring the complexity of FG knowledge editing in MLLMs. |
LLM Agents in Law: Taxonomy, Applications, and Challenges (2026.acl-long)
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Shuang Liu, Ruijia Zhang, Ruoyun Ma, Yujia Deng, Lanyi Zhu, Jiayu Li, Zelong Li, Zhibin Shen, Mengnan Du
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have improved the legal domain, but deployment of standalone models faces significant limitations regarding hallucination, outdated information, and verifiability. |
| Approach: | They present a survey of LLM agents for legal tasks and analyze their architectures . they analyze the transition from standard legal LLMs to legal agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures bridge the gap between technical capabilities and domain-specific needs. |
Bridging Relevance and Reasoning: Rationale Distillation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Xiaopeng Li, Zhaocheng Du, Xiangyang Li, Yichao Wang, Yuhao Wang, Qidong Liu, Maolin Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rerank and align documents based on reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) . prior work shows that LLMs have exceptional reasoning and text generation capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale extraction method that leverages reasoning capabilities of large language models to extract the rationales necessary for answering a query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compared with baseline methods on two tasks across three datasets. |
HiPrune: Hierarchical Attention for Efficient Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual token pruning lack insight into the intrinsic property of the vision encoder . et al., 2017: 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic token pruning method that trains without training . they propose 'HiPrune' method which prunes visual tokens according to their attention . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens . it reduces inference FLOPs by 58.7% and maintains 99.99% accuracy with 2/9 tokens. |
Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models (LVLMs) suffer from object hallucinations, i.e., they tend to generate objects inconsistent with the target images in the descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate powerful large vision-language models (LVLMs) they propose a polling-based query method to evaluate object hallucination . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can evaluate object hallucination in a more stable and flexible way. |
CSTree-SRI: Introspection-Driven Cognitive Semantic Tree for Multi-Turn Question Answering over Extra-Long Contexts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP), particularly in single-turn question answering (QA) on short-text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures logical correlations across chunks of ELC and maintains coherence of multi-turn Questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to capture logical correlations across chunks of ELC and maintain coherence of multi-turn Questions. |
Diversify, Rationalize, and Combine: Ensembling Multiple QA Strategies for Zero-shot Knowledge-based VQA (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge-based Visual Qustion-answering (K-VQA) often requires background knowledge beyond the image content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a bundle of complementary question-answering tactics to aggregate their answers using textual rationales. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DietCoke outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based baselines by 2.8% and 4.7% on K-VQA. |
Towards Reliable Large Audio Language Model (2025.findings-acl)
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Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yakun Song, Wenxi Chen, Chenpeng Du, Jian Wu, Yuanzhe Chen, Zhuo Chen, Yuping Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large audio language models (LALMs) have demonstrated impressive results and promising prospects in universal understanding and reasoning across speech, music, and general sound. |
| Approach: | They propose to use training-free and training-based methods to enhance LALM reliability to different extents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the reliability of large audio language models to different extents. |
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 . |
When is a Language Process a Language Model? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In some pathological situations, such a stochastic process may "leak" probability mass onto the set of infinite strings. |
| Approach: | They propose to view a language model as a discrete stochastic process X t : t = = t + . |
| Outcome: | The proposed conditions of tightness are generalized to language models and the literature. |
MINED: Probing and Updating with Multimodal Time-Sensitive Knowledge for Large Multimodal Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Kailin Jiang, Ning Jiang, Yuntao Du, Yuchen Ren, Yuchen Li, Yifan Gao, Jinhe Bi, Yunpu Ma, Bin Li, Lei Liu, Qing Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are constrained by static representations, inadequately evaluating their ability to understand time-sensitive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark containing 2,104 time-sensitive knowledge samples spanning six knowledge types to evaluate temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 challenging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 tasks, while most open-source LMMs still lack time understanding ability. |
DEEPER Insight into Your User: Directed Persona Refinement for Dynamic Persona Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Aili Chen, Chengyu Du, Jiangjie Chen, Jinghan Xu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Zulong Chen, Liangyue Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating personas from static historical data fail to capture dynamic behaviors and evolving preferences in real-world interactive scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that iteratively updates personas using streaming user behavior data to continually enhance their quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach delivers 32.2% reduction in user behavior prediction error over four update rounds, outperforming the best baseline by 22.92%. |
UOR: Universal Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to attack pre-trained language models rely on manual selection of triggers and backdoor representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack method that turns manual selection into automatic optimization . they propose to use poisoned contrastive learning to learn more uniform backdoor representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better attack performance on text classification tasks compared to manual methods. |
Cross Attention Augmented Transducer Networks for Simultaneous Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simultaneous translation are limited by monotonic constraint . a novel architecture for simultaneous translation is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a cross attention-augmented transducer for simultaneous translation that optimizes both policies and translation models by expanding target sequences with blank symbols. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves better latency-quality trade-offs than state-of-the-art approaches. |
LLMs Know More About Numbers than They Can Say (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in mathematical, scientific, financial and engineering domains. |
| Approach: | They probe the hidden states of several smaller open-source LLMs to find out how big they are . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves verbalized accuracy by 3.22% over base models. |
QiMeng-PRepair: Precise Code Repair via Edit-Aware Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Changxin Ke, Rui Zhang, Jiaming Guo, Yuanbo Wen, Li Ding, Shuo Wang, Xuyuan Zhu, Xiong Peng, Di Huang, Zidong Du, Xing Hu, Qi Guo, Yunji Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to program repair are based on correctness alone. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that mitigates over-editing and improves repair accuracy by generating buggy programs and re-edits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves repair precision by 31.4% under fix1@1, a metric that considers repair correctness and extent, and significantly increases decoding throughput when combined with speculative editing. |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios. |
Efficient Large Scale Language Modeling with Mixtures of Experts (2022.emnlp-main)
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Mikel Artetxe, Shruti Bhosale, Naman Goyal, Todor Mihaylov, Myle Ott, Sam Shleifer, Xi Victoria Lin, Jingfei Du, Srinivasan Iyer, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Giridharan Anantharaman, Xian Li, Shuohui Chen, Halil Akin, Mandeep Baines, Louis Martin, Xing Zhou, Punit Singh Koura, Brian O’Horo, Jeffrey Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mona Diab, Zornitsa Kozareva, Veselin Stoyanov
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts layers (MoEs) enable efficient scaling of language models . large autoregressive language models such as GPT-3 can be adapted to a wide range of tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mixture of Experts layers to enable efficient scaling of language models . they find that MoEs are substantially more compute efficient than dense models compared to MoE models - but only when they are more modestly trained . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms dense models in a wide range of tasks and domains. |
Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Generative Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xi Victoria Lin, Todor Mihaylov, Mikel Artetxe, Tianlu Wang, Shuohui Chen, Daniel Simig, Myle Ott, Naman Goyal, Shruti Bhosale, Jingfei Du, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Sam Shleifer, Punit Singh Koura, Vishrav Chaudhary, Brian O’Horo, Jeff Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Zornitsa Kozareva, Mona Diab, Veselin Stoyanov, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Large-scale generative language models such as GPT-3 are competitive few-shot learners. |
| Approach: | They train multilingual generative language models on a corpus covering a diverse set of languages and study their few- and zero-shot learning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-3 on 171 out of 182 directions with 32 training examples and surpasses the official supervised baseline in 45 directions. |
Med-SRAF: A Multi-Agent Framework for Medical Reasoning via Semantic Routing and Agentic Fusion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods suffer from a two-part problem: semantic drift and concatenation fallacy . et al.: rapid development of Large Language Models has led to a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent retrieval augmentation framework guided by medical domain knowledge to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing general RAG baselines on five widely used medical benchmarks. |
Advancing General Multimodal Capability of Vision-language Models with Pyramid-descent Visual Position Encoding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encode visual positions inhibit the performance of vision-language Models (VLMs) however, language constitutes only one aspect of communication. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assign visual position indexes from the periphery to the center and expand the central receptive field incrementally to enhance the perception of visual tokens within VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the relative distance between interrelated visual elements and instruction tokens, promoting a more rational allocation of attention weights and allowing for a multi-granularity perception of visual elements. |
Backdoor NLP Models via AI-Generated Text (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing attacks disregard fluency and semantic fidelity of poisoned text, rendering it easily detectable. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI-generated poisoned text to attack NLP models by establishing covert associations between trigger patterns and target labels without affecting normal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves effective attacks while maintaining fluency and semantic similarity across all scenarios. |
MolTC: Towards Molecular Relational Modeling In Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Junfeng Fang, Shuai Zhang, Chang Wu, Zhengyi Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Sihang Li, Kun Wang, Wenjie Du, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a promising way to understand interactions between molecular pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for molecular interaction modeling following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory which integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
Tool Zero: Training Tool-Augmented LLMs via Pure RL from Scratch (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yirong Zeng, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Li Du, Juyi Dai, Qiuyang Ding, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Weiwen Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve over 7% performance improvement compared to both SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic generalization-guided reward design for rule-based RL that shifts rewards from exploratory to exploitative tool-use patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves over 7% performance improvement compared to SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. |
Context-aware Embedding for Targeted Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods do not specifically pre-train reasonable embeddings for targets and aspects in TABSA. |
| Approach: | They propose to refine the embeddings of targets and aspects using a sparse coefficient vector . this allows the embeds to be refined from highly correlative words instead of context-independent vectors . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves on two benchmark datasets. |
Boosting Text-to-SQL through Multi-grained Error Identification (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for error identification often overlook validation of generated results . text-to-SQL is a technology that converts natural language questions into executable SQL queries . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a multi-grained error identification method into existing methods to detect SQL errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be integrated as a plugin into various methods, providing effective error identification and correction capabilities. |
DialCoT Meets PPO: Decomposing and Exploring Reasoning Paths in Smaller Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting has improved the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) but it is ineffective or detrimental to the performance on reasoning tasks in Smaller Language Model (SLMs) with less than 10 billion parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dialogue-guided Chain-of-Thought method to improve the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by generating intermediate reasoning steps in a dialogue format to guide the model to the final answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art competitors on four arithmetic reasoning datasets. |
MBA-RAG: a Bandit Approach for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Question Complexity (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG frameworks either indiscriminately perform retrieval or rely on rigid single-label classifiers to select retrieval methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically selects the most suitable retrieval strategy based on query complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple single-hop and multi-hop datasets while reducing retrieval costs. |
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. |
Instance-Guided Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Text Matching (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot text matching is a more practical technique to determine whether two texts are semantically identical. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable prompt learning method for few-shot text matching . they use the semantics of instances to regulate the effects of the gate on the prompt tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on MRPC and QQP. |
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)
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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan
| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
Multi-Granularity Information Interaction Framework for Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches in Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) fail to capture the source of important words, introducing words from irrelevant utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to capture the multi-granularity of semantic information and fetch the relevant utterance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets . it can capture the source of important words and fetch the relevant utterance . |
Beyond the Last Frame: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on single-frame assessments, which can lead to outcome-hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware evaluation paradigm that uses a hierarchical rubric to evaluate the validity of the intermediate steps and the final result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves POC@1.0 only about 20% and exhibits significant outcome-hacking. |
SWE-Fixer: Training Open-Source LLMs for Effective and Efficient GitHub Issue Resolution (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel in code generation benchmarks, but these benchmarks focus on single-file scenarios with constrained context scope. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source framework to effectively resolve GitHub issues using a code file retrieval module and a model-based code editing module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on two GitHub benchmarks. |
PRDetect: Perturbation-Robust LLM-generated Text Detection Based on Syntax Tree (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods for detecting LLM-generated text have shown impressive performance, but in real-world scenarios, users often introduce perturbations to the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects syntactic trees that are minimally affected by perturbations and exhibit distinct differences between human-written and LLM-generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that it is significantly better against perturbations on the HC3 and GPT-3.5-mixed datasets and also has the shortest time expenditure. |
Rewarding What Matters: Step-by-Step Reinforcement Learning for Task-Oriented Dialogue (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing RL methods focus on generation tasks while neglecting dialogue state tracking (DST) for understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates RL into both understanding and generation tasks by introducing step-by-step rewards throughout the token generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on three widely used datasets. |
Type Enhanced BERT for Correcting NER Errors (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is the task of identifying spans that belong to particular categories, such as person, location, organization, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates named entity’s type information into BERT by an adapter layer and integrates it into a gazetteer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in multiple corpus. |
Forget the Token and Pixel: Rethinking Gradient Ascent for Concept Unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Li, Chuanyi Zhang, Miaozeng Du, Hui Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Qianshan Wei, Junfeng Fang, Ruipeng Wang, Sheng Bi, Guilin Qi
| Challenge: | Gradient Ascent (GA) has emerged as a promising approach for concept unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (MGMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that selectively applies GA to targeted Conceptual Knowledge while preserving Natural Knowledge through Gradient Descent (GD). |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach removes Conceptual Knowledge and inadvertently diminishes Natural Knowledge, resulting in utility degradation. |
EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels. |
Context-Fidelity Boosting: Enhancing Faithful Generation through Watermark-Inspired Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Weixu Zhang, Fanghua Ye, Qiang Gao, Jian Li, Haolun Wu, Yuxing Tian, Sijing Duan, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li
| Challenge: | Large language models produce content that contradicts or overlooks information provided in the input context, a phenomenon known as faithfulness hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that boosts the generation probability of context-relevant tokens by boosting the generation of tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves faithfulness metrics with minimal generation overhead. |
SeCuRepair: Semantics-Aligned, Curriculum-Driven, and Reasoning-Enhanced Vulnerability Repair Framework (2026.acl-long)
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Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Jinfeng Jiang, Xin Zhou, Haoye Tian, Mingzhe Du, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Yikun Li, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating vulnerability repair suffer from syntactic overfitting . nvd published 49,230 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records in 2025 alone . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware reward framework that optimizes for code semantic equivalence rather than lexical mimicry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks on repository-level splits . it incorporates expert-aligned reasoning mechanism that grounds patch generation in structured diagnosis. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
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Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
EnigmaToM: Improve LLMs’ Theory-of-Mind Reasoning Capabilities with Neural Knowledge Base of Entity States (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing ToM reasoning methods rely excessively on off-the-shelf LLMs, reducing their efficiency and limiting their applicability to high-order ToM. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic framework that integrates a Neural Knowledge Base of Entity States and knowledge injection to enhance ToM reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves ToM reasoning on ToMi, HiToM, and FANToM benchmarks. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
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Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
General Purpose Text Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models for Scalable Inference (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models are currently used for many NLP tasks . however, inference for these models requires significant computational resources . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a shared text encoder to amortize the computational cost of inference over multiple tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the size of the extracted representations by a factor of 16 to store them for later use. |
S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities require large-scale data or significant training efforts. |
| Approach: | They introduce an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models trained on long-CoT distilled data with 3.1k initialization samples and achieves an accuracy improvement of 51.0% to 81.6%. |
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages. |
Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)
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Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li, Junlin Li, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yangneng Chen, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Foundational models and their checkpoints have advanced deep learning, boosting performance across applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning fine-tuned models by calculating differences between them and original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks. |
Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph for Conditional Question Answering on Long Documents (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to conditional question answering on long documents ignore document structure and discourse relations between sentences in document sections. |
| Approach: | They construct a Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph and conduct bottom-up information propagation to address this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing methods on the conditional question answering on long documents by 3.0 EM score and 2.4 F1 score on answer measuring, and 2.2 EM and 1.9 F1 scores on jointly answer and condition measuring. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
e-CARE: a New Dataset for Exploring Explainable Causal Reasoning (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing causal reasoning models only learn to induce empirical causal patterns that are predictive to the label, while human beings seek for deep and conceptual understanding of the causality to explain the observed causal facts. |
| Approach: | They present a human-annotated CAusal REasoning dataset with conceptual explanations of the causality. |
| Outcome: | The presented dataset shows that human-annotated explanations can be useful for promoting the accuracy and stability of causal reasoning models. |
Data-Centric Explainable Debiasing for Improving Fairness in Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data-centric debiasing strategies mainly leverage explicit bias words for counterfactual data augmentation to balance the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses an explainability method to search for implicit bias words to assist in debiasing PLMs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art debiasing performance and strong generalization while maintaining predictive abilities. |
DependEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Repository Dependency Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a benchmark is designed to evaluate the repository-level dependency understanding of large language models (LLMs) based on 2683 repositories from real-world websites. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate repository dependency understanding for large language models . DEPENDEVAL evaluates models on three core tasks across 8 programming languages . |
| Outcome: | The benchmark evaluates models on three core tasks across 8 programming languages from real-world repositories. |
CodeTool: Enhancing Programmatic Tool Invocation of LLMs via Process Supervision (2025.acl-long)
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YifeiLu YifeiLu, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Qiang Gao, Cheng Liu, Haibo Luo, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li, Feiliang Ren
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tool invocation are often unnecessarily long and require lengthy reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for stepwise code generation that improves LLM tool invocation . they incorporate two distinct process rewards: the On-the-spot and the Latent Reward . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM tool invocation by leveraging the concise nature of code. |
Self-Instructed Derived Prompt Generation Meets In-Context Learning: Unlocking New Potential of Black-Box LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt refinement methods suffer from semantic inconsistencies and fail to maintain users’ real intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-instructed in-context learning framework that generates reliable derived prompts while keeping semantic consistency with original prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates better derived prompts and significantly enhances LLMs’ ability to deliver more effective responses. |
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). |
| Approach: | They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency. |
Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Text Classification Using Latent Space Geometry (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on predictive shortcuts that hold in training data but break under distribution shifts, leading to large performance drops for minority groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms abstract biases into interpretable geometric anchors without auxiliary classifiers by manipulating latent space geometry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and improves worst-group accuracy by over 20% on the CivilComments dataset. |
“I See What You Did There”: Can Large Vision-Language Models Understand Multimodal Puns? (2026.acl-long)
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Naen Xu, Jiayi Sheng, Changjiang Li, Chunyi Zhou, Yuyuan Li, Tianyu Du, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Puns are a common form of rhetorical wordplay that exploits polysemy and phonetic similarity to create humor. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal pun generation pipeline and a model to evaluate their understanding of puns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves the understanding of multimodal puns by 16.5% in the F1 test. |
Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Reward Model - Optimization-Free Verification from Experience (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing verifiers operate on the surface text or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, which can be brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, non-parametric verifier that summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta and compares it to two class centroids computed from labeled experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves selection and reranking on large and less-calibrated models. |
Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that our model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural abstractive multi-document summarization model which captures cross-document relations and can guide the summary generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the WikiSum and MultiNews datasets and can be easily combined with pre-trained language models. |
GraphDx: A Cost-Aware Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Agent Framework for Sequential Diagnosis (2026.findings-acl)
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Shaoting Tan, Ning Liu, Yuntao Du, Shuyue Wei, Wu Shuai, Qian Li, Yanyu Xu, Wei Zhang, Lizhen Cui, Haitao Yuan
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models struggle to reason systematically under cost constraints . Existing approaches lack the knowledge-reasoning capability to reason under cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced framework that leverages large language models to construct MDKGs . they propose three collaborative agents that handle language understanding and generation . |
| Outcome: | GraphDx improves diagnostic success rates from 50–68% to 79–93% while reducing test costs by 20–54%. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3. |
Augmenting Legal Judgment Prediction with Contrastive Case Relations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing legal judgment prediction methods only consider one case fact description as input, which may not fully utilize information in the data such as case relations and frequency. |
| Approach: | They propose a new perspective that introduces some contrastive case relations to construct case triples as input and a corresponding judgment prediction framework with case triple modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to refine encoding and decoding processes using three customized modules on two public datasets. |
ACIArena: Toward Unified Evaluation for Agent Cascading Injection (2026.acl-long)
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Hengyu An, Minxi Li, Jinghuai Zhang, Naen Xu, Chunyi Zhou, Changjiang Li, Xiaogang Xu, Tianyu Du, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing studies consider only limited attack strategies and simplified MAS settings, limiting their generalizability and comprehensive evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the robustness of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) they propose unified evaluation suites spanning attack surfaces and attack objectives . |
| Outcome: | ACIArena provides a benchmark of 1,356 test cases for evaluating MAS robustness . it covers six widely used MAS implementations and provides measurable results . |
ProjectEval: A Benchmark for Programming Agents Automated Evaluation on Project-Level Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack the ability to automatically evaluate from users’ perspective and lack the explainability of the results of LLM agents’ code generation capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark for LLM agents' automated evaluation by simulating user interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can evaluate the generated projects by user interaction simulation and by code similarity through existing objective indicators. |
TPTU-v2: Boosting Task Planning and Tool Usage of Large Language Model-based Agents in Real-world Industry Systems (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Yilun Kong, Jingqing Ruan, YiHong Chen, Bin Zhang, Tianpeng Bao, Shi Shiwei, Du Qing, Xiaoru Hu, Hangyu Mao, Ziyue Li, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao, Xueqian Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance the task planning and tool usage abilities of LLMs in industrial systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the task planning and tool usage abilities of LLM-based agents in industrial systems. |
RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qingyao Li, Wei Xia, Xinyi Dai, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing tree search methods neglect the underlying reasoning process, resulting in poor search quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically explores and refines the reasoning process for code generation by using a tree search engine and a reflection mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in the code generation domain. |
One for All: Update Parameterized Knowledge Across Multiple Models with Once Edit (2025.acl-long)
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Weitao Ma, Xiyuan Du, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Yichong Huang, Huiyi Zhang, Xiaoliang Yang, Baohang Li, Xiachong Feng, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for modifying large language models focus on individual models, resulting in errors and hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose an ensemble-based approach that employs a plug-in model as the editing module and a dynamic weight mechanism to enhance its effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods while achieving superior editing efficiency. |
AudioStealer: Extracting Audio Prompts via Shapley Value-Guided Query Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | prompt stealing is a new form of attack that aims to reconstruct high-value prompts that guide music generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to steal music prompts from audio domains using a black-box attack framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method recovers prompts with high textual consistency to the ground truth while maintaining strong perceptual similarity to the target recordings. |
Zero-shot Visual Question Answering with Language Model Feedback (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge-based visual question answering are based on pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model guided captioning approach that leverages a pre-trained language model to generate captions for an image to help answer a visual question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several competing methods on the knowledge-based VQA task and achieves comparable results to a fine-tuned VLP model. |
NL ⇒ Schedule: Evaluate Multitask Scheduling Capability of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for scheduling from natural language descriptions rely on experts with limited scheduling skills and domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate a feasible schedule from natural language descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more robust performance than six state-of-the-art LLM+solver methods. |
EventWeave: A Dynamic Framework for Capturing Core and Supporting Events in Dialogue Systems (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Yiming Du, Bin Liang, Baojun Wang, Zhongyang Li, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems process conversational turns in isolation, overlooking event structures that guide natural interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly models relationships between conversational events to generate more contextually appropriate dialogue responses. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three dialogue datasets show that the proposed approach produces more natural responses while requiring less computational overhead. |
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)
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Chenhao Zhang, Xi Feng, Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Jinchang Hou, Kaixin Deng, Guangzeng Han, Qinrui Li, Bingli Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yifei Zhang, Qixuan Zhao, Yiming Liang, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Ge Zhang, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context. |
Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer selection are limited in domains with limited labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-aware Attentive Network framework for cross-domain answer selection that uses the knowledge base as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong competitors by a noticeable margin in cross-domain answer selection. |
Are LLMs Reliable Rankers? Rank Manipulation via Two-Stage Token Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as rerankers, but their ranking behavior can be steered by small, natural-sounding prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a token optimization method that crafts concise textual perturbations to consistently promote a target item in LLM-generated rankings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art base-lines and is hard to detect. |
CogniBench: A Legal-inspired Framework and Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Faithfulness of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on “factual statements” that rephrase source materials, but ignore “cognitive statements” . evaluating and detecting "faithfulness hallucinations" remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess faithfulness of cognitive statements and introduce a dataset to scale easily across models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses faithfulness of cognitive statements and scales easily across models. |
DYNTEXT: Semantic-Aware Dynamic Text Sanitization for Privacy-Preserving LLM Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Juhua Zhang, Zhiliang Tian, Minghang Zhu, Yiping Song, Taishu Sheng, Siyi Yang, Qiunan Du, Xinwang Liu, Minlie Huang, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods to protect privacy of sensitive data are differential privacy (DP) and DP is used to protect users from privacy leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose an LDP-based Dynamic Text sanitization for privacy-preserving LLM inference that dynamically constructs semantic-aware adjacency lists of sensitive tokens to sample non-sensitive tokens for perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels on three datasets. |
ATLAS: Agent Tuning via Learning Critical Steps (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing agent tuning approaches employ supervised finetuning on entire expert trajectories, but behavior-cloning of full traitories introduces expert bias and weakens generalization to states not covered by the expert data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that finetunes LLMs on critical steps in expert trajectories and identifies and finetuns them on these steps with reduced costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and open-source LLM agents on only 30% critical steps in extensive experiments. |
Prompt Tuning Pushes Farther, Contrastive Learning Pulls Closer: A Two-Stage Approach to Mitigate Social Biases (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing debiasing techniques use Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) to balance the training corpus, but this technique slightly modifies the original corpus limiting the representation distance between different demographic groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage debiasing model using Contrastive learning with Continuous Prompt Augmentation to mitigate social biases in PLMs’ encoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in terms of debiasing performance while maintaining the language modeling capability of PLMs. |
IPIGuard: A Novel Tool Dependency Graph-Based Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks rely on assumptions about the model's inherent security, which lacks structural constraints on agent behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task execution paradigm that models the agents’ task execution process as a traversal over a planned Tool Dependency Graph (TDG). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces unintended tool invocations triggered by injected instructions, enhancing robustness against IPI attacks. |
Multi-Modality Expansion and Retention for LLMs through Parameter Merging and Decoupling (2025.acl-long)
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Junlin Li, Guodong Du, Jing Li, Sim Kuan Goh, Wenya Wang, Yequan Wang, Fangming Liu, Ho-Kin Tang, Saleh Alharbi, Daojing He, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a cornerstone in artificial intelligence due to their exceptional performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that integrates existing MLLMs for effective multimodal expansion while retaining their original performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can expand LLMs' multimodal capabilities while retaining original performance. |
On the Representational Capacity of Recurrent Neural Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on LMs as formal languages, but they do not consider language membership. |
| Approach: | They extend the Turing completeness result to the probabilistic case . they show that a rationally weighted RLM can simulate any deterministic Turing machine . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can simulate any deterministic Turing machine with rationally weighted transitions . the proposed model is based on recurrent neural networks with a rational weighting over strings . |
Improving Fine-grained Entity Typing with Entity Linking (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained entity typing require a large tag set and knowledge of the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep neural model that uses context and information from entity linking to improve fine-grained entity typing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5% absolute strict accuracy improvement over the state of the art on two datasets. |
From Parameters to Performance: A Data-Driven Study on LLM Structure and Development (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have revolutionized a wide range of domains, driving significant advancements in both technology and real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale dataset encompassing diverse open-source LLM structures and their performance across multiple benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model validates the relationship between structural configurations and performance across multiple benchmarks and further corroborates the findings using mechanistic interpretability techniques. |
Tackling Long Code Search with Splitting, Encoding, and Aggregating (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pretraining models take the first 256 tokens of code snippets by default, limiting the input length to 512. |
| Approach: | They propose a baseline SEA model which splits long code into code blocks and aggregates them to obtain a comprehensive long code representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model long code without changing their internal structure and re-pretraining. |
Generating Domain-Specific Knowledge Graphs from Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive world knowledge across different benchmarks and domains but their knowledge is inconveniently scattered across their billions of parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based method to extract knowledge solely from LLMs’ parameters to construct domain-specific KGs by a schema-based process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates large domain-specific KGs containing tens of thousands of entities and relations, and then evaluates against Wikidata, an open-source human-created KG. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
AgentMove: A Large Language Model based Agentic Framework for Zero-shot Next Location Prediction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to apply large language models to zero-shot next location prediction tasks are limited due to their limited computational power. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic agentic prediction framework to achieve generalized next location prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the leading baseline by 3.33% to 8.57% across 8 out of 12 metrics. |
Leveraging Structured Information for Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering and Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Neural models, including large language models (LLMs), achieve superior performance on multi-hop question-answering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the chain-of-thought mechanism to generate both the reasoning chain and the answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework generates more faithful reasoning chains and significantly improves the QA performance on two benchmark datasets. |
GrandGuard: Taxonomy, Benchmark, and Safeguards for Elderly-Chatbot Interaction Safety (2026.findings-acl)
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Changxuan Fan, Xi Yang, Yueyuan Zheng, Bin Zhou, Yuanping Wang, Wenbin Hu, Huihao Jing, Ki Sen Hung, Dazhao Du, Haoran Li, Janet Hui-wen Hsiao, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | a survey of older adults shows that many LLMs mishandle elderly-specific contextual risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess elderly-specific contextual risks in LLM interactions . they use a taxonomy to identify 50 fine-grained risk types across mental well-being, financial, medical, toxicity, and privacy domains . |
| Outcome: | a new framework assesses elderly-specific contextual risks in LLM interactions . it achieves 96.2% and 90.9% unsafe-prompt detection accuracy, respectively . |
Powering Verifiable Learning via Automated Evolutionary Data Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to building generalizable verifiable data are task-specific and lack a principled, universal evaluator of verifikatability. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic, strategy-guided, executably-checkable data synthesis framework that synthesizes problems, diverse candidate solutions and verification artifacts from a single source. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes problems, candidates, and verification artifacts from human-annotated and strategy-induced checks and iteratively discovers strategies. |
TL-Training: A Task-Feature-Based Framework for Training Large Language Models in Tool Use (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Junjie Ye, Yilong Wu, Sixian Li, Yuming Yang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Peng Wang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Zhengyin Du
| Challenge: | a new approach to training large language models (LLMs) overlooks task-specific characteristics in tool use, leading to performance bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-feature-based framework that mitigates the effects of suboptimal training data . they use a dataset to train large-scale LLMs and a reward mechanism tailored to error categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or surpasses open- and closed-source LLMs in tool-use performance using only 1,217 training data points. |
Cooperative Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for distantly supervised relation extraction suffer from noisy labeling problem, which can severely degrade its performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for distantly supervised relation extraction that leverages text corpus and knowledge graph and a cooperative module involving their mutual learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the noisy labels and achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. |
Dynamic Global Memory for Document-level Argument Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on document-level event argument extraction is restricted by sequence length constraints and ignores global context between events. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a document memory store to extract contextual event information and leverage it to implicitly and explicitly help with decoding of arguments for later events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior methods and is more robust to adversarially annotated examples with constrained decoding design. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
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. |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
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Siwei Wu, JinCheng Ren, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Yiming Liang, Jie Liu, Yunwen Li, Tyler Loakman, Tianyu Zheng, Boyu Feng, Huaqing Yuan, Zili Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenhao Huang, Chenglin Cai, Haoran Que, Jian Yang, Yuelin Bai, Zekun Moore Wang, Zhouliang Yu, Qunshu Lin, Ding Pan, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Tiannan Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shenzhi Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Minghao Liu, Guoyin Wang, Ge Zhang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark. |
Correlation-Aware Example Selection for In-Context Learning with Nonsymmetric Determinantal Point Processes (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qiunan Du, Zhiliang Tian, Zhen Huang, Kailun Bian, Tianlun Liu, Zhaoning Zhang, Xinwang Liu, Feng Liu, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning (ICL) focus on the selection of individual examples and ignore correlations among examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture positive and negative correlations using the determinantal point process . they optimize the method via kernel decomposition-based MLE to fit a constructed pseudo-labeled dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in ICL example selection. |
Interventional Rationalization (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for rationalization use spurious correlations in data to compose rationales and make predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to discover the causal rationales by using a structural causal model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on the causal theory and validates on three real-world datasets. |
Sequential and Repetitive Pattern Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn temporal evolutional representations of entities are hard to capture the complex temporal patterns such as sequential and repetitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sequential and Repetitive Pattern Learning method that captures both sequential and repetitive patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four representative benchmarks on GDELT dataset, where performance improvement of MRR reaches up to 18.84%. |
Medical Dialogue System: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges (2024.findings-acl)
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Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Li Du, Yuxuan Wang, Hongru Wang, Yuhang Guo, Tong Ruan, Jie Xu, Xiaofan Zhang, Shaoting Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing medical dialogue systems have significant potential to simplify diagnostic procedure and reduce the cost of collecting information from patients. |
| Approach: | They analyze 325 papers from well-known computer science, natural language processing conferences and journals to find out the major challenges of medical dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems have been surveyed in the medical community but have not been evaluated from a technical perspective. |
Neural Natural Logic Inference for Interpretable Question Answering (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering models are based on textual entailment tasks . prior work has focused on QA on premise-based questions . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic QA approach that integrates natural logic reasoning within deep learning architectures towards developing effective question answering models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous work on multiple-choice science questions . it integrates natural logic reasoning within deep learning architectures to build proof paths . |
FSUIE: A Novel Fuzzy Span Mechanism for Universal Information Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Universal Information Extraction models rely heavily on span boundaries in data during training, which does not reflect the reality of span annotation challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses fuzzy spans to model various IE tasks . they propose generative Universal Information Extraction (UIE) to unify various ie tasks based on fuzzy span boundaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a series of main IE tasks with small amounts of data and training epochs. |
Analogical Reasoning on Chinese Morphological and Semantic Relations (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Analogical reasoning is effective in capturing linguistic regularities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese lexical knowledge to build an analogical reasoning task using a large dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset proves to be reliable benchmark for evaluating Chinese word embeddings. |
Taming Text-to-Image Synthesis for Novices: User-centric Prompt Generation via Multi-turn Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yilun Liu, Minggui He, Feiyu Yao, Yuhe Ji, Shimin Tao, Jingzhou Du, Justin Li, Jian Gao, Zhang Li, Hao Yang, Boxing Chen, Osamu Yoshie
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for text-to-image synthesis are sensitive on textual prompts, posing a challenge for novice users. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-based TIS prompt generation model that emphasizes user experience for novice users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model emphasizes user experience for novice users . it improves user-centricity score while maintaining a competitive quality of synthesized images. |
FlowEval: A Consensus-Based Dialogue Evaluation Framework Using Segment Act Flows (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite recent progress in dialogue evaluation, how to develop automatic metrics remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a consensus-based framework for dialog evaluation using segment act flows . they propose to crowdsource a large-scale dataset for it to be evaluated . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reach the best or comparable correlation with human evaluation. |
Mind’s Mirror: Distilling Self-Evaluation Capability and Comprehensive Thinking from Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, but their scale and computational demands pose challenges to their practical application. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for distilling the self-evaluation capability from LLMs into SLMs and advocate for more comprehensive thinking by incorporating multiple distinct CoTs and self-estimation outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of distilled SLMs on three NLP benchmarks. |
Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that the composition of the pretraining corpus exerts a significant impact upon the performance of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of Large Language Models and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis provides insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of Large Language Models. |
Soft-Prompting with Graph-of-Thought for Multi-modal Representation Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn multi-modal tasks are based on chain-of-thought . however, human thought processes are non-linear and employ dynamic adjustment and updating mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought technique that adjusts the length of the chain to improve the performance of generated prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves multi-modal representation learning in visual, visual, and audio-visual tasks and also has good domain generalization performance due to better reasoning. |
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoyun Du, LujieZheng LujieZheng, Renjun Hu, Yuyang Xu, Xiawei Li, Ying Sun, Wei Chen, Jian Wu, Haolei Cai, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
On Support Samples of Next Word Prediction (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Language models excel in various tasks by making complex decisions, but understanding the rationale behind these decisions remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They investigate data-centric interpretability in language models by focusing on the next-word prediction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model supports or deteres specific predictions, while non-support samples play a critical role in generalization and representation learning. |
FG-PRM: Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Mitigation in Language Model Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect hallucinations in large language models lack nuanced understanding of their types and manifestations. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes hallucinations into six types . they propose an augmented model to detect and mitigate hallucinosity in a fine-grained manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects and mitigates hallucinations in a fine-grained manner . it significantly boosts the performance of LLMs on GSM8K and MATH benchmarks. |
Analyzing the Rapid Generalization of SFT via the Perspective of Attention Head Activation Patterns (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, LLMs learn in a data-driven schema while the instructions about complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. |
| Approach: | They employ a gradient-based method to dissect the process that the Supervised Fine-tuning Process (SFT) adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method dissects the process that the SFT process adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. |
Towards Stable Natural Language Understanding via Information Entropy Guided Debiasing (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to debiase Natural Language Understanding models use dataset biases instead of learning the intended task. |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing framework that detects and purifies dataset biases using information entropy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the stability of performance on out-of-distribution datasets for a set of widely adopted NLU models. |
Explicit and Implicit Data Augmentation for Social Event Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Social event detection relies on labeled data, but annotation is costly and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play dual augmentation framework that combines explicit text-based and implicit feature-space augmentation to enhance data diversity and model robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the best baseline model by 17.67% on the Twitter2012 dataset and 15.57% on the twitter2018 dataset in terms of the average F1 score. |
ToolExpNet: Optimizing Multi-Tool Selection in LLMs with Similarity and Dependency-Aware Experience Networks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current empirical methods that focus on isolated tools learning struggle with accurate multi-tool selection due to issues like confusing similar tools and neglecting dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-learning paradigm which integrates tools and trial-and-error experiences into a network characterized by semantic similarity and dependency relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on multiple real-world API datasets and significantly outperformed baselines. |
TSPO: Breaking the Double Homogenization Dilemma in Multi-turn Search Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Shichao Ma, Zhiyuan Ma, Ming Yang, Xiaofan Li, Xing Wu, Jintao Du, Yu Cheng, Weiqiang Wang, Qiliang Liu, Zhengyang Zhou, Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve complex tasks through iterative information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a turn-level stage-aware policy optimization approach to solve this problem . they introduce a first-occurrence latent reward mechanism to allocate partial rewards . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TSPO outperforms state-of-the-art models on Qwen2.5-3B and 7B models. |
Tokenization and the Noiseless Channel (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Subword tokenization is a key part of most NLP pipelines, but little is known about why some combinations lead to improved downstream model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose that good tokenizers lead to efficient channel usage . they propose that an optimal encoding assigns extremely long codes to low-frequency subwords . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizers have a very strong correlation with BLEU in machine translation . the proposed function can be used to improve model performance in the downstream task . |
Three Stream Based Multi-level Event Contrastive Learning for Text-Video Event Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction ignore motion representations in videos and are misguided by background noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-video based multimodal event extraction framework that integrates video appearance features and motion representations with video appearance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the event extraction field. |
Flexibly Utilize Memory for Long-Term Conversation via a Fragment-then-Compose Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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Cai Ke, Yiming Du, Bin Liang, Yifan Xiang, Lin Gui, Zhongyang Li, Baojun Wang, Yue Yu, Hui Wang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models extract useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fragment-then-Compose framework to optimize memory utilization for long-term open-domain conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to extract useful information from conversation history . it can be adapted to different situations and improve response generation . |
Shallow-to-Deep Training for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that deep training is 1:4 faster than training from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose a shallow-to-deep training method that learns deep models by stacking shallow models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 1:4 faster than training from scratch and achieves BLEU scores of 30:33 and 43:29 on two translation tasks. |
Compiling Activation Steering into Weights via Null-Space Constraints for Stealthy Backdoors (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Yin, Tianxu Han, Naen Xu, Changjiang Li, Ping He, Chunyi Zhou, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Tianyu Du, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods to inject safety-aligned large language models rely on token-level mappings, which do not guarantee sustained harmful output. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that directly modifies model weights to map a trigger to an attacker-specified response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high triggered attack success while maintaining non-triggered safety and general utility. |
LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding (2024.acl-long)
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Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Hongchang Lyu, Jiankai Tang, Zhidian Huang, Zhengxiao Du, Xiao Liu, Aohan Zeng, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual, multi-task benchmark for long context understanding that extends context windows and more sophisticated memory mechanisms to improve models' long context capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models but struggles on longer contexts. |
DELAN: Dual-Level Alignment for Vision-and-Language Navigation by Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on cross-modal attention at the fusion stage, but modality features generated by disparate uni-encoders reside in their own spaces, leading to a decline in the quality of cross-modulation and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to align navigation-related modalities before fusion by cross-modal contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates with the majority of existing models, resulting in improved navigation performance on various VLN benchmarks, including R2R, R4R, and CVDN. |
CodRED: A Cross-Document Relation Extraction Dataset for Acquiring Knowledge in the Wild (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting relational facts between entity pairs within single sentences or documents. |
| Approach: | They present a problem of cross-document relation extraction (CRE) using human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first human-annotated cross-document RE dataset . it shows that it is challenging to existing RE methods including strong BERT-based models. |
ExCAR: Event Graph Knowledge Enhanced Explainable Causal Reasoning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work infers the causation between events based on knowledge from annotated causal event pairs, but additional evidence information is unexploited. |
| Approach: | They propose an Event graph knowledge enhanced explainable CAusal Reasoning framework that acquires additional evidence information from a large-scale causal event graph as logical rules for causal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in human evaluation and in animal models. |
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. |
Merlin’s Whisper: Enabling Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models via Black-box Persuasive Prompting (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated proficiency in tackling complex tasks through step-by-step thinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box persuasive prompting framework that generates concise responses without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage while preserving performance. |
LMR-BENCH: Evaluating LLM Agent’s Ability on Reproducing Language Modeling Research (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shuo Yan, Ruochen Li, Ziming Luo, Zimu Wang, Daoyang Li, Liqiang Jing, Kaiyu He, Peilin Wu, Juntong Ni, George Michalopoulos, Yue Zhang, Ziyang Zhang, Mian Zhang, Zhiyu Chen, Xinya Du
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in advancing scientific discovery, but their capability in reproducing code from research papers remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLM agents' ability to reproduce scientific research papers by analyzing code reproduction tasks from 23 research papers published in top-tier NLP venues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically evaluates the capability of large language model (LLM) agents on code reproduction from Language Modeling Research. |
Search to Pass Messages for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on missing facts in temporal knowledge graphs are based on hand-designed architectures and fail to explore the diverse topological and temporal properties of TKGs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use neural architecture search to design a data-specific message passing architecture for TKG completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures achieve the state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets. |
Automated Profile Inference with Language Model Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy protections for large language models (LLMs) are limited due to the potential for malicious applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated profile inference framework that can extract personal information from public online activities by an adversary with the help of large language model (LLM) based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly effective and efficient and the inferred attributes are both identifiable and sensitive, posing significant privacy risks. |
Entropy-Aware Reshaping of Reinforcement Signals for Multi-Answer Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a standard post-training paradigm for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reshapes how learning signals are normalized and aggregated. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MCTACO and MMLU-Multi show that the proposed framework improves accuracy, training stability and cross-dataset transfer performance. |
f-Divergence Minimization for Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation approaches focus on minimizing a generalized f-divergence function. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which formulates sequence-level knowledge distillation as minimizing a generalized f-divergence function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and reduces intractable divergence to word-level losses. |
Variational Autoregressive Decoder for Neural Response Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing variational Bayesian models generate responses from a single latent variable, which is not sufficient to model high variability in responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional variable auto-encoder that sequentially introduces latent variables to condition the generation of each word in the response sequence. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model improves on state-of-the-art models on Opensubtitle and Reddit datasets. |
GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are often finetuned for downstream tasks, which has been shown to improve performance over non-pretrained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for few-shot learning with pretrained language models by gradient-free algorithm. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse datasets show that the proposed method outperforms manual prompts by 2.6 points. |
EmbSpatial-Bench: Benchmarking Spatial Understanding for Embodied Tasks with Large Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have revealed significant deficiencies of LVLMs in understanding visual contents, leaving the gap between current embodied intelligence and large vision-language models (LVLM) . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LVLMs' spatial understanding of embodied environments to evaluate their ability to understand visual contents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is derived from embodied scenes and covers 6 spatial relationships from an egocentric perspective. |
The Medical Scribe: Corpus Development and Model Performance Analyses (2020.lrec-1)
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Izhak Shafran, Nan Du, Linh Tran, Amanda Perry, Lauren Keyes, Mark Knichel, Ashley Domin, Lei Huang, Yu-hui Chen, Gang Li, Mingqiu Wang, Laurent El Shafey, Hagen Soltau, Justin Stuart Paul
| Challenge: | Existing tools to assist in clinical note generation using audio of provider-patient encounters are lacking. |
| Approach: | They develop an annotation scheme to extract relevant clinical concepts from audio of provider-patient encounters and train a state-of-the-art tagging model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more useful than the F-scores reflect and can be used in clinical notes. |
Modeling Event Background for If-Then Commonsense Reasoning Using Context-aware Variational Autoencoder (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Understanding event and event-centered commonsense reasoning is crucial for natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a If-Then commonsense reasoning dataset Atomic and an RNN-based Seq2Seq model to facilitate this. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the accuracy and diversity of inferences compared with baseline methods. |
MiMoTable: A Multi-scale Spreadsheet Benchmark with Meta Operations for Table Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for table reasoning are incomplete due to the complexity of the tables and user questions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-scale spreadsheet benchmark with Meta operations for Table reasoning that incorporates two key features and a new criterion with six categories of meta operations for measuring the difficulty of each question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Claude-3.5-Sonnet with 77.4% accuracy on the existing benchmarks. |
NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yingfeng Luo, Ziqiang Xu, Yuxuan Ouyang, MuRun Yang, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Tong Zheng, Bei Li, Peinan Feng, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) yet scaling to many languages while maintaining robust performance across directions remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to reduce the number of translations in one direction . they propose auxiliary parallel sentences to promote cross-lingual transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with or better than substantially larger baselines. |
The GaoYao Benchmark: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Multilingual and Multicultural Abilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yilun Liu, Chunguang Zhao, Mengyao Piao, Lingqi Miao, Shimin Tao, Minggui HE, Chenxin Liu, Zhang Li, null Mahongxia, Jiaxin Guo, Chen Liu, Liqun Deng, Jiansheng Wei, Xiaojun Meng, Fanyi Du, Daimeng Wei, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual evaluation benchmarks neglect cultural nuances and lack language coverage in subjective tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that categorizes evaluation tasks into three cultural layers and nine cognitive sub-layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses prior coverage by up to 111% on 20+ LLMs. |
PerMemSafe: Benchmarking Implicit Personalized Safety of Long Horizon Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing self-evolving agents have a low safety rate in long-horizon interactions . however, this reliance on context-independent safety evaluations is insufficient . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly models personalized risk inference and memory evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves implicit personalized safety by 23.8% over prior frameworks while maintaining helpfulness in long-horizon interactions. |
Trigger Word Detection and Thematic Role Identification via BERT and Multitask Learning (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | Using natural language processing to discover and mine drug-related knowledge from text has been a hot topic in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained biomedical language representation model to extract mutation-disease knowledge from PubMed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches achieve 0.60 (ranks 1) and 0.25 (rank 2) on task 1 and task 2 respectively in terms of F1 metric. |
Quantification of Large Language Model Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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Sunbowen Lee, Junting Zhou, Chang Ao, Kaige Li, Xeron Du, Sirui He, Haihong Wu, Tianci Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yitao Liang, Zhoufutu Wen, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | Existing studies have revealed the robustness degra-dation caused by data distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate and quantify model distillation . they aim to identify identity cognition contradictions and analyse multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses two key aspects: (1) Identifying identity cognition contradictions to assess discrepancies in how models perceive and represent identity-related information; (2) Analyzing multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
Improving Multi-Agent Debate with Sparse Communication Topology (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-agent debates use a brute force algorithm, resulting in a computationally intensive process. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the multi-agent debate framework to multi-modal reasoning and alignment labeling tasks, showcasing its broad applicability and effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve comparable or superior performance while significantly reducing computational costs. |
Large Language Models Are Still Misled by Simple Bias Ensembles (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models are constrained to datasets where each sample is manually injected with only one type of bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-bias benchmark where each sample contains multiple types of biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing LLMs and debiasing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the challenge of eliminating compounded biases. |
Knowledge Fusion By Evolving Weights of Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results on mainstream language models show that Evolver outperforms previous state-of-the-art models by large margins due to the high training costs of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate multiple models from diverse training scenarios into a unified model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on mainstream language models by large margins. |
Exploring How Generative MLLMs Perceive More Than CLIP with the Same Vision Encoder (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that CLIP models struggle with visual reasoning tasks . despite the success of Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining, there are still limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a visual encoder to train CLIP-like models for fine-grained visual reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform CLIP-like encoders in visual reasoning tasks . the study highlights the importance of VLM architectural choices . |
Bi-Directional Multi-Granularity Generation Framework for Knowledge Graph-to-Text with Large Language Model (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods generate whole text based on all KG triples at once and may incorporate incorrect KG Triples for each sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-directional multi-granularity generation framework that generates graph-level sentences based on KG triples instead of the whole text at a time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in benchmark dataset WebNLG and further analysis shows the efficiency of different modules. |
Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agents: Foundations, Emerging Challenges, and Opportunities (2026.acl-long)
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Changdae Oh, Seongheon Park, To Eun Kim, Jiatong Li, Wendi Li, Samuel Yeh, Sean Du, Hamed Hassani, Paul Bogdan, Dawn Song, Sharon Li
| Challenge: | Uncertainty quantification (UQ) for large language models is a key building block for daily applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a general formulation of agent UQ that subsumes broad classes of existing UQ setups. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the first general formulation of agent UQ that subsumes broad classes of existing setups. |
VAUQ: Vision-Aware Uncertainty Quantification for LVLM Self-Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing self-evaluation methods rely on a model’s ability to estimate the correctness of its own outputs, but they depend heavily on language priors and are therefore ill-suited for evaluating vision-conditioned predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-aware uncertainty quantification framework that measures how strongly a model’s output depends on visual evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across multiple datasets. |
RouteLMT: Learned Sample Routing for Hybrid LLM Translation Deployment (2026.acl-industry)
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Yingfeng Luo, Hongyu Liu, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Chenglong Wang, Bei Li, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing routing strategies rely on heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation to capture whether the large model provides a worthwhile improvement over the small one. |
| Approach: | They propose a budget allocation problem for routing large model to large model . they propose heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation to determine the optimal signal for budgeted decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms heuristics, quality/difficulty estimation baselines and achieves a superior quality–budget Pareto frontier. |
VLP: Vision-Language Preference Learning for Embodied Manipulation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reward engineering are time-consuming and expensive to collect human preference labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language preference learning framework which learns from human feedback . they define three types of language-conditioned preferences and construct a visual preference dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on embodied manipulation tasks and can be applied to other tasks. |
Few-shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling with Retrieved Examples (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot learning are based on labeled examples, but they are non-trivial . few-sshot learning is challenging due to the imbalance in the amount of data between the source and target domains. |
| Approach: | They propose retrieval-based methods for intent classification and slot filling tasks . they use a batch-softmax objective to learn similar contextualized representations for spans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous systems on the CLINC and SNIPS benchmarks. |
SRAP-Agent: Simulating and Optimizing Scarce Resource Allocation Policy with LLM-based Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on the allocation of public scarce resources has limitations due to data scarcity and data scariness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Large Language Models into economic simulations . they conduct extensive policy simulation experiments to verify the framework's effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between theoretical models and real-world dynamics by integrating large language models into economic simulations. |
Improving Sharpness-Aware Minimization with Fisher Mask for Better Generalization on Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pretrained language models suffer from poor generalization . however, they add a perturbation to each model parameter equally, which is sub-optimal . |
| Approach: | They propose a sharpness-aware minimization optimization procedure that introduces a Fisher mask to improve the efficiency of SAM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the vanilla sharpness-aware minimization method on GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. |
GoT-R1: Internalizing Graph-of-Thought via Structural Reinforcement for High-Density Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning suffers from an inherent mechanism flaw: linearity induces overthinking . emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally redefined artificial intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that replaces verbose linear trajectories with high-density reasoning graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models with reduced token overhead. |
A Graph Enhanced BERT Model for Event Prediction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict subsequent events use sparsity of event graph to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically build event graph using a BERT model by adding a structured variable to the model to learn to predict event connections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two event prediction tasks. |
QA-Driven Zero-shot Slot Filling with Weak Supervision Pretraining (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict slots and their values do not encode enough semantic information, limiting the models’ zero-shot capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a QA-driven slot filling model which extracts slot-filler spans from utterances with a span-based QA model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by over 5% on the SNIPS benchmark. |
Segment First or Comprehend First? Explore the Limit of Unsupervised Word Segmentation with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to measure word segmentation only assess the language model's understanding of the overall meaning of sentences, lacking an evaluation of the language models' understanding capabilities at a fine-grained level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to explore the limit of unsupervised word segmentation with Large Language Models (LLMs) they employ current mainstream LLMs to perform word segmentations across multiple languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing methods and combines the advanced pattern recognition capabilities of Aho-Corasick automata with the deep insights of well-pretrained LLMs. |
Escaping the Echo Trap: On Credit Assignment Failure in Multi-turn LLM Self-Reflection (2026.acl-long)
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Linxuan Du, Guangquan Xue, Xiaobo Liang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Xinyu Shi, Zhang Yijun, Ji Qi, Wenpeng Zhu, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-turn self-reflection are limited by the Echo Trap problem . the model is limited by its inherent capabilities and repeats earlier reflections to preserve reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured extension of GRPO for multi-turn self-reflection which enables more accurate advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates behavior collapse and improves performance across benchmarks. |
Activation-Guided Local Editing for Jailbreaking Attacks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited and produce incoherent or unreadable inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that performs a one-shot, scenario-based generation of context and rephrases the original malicious query to obscure its harmful intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate, with gains of up to 37.74% over the strongest baseline, and excellent transferability to black-box and large-scale models. |
Multi-grained Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat Named Entity Recognition (NER) as a sequence labeling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art frameworks by 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks. |
ZeroPrompt: Scaling Prompt-Based Pretraining to 1,000 Tasks Improves Zero-Shot Generalization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization . they focus on task scaling and zero-shooting to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot generalization efficiency by 30 times with task scaling. |
Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that label slots and detect intent do not preserve hierarchical relationship between words, slots, and intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule-based neural network model which performs slot filling and intent detection via a dynamic routing-by-agreement schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models and existing models on real-world datasets. |