Papers by Li Kong

80 papers
Identifying Exaggerated Language (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies on metaphor and metonymy have focused on hyperbole, but it is a relatively understudied phenomenon in the figurative language processing community.
Approach: They propose to use hyperbole detection to determine whether a sentence is hyperbolic . they also perform statistical and manual analyses of the corpus and address the automatic hyperbola detection task.
Outcome: The proposed dataset consists of 709 hyperbolic sentences with a non-hyperbolic version created by paraphrasing its hyperbolical counterpart.
RealTalk-CN: A Realistic Chinese Speech Task-Oriented Dialogue Benchmark with Cross-Modal Analysis (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in speech large language models have enabled end-to-end spoken interactions, but their robustness in real-world applications remains unclear.
Approach: They propose a multi-turn, multi-domain speech–text TOD dataset for Chinese users . it contains 5.4k dialogues with annotations for dialogue states, disfluency types, speaker characteristics .
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to evaluate speech large language models in real-world scenarios . the proposed model is based on 5.4k real human-to-human dialogues with annotations .
Event Transition Planning for Open-ended Text Generation (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Open-ended text generation tasks require models to generate coherent continuation given limited preceding context.
Approach: They propose a novel two-stage method which explicitly arranges ensuing events in open-ended text generation tasks.
Outcome: The proposed method improves coherence and diversity of open-ended text generation tasks.
Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks that use large language models as referees are insufficient for accurately assessing their alignment with human intent.
Approach: They propose a calibration framework to address positional bias in large language models as evaluators by manually annotating the “win/tie/lose” outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicun A Benchmark’s question prompt.
Outcome: The proposed framework alleviates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments.
FineLAP: Taming Heterogeneous Supervision for Fine-grained Language-Audio Pretraining (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing audio-language models excel at clip-level understanding but struggle with frame-level tasks.
Approach: They propose a novel training paradigm that advances both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data.
Outcome: The proposed training paradigm improves both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data.
Multi-Hop Question Generation via Dual-Perspective Keyword Guidance (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing work fails to fully utilize the guiding potential of keywords and neglect to differentiate the distinct roles of question-specific and document-specific keywords.
Approach: They propose a dual-perspective keyword-guided framework that integrates question and document keywords into the multi-hop question generation process.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates question and document keywords into the multi-hop question generation process.
How Well Do LLMs Handle Cantonese? Benchmarking Cantonese Capabilities of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Cantonese has scant representation in NLP research, especially compared to other languages from similarly developed regions.
Approach: They propose to evaluate Cantonese LLM performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantonesian.
Outcome: The proposed models will evaluate Cantonese's performance in factual generation, mathematical logic, complex reasoning, and general knowledge in Cantone.
MalURLBench: A Benchmark Evaluating Agents’ Vulnerabilities When Processing Web URLs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing models struggle to detect elaborately disguised malicious URLs, despite their ability to process malicious URL's.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ vulnerabilities to malicious URLs and a lightweight defense module to mitigate the vulnerability.
Outcome: The proposed framework analyzes 61,845 attack instances spanning 10 real-world scenarios and 7 categories of real malicious websites.
On LLM-Based Scientific Inductive Reasoning Beyond Equations (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing research on inductive reasoning models emphasizes rule design without grounding them in specific scenarios.
Approach: They propose to use LLMs to learn underlying patterns from limited examples in entirely new environments.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates the inductive reasoning abilities of large language models in scientific settings.
A Top-down Neural Architecture towards Text-level Parsing of Discourse Rhetorical Structure (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Text-level discourse parsing of discourse rhetorical structure (DRS) is a fundamental research topic in natural language processing.
Approach: They propose a top-down neural architecture for text-level discourse parsing . they cast the parser as a recursive split point ranking task .
Outcome: The proposed top-down approach is more suitable for text-level discourse parsing.
Benchmarking LLM’s Capability in Reasoning over Conflicting Web References (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) integrated with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are a dominant framework for building intelligent assistants.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' reasoning capability over real-world conflicting documents retrieved from the web.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates LLMs' reasoning capability over real-world conflicting documents retrieved from the web.
Chinese Paragraph-level Discourse Parsing with Global Backward and Local Reverse Reading (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods on discourse parsing in English suffer from long discourse units and fewer explicit connectives.
Approach: They propose to use two reading modes to construct Chinese paragraph level discourse trees.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on Chinese discourse trees.
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models.
Approach: They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks.
Outcome: The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles.
SCVQ: Sparse-Compensated Vector Quantization for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing vector quantization methods incur inference overhead due to massive codebook storage and intensive index lookups.
Approach: They propose a framework for vector quantization that incorporates a salience-aware weighted K-means clustering scheme with symmetry constraints to reduce codebook size and indexing costs.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves a perplexity of 5.78 on WikiText-2 for LLaMA-2-7B at 2-bit quantization while delivering a 1.4 speedup over existing baselines.
VLFeedback: A Large-Scale AI Feedback Dataset for Large Vision-Language Models Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are evolving rapidly and require data with human supervision to achieve better alignment.
Approach: They introduce VLFeedback, the first large-scale vision-language feedback dataset . they train Silkie, an LVLM fine-tuned via direct preference optimization .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms its base model in helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and safety metrics and exhibits enhanced resilience against red-teaming attacks.
A Distance-Aware Multi-Task Framework for Conversational Discourse Parsing (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused on graph-based and transition-based discourse parsing, but no study has investigated the advantages of both paradigms for conversational discourse paring.
Approach: They propose a distance-aware multi-task framework that incorporates the strengths of transition-based paradigms to facilitate conversational discourse parsing.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the graph-based paradigm on long-distance dependency links.
Efficient Transformer-based Large Scale Language Representations using Hardware-friendly Block Structured Pruning (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Pretrained large-scale language models have been criticized for their limited weight storage and computational speed on hardware platforms.
Approach: They propose an efficient transformer-based large-scale language representation using hardware-friendly block structure pruning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 5.0x accuracy on GLUE benchmarks and 1.79x compression rate on DistilBERT.
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Persuasive dialogue models rely on utterance semantic matching and a key aspect has been ignored . compared with utterrance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuation.
Approach: They propose to model conversation semantics and strategies to match them using a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor.
Outcome: The proposed model improves state-of-the-art by 5% on a small and 37% on 'large' datasets.
Developing and Utilizing a Large-Scale Cantonese Dataset for Multi-Tasking in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Cantonese is considered a low-resource language due to the dominance of Mandarin . rich colloquial vocabulary of Cantone, English loanwords, and code-switching characteristics add to the complexity of corpus collection and processing.
Approach: We collect Cantonese texts from open source corpora, Hong Kong-specific forums, Wikipedia . we refine the model through supervised fine-tuning on curated Cantonesian tasks .
Outcome: The model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four Cantonese benchmarks.
TreeReview: A Dynamic Tree of Questions Framework for Deep and Efficient LLM-based Scientific Peer Review (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in assisting peer review, but current methods struggle to generate thorough and insightful reviews while maintaining efficiency.
Approach: They propose a framework that models paper review as a hierarchical and bidirectional question-answering process.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on full review generation and actionable feedback comments generation tasks while reducing LLM token usage by up to 80% compared to computationally intensive approaches.
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints.
Approach: They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications.
BBA: Bi-Modal Behavioral Alignment for Reasoning with Large Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Multimodal reasoning is a key capability for large vision-language models . however, the vanilla Chain-of-Thought method fails to address critical steps in multi-step reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a bi-modal Behavioral Alignment method to augment multimodal reasoning . they use domain-specific language to integrate multimodal information into a precise alternative form .
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves GPT-4V(ision) on geometry problem solving, chess positional advantage prediction and molecular property prediction.
A Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue System with Multi-source Knowledge Fusion for Elders with Cognitive Impairment (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing cognitive stimulation systems lack data on how to integrate emotional support and therapy principles into chit-chat dialogue systems.
Approach: They propose a multi-source knowledge fusion method for CS dialogue to generate open-ended responses guided by the therapy principle and emotional support strategy.
Outcome: The proposed method generates open-ended responses guided by the therapy principle and emotional support strategy of the target response.
Mitigating Contradictions in Dialogue Based on Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current chatbots generate fluent, informative responses but sometimes generate contradictory responses when interacting with human.
Approach: They propose to use contrastive learning technique to mitigate contradiction issues in chatbots by minimizing the similarity between the target response and contradiction related negative example.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on automatic and human evaluation while preserving response fluency.
MODDP: A Multi-modal Open-domain Chinese Dataset for Dialogue Discourse Parsing (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmark datasets for discourse parsing are domain-specific and contain only textual modality . this makes it difficult to accurately understand the dialogue without multi-modal clues .
Approach: They propose a multi-modal Chinese discourse parsing dataset based on open-domain dialogues . they propose to integrate multi-modality into the original textual unimodal DDP model .
Outcome: The proposed dataset improves on the existing unimodal model by adding multimodalities to the model.
NarGINA: Towards Accurate and Interpretable Children’s Narrative Ability Assessment via Narrative Graphs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for assessing children's narrative ability are limited to evaluating completeness of narrative content and the coherence of expression, as well as interpretability of assessment results.
Approach: They propose a computational framework for assessing narrative ability using a narrative graph to provide a concise and structured summary representation of narrative text.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvement over baselines while possessing good interpretability.
Exploring the Reliability of Large Language Models as Customized Evaluators for Diverse NLP Tasks (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing work uses large language models (LLMs) to evaluate natural language process tasks, but there are shortcomings in current LLMs.
Approach: They examine the alignment between LLM evaluators and human annotators by comparing conventional and alignment tasks with different evaluation criteria.
Outcome: The proposed models excel in general criteria, such as fluency, but face challenges with complex criteria, including numerical reasoning.
MEIC-DT: Memory-Efficient Incremental Clustering for Long-Text Coreference Resolution with Dual-Threshold Constraints (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing supervised neural methods are underexplored for coreference resolution, especially in incremental clustering.
Approach: They propose a dual-threshold incremental clustering approach based on a lightweight Transformer.
Outcome: Experiments on common benchmarks show that MEIC-DT achieves highly competitive coreference performance under stringent memory constraints.
Lego-MT: Learning Detachable Models for Massively Multilingual Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing monolithic models for multilingual neural machine translation encounter parameter interference and inefficient inference for large models.
Approach: They propose a detachable multi-way model that assigns each language to an individual branch . they use data from OPUS to build a translation benchmark covering 433 languages .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models in OPUS and is faster than existing models.
Aspect-Category Enhanced Learning with a Neural Coherence Model for Implicit Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a major research topic in NLP since social networking services have increased . but the recognition of implicit sentiments that do not contain obvious opinion words remains unexplored . elcom captures document-level coherence by using contrastive learning and sentence-level by a hypergraph .
Approach: They propose aspect-category enhanced learning with a neural coherence model . it captures document-level coherency by contrastive learning and sentence-level by a hypergraph .
Outcome: The proposed model captures document-level coherence by using contrastive learning and sentence-level by a hypergraph to mine opinions from explicit sentences to aid implicit sentiment classification.
Modeling and Solving Stable Matching under Probabilistic Preferences with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capability in understanding and simulating humans’ decisions, suggesting a new way to use LLMs as tools to study social systems.
Approach: They propose a Hybrid GS–LLM matching method that integrates Gale–Shapley with probabilistic acceptance decisions.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms classical baselines in terms of stability and improves robustness under uncertainty.
GSM-Plus: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs as Mathematical Problem Solvers (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various mathematical reasoning benchmarks.
Approach: They introduce an adversarial grade school math dataset and explore whether LLMs can be more robust when questions are slightly changed.
Outcome: The proposed method generates and verifies each intermediate thought based on its reasoning goal and calculation result.
Intent-Driven Semantic ID Generation for Grounded Conversational News Recommendation (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: a new approach to news recommendation grounds each suggestion in a rapidly evolving article corpus while addressing implicit user intents that lack explicit retrievable keywords.
Approach: They propose an intent-driven Semantic ID generation paradigm to address these challenges . they map diverse intents to hierarchical SID prefixes and then fuzzy-match them to current news pool .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 0% hallucination and 12.4% L1 match on a mainstream Chinese news platform.
Long Chain-of-Thought Fine-tuning via Understanding-to-Reasoning Transition (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing research on long-context scaling in language models has focused on managing lengthy input prompts instead of producing long outputs.
Approach: They propose a sequence-level curriculum learning framework that shifts a model’s focus from interpreting long chain-of-thoughts to generating them.
Outcome: Experiments on rigorous reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and GPQA Diamond, show that the proposed approach surpasses standard fine-tuning by over 10% while maintaining robust performance on understanding tasks.
SenseJudge: Human-Centric Preference-Driven Judgment Framework (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing judgment approaches rely on trained judgers using fixed preference data . existing judgment approaches neglect diverse user preferences and struggle to adapt to real-world human-AI dialogue scenarios.
Approach: They propose a customizable judgment framework driven by human preferences and a diverse instruction following benchmark derived from real-world multi-turn interactions.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses other judgment methods and models in two tasks, and achieves model ranking that aligns with real human sense.
Dynamic Anticipation and Completion for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Sparse Knowledge Graph (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing reasoning methods for sparse KGs are incomplete and lack of evidential paths to target entities makes multi-hop reasoning difficult.
Approach: They propose a multi-hop reasoning model over sparse KGs to solve this problem . they use latent prediction of embedding-based models to make the model perform more potential path search over sparses .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on five datasets from Freebase, NELL and Wikidata.
Recipe2Plan: Evaluating Planning Abilities of LLMs for Efficient and Feasible Multitasking with Time Constraints Between Actions (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks focus on single task performance, ignoring multitask planning and execution efficiency.
Approach: They propose a benchmark framework based on real-world cooking scenarios . recipe2plan challenges agents to optimize cooking time through parallel task execution .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks highlight the need for improved temporal awareness and global multitasking capabilities in large language models.
ProcWorld: Benchmarking Large Model Planning in Reachability-Constrained Environments (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for embodied spatial reasoning and long-term planning are non-trivial due to the combinatorial complexity of long-horizon abstract reasoning.
Approach: They propose a large-scale benchmark for partially observable embodied spatial reasoning and long-term planning with large language models and vision language models.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better in 16 task types, 5,000 rooms, and over 10 million evaluation trajectories with diverse data distribution.
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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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.
SwapMoE: Serving Off-the-shelf MoE-based Large Language Models with Tunable Memory Budget (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Mixture of experts (MoE) is a popular technique to improve capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) but memory-constrained devices are a major concern in edge AI training and serving.
Approach: They propose a framework for efficient serving of MoE-based large language models with tunable memory budgets.
Outcome: Experiments show that SwapMoE can reduce memory consumption while maintaining reasonable accuracy.
EPO: Explicit Policy Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for strategic reasoning face challenges in adaptability, scalability, and transferring strategies to new contexts.
Approach: They propose an explicit policy optimization model that provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior.
Outcome: The proposed model provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior.
GLTW: Joint Improved Graph Transformer and LLM via Three-Word Language for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graphs lack the ability to integrate structural information into LLMs and output predictions deterministically.
Approach: They propose a method which encodes structural information of KGs and merges it with LLMs to enhance KGC performance.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of KG Completion datasets on KGs by integrating structural information with LLMs.
Double: Breaking the Acceleration Limit via Double Retrieval Speculative Parallelism (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Parallel Speculative Decoding (PSD) has limitations due to speedup limits and high computational waste . a novel synchronous mechanism solves the Retrieval Precision-Efficiency Dilemma .
Approach: They propose a framework that combines a draft-verification-based approach with a synchronous mechanism to solve the Retrieval Precision-Efficiency Dilemma.
Outcome: The proposed framework breaks speedup limits for Speculative Decoding by overlapping draft generation with verification.
Automated Essay Scoring via Pairwise Contrastive Regression (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to automate essay scoring use regression or ranking objectives . a novel neural pairwise ranking model is developed to optimize both objectives based on the same loss .
Approach: They propose a novel Neural Pairwise Contrastive Regression model that optimizes both objectives simultaneously as a single loss.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms previous methods on the public Automated Student Assessment Prize dataset.
Leveraging AMR Graph Structure for Better Sequence-to-Sequence AMR Parsing (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies on AMR parsing often regard this task as a seq2seq translation problem.
Approach: They propose to translate AMR graphs into AMR token sequences in pre-processing and recover AMR from sequences after decoding.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms baseline and achieves 85.5 0.1 and 84.2 0.2 Smatch scores on AMR 2.0 and AMR 3.0.
Prompting Scientific Names for Zero-Shot Species Recognition (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: We use visionlanguage models (VLMs) to recognize images of common objects in a zero-shot fashion, but it is underexplored how to use CLIP for zero- shot species recognition of highly specialized concepts.
Approach: They propose a method to translate scientific names to common English names and use them in prompts to improve their performance.
Outcome: The proposed method performs poorly for species recognition with prompts that use scientific names, e.g., “a photo of Lepus Timidus” (which is a scientific name in Latin) and additionally use them in the prompts.
PromptRank: Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction Using Prompt (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing keyphrase extraction methods struggle with document and candidate length discrepancies or fail to fully utilize the pre-trained language model without further fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction approach that uses a pre-trained language model to rank candidates based on document embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms the existing keyphrase extraction approach on six benchmarks.
Knowledge-to-Verification: Exploring RLVR for LLMs in Knowledge-Intensive Domains (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning, but their applications on knowledge-intensive domains have not been explored due to the scarcity of high-quality verifiable data.
Approach: They propose a framework that extends reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to knowledge-intensive domains through automated verififiability data synthesis while enabling verification of the LLM's reasoning process.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework enhances the reasoning of large language models in knowledge-intensive domains without significantly compromising the model’s general capabilities.
ImCoref-CeS: An Improved Lightweight Pipeline for Coreference Resolution with LLM-based Checker-Splitter Refinement (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing supervised neural methods for coreference resolution are underexplored . current methods rely on small language models, but their potential is underexploited .
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates an enhanced supervised model with LLM-based reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in coreference resolution.
From Scaffolding to Assimilation: Progressive Structural Internalization for Format-Constrained Creative Text Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing paradigms rely on unreliable prompting or rigid constrained decoding strategies to achieve aesthetic unity.
Approach: They propose a framework to embed external constraints into the model’s intrinsic intuition and use it to generate open-ended creative texts.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses baselines in both strict constraint adherence and literary aesthetics.
SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various tasks, but is limited in multi-turn social interactions.
Approach: They propose a method which dynamically selects key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior.
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform existing methods and proprietary LLMs on the SOTOPIA benchmark and show that they can improve social intelligence.
CTFN: Hierarchical Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Using Coupled-Translation Fusion Network (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis require all modalities as input, thus are sensitive to missing modality at predicting time.
Approach: They propose to model bi-direction interplay via couple learning and exploit multiple bi-directional translations to exploit multimodal fusion embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or often competitive performance on two multimodal benchmarks with extensive ablation studies.
Topic Tensor Network for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition in Chinese (P19-1)

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Challenge: Currently, most studies on implicit discourse relation recognition use sentence-level representations . Chinese is a paratactic language that tends to pro-drop clause connectives .
Approach: They propose a topic tensor network to recognize Chinese implicit discourse relations with both sentence-level and topic-level representations.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in micro and macro F1 scores on a Chinese discourse corpus.
Good for Misconceived Reasons: An Empirical Revisiting on the Need for Visual Context in Multimodal Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies report improvements when equipping models with multimodal information, but it remains unclear whether such improvements actually come from the multimodal part.
Approach: They propose to extend conventional text-only translation models with multimodal information by extending them with visual input.
Outcome: The proposed models replicate similar gains as recently developed multimodal-integrated systems achieved, but learn to ignore multimodal information.
ProReason: Multi-Modal Proactive Reasoning with Decoupled Eyesight and Wisdom (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large vision-language models often prioritize language knowledge over image information on visual reasoning tasks, incurring performance degradation.
Approach: They propose a visual reasoning framework that decouples vision-reasoning capabilities and multi-run proactive perception.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models on benchmarks for open-source and closed-source models with 13.2% performance gain.
Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies show that large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual machine translation (MMT) However, the multilingual translation ability of LLMs remains under-explored.
Approach: They evaluate eight popular LLMs including ChatGPT and GPT-4 to determine their performance in multilingual machine translation.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate moderate translation even on zero-resource languages and cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task guidance for low-resourced translation than exemplar in the same language pairs.
E-EVAL: A Comprehensive Chinese K-12 Education Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: despite the rapid development of Large Language Models, there is no dedicated benchmark for evaluating LLMs in Chinese K-12 education.
Approach: They propose to develop a benchmark specifically tailored for Chinese K-12 education.
Outcome: EVAL is the first evaluation benchmark specifically tailored for Chinese K-12 education.
Explanation Regeneration via Information Bottleneck (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent work builds on prompt engineering to generate free-text explanations without specific training, but they lack sufficiency and conciseness due to the prompt complexity and hallucination issues.
Approach: They propose to generate explanations via the information bottleneck theory by polishing the single-pass output of large pretrained language models but retaining the information that supports the contents being explained by balancing two information bottle neck objectives.
Outcome: The proposed explanations are based on the information bottleneck theory . they are able to explain black-box predictions naturally and accurately .
The Devil in Linear Transformer (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing linear transformers suffer from performance degradations on various tasks and corpus.
Approach: They propose a new linear attention that replaces scaling with a normalization to stabilize gradients and confine attention to neighbouring tokens in early layers.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms vanilla transformers on the long-range arena benchmark while being significantly more space-time efficient.
Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Using multiple sequence alignments (MSA) to extract evolutionary knowledge is limited.
Approach: They propose to use multiple sequence alignments to augment protein representations . they propose to employ Retrieved Sequence Augmentation to enhance protein representation learning .
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses MSA Transformer by 5% in structural and property prediction tasks while being 373 times faster.
ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application for reducing stress and providing emotional guidance.
Approach: They re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards to define roles of role-players . they train a specific role- playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4 .
Outcome: The proposed model behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4, and the model performs better than GPLs.
Adversarial Text Generation by Search and Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing text generation methods only use heuristic replacement strategies or language models to generate replacement words at the word level.
Approach: They propose a search and learning framework for Adversarial Text Generation by Search and Learning to evaluate the robustness of natural language processing models.
Outcome: The proposed methods are significantly superior to the most advanced methods in terms of attack efficiency and adversarial text quality.
MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-Agent Inner Dialogue (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Mental health issues are worsening in today’s competitive society, such as depression and anxiety.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent inner dialogue paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm provides more immersive psychological healing environments.
OS-Sentinel: Towards Safety-Enhanced Mobile GUI Agents via Hybrid Validation in Realistic Workflows (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for detecting unsafe mobile GUI agents are underexplored.
Approach: They propose a mobile agent safety detection framework that integrates a formal verifier and a VLM-based contextual judge to detect system-level violations.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics.
MECH: A Cost-Effective Multi-Task Cascade Framework for Classroom Opinion Evolution Recognition (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on dialogue act annotation, overlooking the deeper dimension of opinion evolution.
Approach: They propose a framework for Classroom Opinion Evolution Recognition that translates "Action-Opinion" dualism into a risk-aware routing mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 78.55% while reducing API costs by 44.4%.
Improving Dialogue Discourse Parsing via Reply-to Structures of Addressee Recognition (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to learn dialogue discourse parsing with related tasks require additional annotation, thus limiting their generality.
Approach: They propose a multitasking framework that integrates dialogue discourse parsing with addressee recognition to reflect relation-based structure of dialogue.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the Molweni and STAC datasets.
ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to generate training data with pre-trained language models have been found effective in various scenarios.
Approach: They propose an unsupervised zero-shot learning method that generates a dataset from scratch and trains a tiny task model under supervision of the synthesized dataset.
Outcome: The proposed method is annotated-free and efficient, but can provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation and unreferenced text generation evaluation.
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in natural language processing, driven by large language models such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama.
Approach: They propose a strategy for role-play prompting and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the standard zero-shot prompting approach across 12 reasoning benchmarks.
Generating Data for Symbolic Language with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) bring performance and complexity, but they incur a large computational cost in practice.
Approach: They propose a task-based model which uses large language models to generate symbolic language data by an informative prompt and agreement-based verifier.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate symbolic language data with a few human demonstrations and saves a considerable amount of inference effort.
Lexical Knowledge Internalization for Neural Dialog Generation (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge-grounded dialog models ignore the knowledge that resides in people's minds during a conversation.
Approach: They propose to integrate lexical knowledge internally into the model's parameters instead of further conditioning them on external knowledge . they adopt contrastive learning approach and use a dictionary-based token-level lexicon retriever that requires only weak supervision.
Outcome: The proposed model can relate J.K Rowling to Khalsa Aid with the knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia.
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately .
Approach: They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes .
Outcome: The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show .
Unraveling the Mechanics of Learning-Based Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent learning-based demonstration selection methods have proven beneficial to in-context learning (ICL) by choosing more useful exemplars.
Approach: They propose two methods to capture task-agnostic similarities between input and output of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed methods integrate task-agnostic similarities of different levels between input and output of exemplars and test cases to eliminate costly data collection.
Stratagem: Learning Transferable Reasoning via Trajectory-Modulated Game Self-Play (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing self-play approaches to developing general reasoning in language models rely on terminal game outcomes.
Approach: They propose a game-based reasoning transfer model that addresses two barriers to reasoning transfer.
Outcome: The proposed model improves mathematical reasoning, general reasoning, and code generation benchmarks.
From Storage to Experience: A Survey on the Evolution of LLM Agent Memory Mechanisms (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents have fundamentally reshaped artificial intelligence . however, the inherent statelessness of LLMs hinders their ability to maintain logical consistency across complex, multi-step tasks .
Approach: They propose a framework for LLM agent memory mechanisms that formalizes the development process into three stages: storage, reflection, and experience.
Outcome: The proposed framework breaks the development process into three stages . it analyzes the need for long-range consistency, challenges in dynamic environments, and the ultimate goal of continual learning.
Enhanced Coherence-Aware Network with Hierarchical Disentanglement for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Aspect-category-based sentiment analysis (ACSA) is a popular approach for identifying aspect categories and predicting their sentiments.
Approach: They propose an enhanced coherence-aware network with hierarchical disentanglement (ECAN) to capture contexts across the whole review and to help the implicit aspect and sentiment identification.
Outcome: The proposed network decouples multiple aspects and sentiment features and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Deep Encoder and Multiple Shallow Decoders (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent work in multilingual translation has improved translation quality surpassing bilingual baselines using deep transformer models with increased capacity.
Approach: They propose a deep encoder with multiple shallow decoders to reduce inference latency while maintaining translation quality.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 1.8x speedup on average compared to a standard transformer model with no drop in translation quality.
DiffuSeq-v2: Bridging Discrete and Continuous Text Spaces for Accelerated Seq2Seq Diffusion Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to text generation use discrete text within a continuous diffusion space, which incurs substantial computational overhead during training and results in slower sampling speeds.
Approach: They propose a soft absorbing state that facilitates diffusion models in learning to reconstruct discrete mutations based on the underlying Gaussian space.
Outcome: The proposed method accelerates training convergence by 4x and generates samples of similar quality 800x faster, rendering it closer to practical application.
ImgTrojan: Jailbreaking Vision-Language Models with ONE Image (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on the safety of large language models (LLMs) with human values have focused on the integration of multi-modal user input into these models.
Approach: They propose a method to bypass safety constraints of large language models by using poisoned images instead of original textual captions.
Outcome: The proposed attack bypasses safety constraints of large language models (VLMs) by replacing the original textual captions with malicious jailbreak prompts.
Bridging the Preference Gap between Retrievers and LLMs (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on retrievers and LLMs treat them as separate components . a novel bridge model is proposed to optimize the relationship between the retriever and the LLM .
Approach: They propose a framework that chains together supervised and reinforcement learning to train a bridge model that optimizes the connection between the retriever and the LLM.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed model optimizes the connection between the retriever and the LLM.
Can Language Models Understand Physical Concepts? (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing language models do not understand basic physical concepts in the human world.
Approach: They propose a method to transfer embodied knowledge from visual models to LMs . they use visual concepts and embodies concepts learned from interaction with the world .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves comparable performance with scaling up parameters of LMs 134.

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