Papers by Li Ming
Exploring and Detecting Self-disclosure in Multi-modal posts on Chinese Social Media (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Self-disclosure can provide psychological comfort but can also pose privacy concerns . a lack of high-quality corpora, analysis, and methods for detection is limiting research . |
| Approach: | They construct a high-quality text-image corpus on Chinese multimodal social media platforms . they analyze the distribution of self-disclosure types, modality preferences, user intent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus analyzes self-disclosure behaviors on Chinese social media platforms . it fine-tunes five multimodal large language models to enhance self-discovery detection . |
MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haowei Liu, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Yaya Shi, Chaoya Jiang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC. |
HEAL: Hybrid Enhancement with LLM-based Agents for Text-attributed Hypergraph Self-supervised Representation Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance text-attributed hypergraph self-supervised learning are limited by label scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that leverages large language models to enhance hypergraph self-supervised learning by integrating hyperedges into a self-representation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates informative nodes and hyperedges through multi-round interaction with LLM-based agents. |
DiffuSpec: Unlocking Diffusion Language Models for Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) decoding in large language models is latency-bounded by strictly sequential token generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion-based drafter that proposes multi-token candidates and then verifies them in parallel by the target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed drafter generates multi-token proposals in a single forward pass while remaining compatible with standard AR verifiers. |
Incentivizing In-depth Reasoning over Long Contexts with Process Advantage Shaping (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing LLMs’ short-context reasoning but falters in long-contemporal scenarios requiring precise grounding and multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs high-difficulty, multi-hop long-context QA pairs with inherent reasoning chains to overcome this bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms RLVR baselines and matches frontier LLMs while using far fewer parameters. |
Ontology-Guided Reverse Thinking Makes Large Language Models Stronger on Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on entity vector matching, but the purpose of the question is abstract and difficult to match with specific entities. Existing approaches rely only on entity-vector matching, and there is a problem with multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs reasoning paths from purposes back to conditions using the KG ontology. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the WebQSP and CWQ datasets show that ORT significantly improves the capability of large language models in knowledge graph question answering tasks (KGQA). |
Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Jiang, Jiahao Chen, Zhenghao Xiang, Zhixiong Yang, Hanchen Wang, Jiabao Zhuang, Xinmeng Che, Jiajun Sun, Hui Li, Yifei Cao, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Junjie Ye, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, but academic research remains non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning that includes a licensed synthetic dataset and a song generation model, Muse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text–music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. |
R2A-TLS: Reflective Retrieval-Augmented Timeline Summarization with Causal-Semantic Integration (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to capture coherent event narratives due to fragmented descriptions . Existing approaches accumulate noise through iterative retrieval strategies that lack relevance evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reflective retrieval-augmented timeline summarization with Causal-Semantic Intergration approach for open-domain timeline summarizing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the best prior published approaches. |
Visual Pivoting Unsupervised Multimodal Machine Translation in Low-Resource Distant Language Pairs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that neural MT achieves much worse translation quality than statistical MT with a small number of corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual pivoting method for alignment between distant language pairs . they first construct a dataset and then apply it to pre-training and fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on DLPs and close language pairs. |
SumSurvey: An Abstractive Dataset of Scientific Survey Papers for Long Document Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a growing need for long document summarization datasets with 16k input is causing problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze salient information in long document summarizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models and LLMs in the distribution form of salient information and the distribution of salinal information is an indicator of quality. |
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. |
Semantics of the Unwritten: The Effect of End of Paragraph and Sequence Tokens on Text Generation with GPT2 (2021.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments on an English essay dataset using Chinese-GPT2 . they find that the model can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised learning methods in natural language processing require large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose an active learning loop that takes LLMs as annotators and puts them into an active loop to determine what to annotate efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with few-shot performance in two NLP tasks. |
WikiDiverse: A Multimodal Entity Linking Dataset with Diversified Contextual Topics and Entity Types (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) is an essential task for many multimodal applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-annotated Wikipedia-based multimodal entity linking dataset to improve the quality of existing MEL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model uses the visual information of images more effectively than existing models. |
Can LLMs Speak For Diverse People? Tuning LLMs via Debate to Generate Controllable Controversial Statements (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack sufficient controllability to generate statements supporting diverse or even controversial perspectives. |
| Approach: | They develop a pipeline that fine tunes LLMs to generate statements generated via debate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves the controllability of LLMs in generating statements supporting an argument the user defined in the prompt. |
AnRe: Analogical Replay for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) are vital for event prediction, yet current methods face limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free Analogical Replay reasoning framework that uses LLMs to extract historical contexts and generate analogical reasoning examples as contextual inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing training-free methods on four benchmarks. |
FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wu, Hongru Sun, Wanqing Li, Xinguo Yu, Hao Ming, Xiao Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Jiahong Zhao, Yi Guo, Jie Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states. |
Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Code Pre-trained Models through Structure-Aware Adversarial Samples Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained code models have made significant strides in the field of neural code intelligence, but they are susceptible to adversarial attacks that subtly modify the input sequence and can impair generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of novel robustness evaluation methods based on the intrinsic structure of the code to explore the impact of imperceptible perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods have demonstrated their effectiveness across a wide range of models and tasks, and are able to predict the performance of perturbed models. |
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)
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Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li, Xin Miao, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Jianhao Chen, Birong Pan, Hankun Kang, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | Existing studies on vision-language models aligned with general human objectives have not been successful because people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set and then evaluate their actions to see whether personalized alignment is achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment. |
Schoenfeld’s Anatomy of Mathematical Reasoning by Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models expose reasoning traces, yet their underlying cognitive structure and steps remain difficult to identify and analyze beyond surface-level statistics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly abstracts reasoning traces into functional reasoning steps such as Analysis, Explore, Implement, Verify, etc. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals reproducible thinking dynamics and structural differences between reasoning and non-reasoning models, which are not apparent from token-level views. |
SAC: Neural Speech Codec with Semantic-Acoustic Dual-Stream Quantization (2026.acl-long)
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Wenxi Chen, Ruiqi Yan, Yushen Chen, Zhikang Niu, Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yuzhe Liang, null Wenhanlin, Shunshun Yin, Ming Tao, Xinsheng Wang, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance high-quality reconstruction with semantically rich representations, limiting their effectiveness in both generative and understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural speech codec with semantic-acoustic dual-stream quantization that disentangles semantic and acousian modeling into two dedicated streams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms state-of-the-art speech tokenizers in auto-propagating text-to-speech models. |
Make Prompt-based Black-Box Tuning Colorful: Boosting Model Generalization from Three Orthogonal Perspectives (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing power on NLP tasks. however, tuning these models for downstream tasks usually requires exorbitant costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box tuning technique that optimizes task-specific prompts without accessing gradients and hidden representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance under few-shot learning scenarios. |
Vision-Language Model Fine-Tuning via Simple Parameter-Efficient Modification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models have seen the success of prompt tuning and adapter tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune CLIP without introducing any overhead of extra parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves CLIP by 7.27% average harmonic mean accuracy. |
HSUGA: LLM-Enhanced Recommendation with Hierarchical Semantic Understanding and Group-Aware Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing sequential recommendation use long interaction sequences, but they lack the ability to extract user preferences from long sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a plugin that integrates LLMs to infer user preferences from interaction sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms improve user semantic embedding extraction and utilization on three benchmark datasets. |
Budget-Constrained Tool Learning with Planning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for budget-constrained tool learning have been overlooked . et al., 2023b) compared tool learning with other methods to improve performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for budget-constrained tool learning by creating a preferable plan under the budget constraint before utilizing the tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the cost of tool learning and reaches competitive Pass Rate. |
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)
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Hongzhan Chen, Hehong Chen, Ming Yan, Wenshen Xu, Gao Xing, Weizhou Shen, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on role-playing agents have focused on enhancing their conversational capability, role-specific knowledge and style, but there has been a gap in assessing their social intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the sociality of role-playing agents using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from various sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. |
Can Pretrained Language Models Derive Correct Semantics from Corrupt Subwords under Noise? (2023.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) perform poorly under noise due to subword segmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for subword segmentation that provides a systematic categorization of segmentation corruption under noise and evaluation protocols by generating contrastive datasets with canonical-noisy word pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a systematic categorization of segmentation corruption under noise and evaluation protocols by generating contrastive datasets with canonical-noisy word pairs. |
CipherBank: Exploring the Boundary of LLM Reasoning Capabilities through Cryptography Challenge (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their capabilities in cryptographic decryption tasks remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
Aligning Large Language Models with Implicit Preferences from User-Generated Content (2025.acl-long)
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Zhaoxuan Tan, Zheng Li, Tianyi Liu, Haodong Wang, Hyokun Yun, Ming Zeng, Pei Chen, Zhihan Zhang, Yifan Gao, Ruijie Wang, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing preference learning methods rely heavily on curated data from humans or advanced LLMs, which is costly and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages implicit preferences in unlabeled user-generated content to generate preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms user-generated content into user queries and generates responses from the policy model. |
Attention-Guided Answer Distillation for Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reading comprehension systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from an ensemble to a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform the teacher on adversarial datasets and NarrativeQA benchmarks. |
Breaking Language Barriers: Cross-Lingual Continual Pre-Training at Scale (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides towards Artificial General Intelligence, but training them from scratch is prohibitively expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose to continuously pre-train LLMs from existing pre-trained LLM models by using a set of parameters instead of randomly initializing them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach saves significant resources and accelerates convergence and performance. |
Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC) when instructions are revealed progressively in multi-turn settings, models get "Lost in Conversation" |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encourages models to generate correct answers and judge solvability in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models' ability to balance problem-solving with abstention . it reduces premature answering behaviors that cause lost-in-conversation (LiC) |
TableBank: Table Benchmark for Image-based Table Detection and Recognition (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for table detection and recognition are limited to document types and layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a table detection and recognition dataset with weak supervision from Word and Latex documents on the internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 417K high quality labeled tables and is publicly available. |
LEMMA: Learning from Errors for MatheMatical Advancement in LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoshi Pan, Yu Li, Honglin Lin, Qizhi Pei, Zinan Tang, Wei Wu, Chenlin Ming, H. Vicky Zhao, Conghui He, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on improving the quality of correct training data, neglecting the value contained in error data, thereby hindering the model’s reflective ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve LLM's reasoning ability by learning from error data and a grounded mistake augmentation method to collect representative errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant performance improvements over other strong models with less than 90k data. |
Model Merging for Knowledge Editing (2025.acl-industry)
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Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Guojing Li, Yingying Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, Tianshi Ming, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing approaches struggle with sequential editing scenarios and harm the general capabilities of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines robust supervised fine-tuning and model merging for knowledge editing to combine supervised and supervised learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in sequential editing while preserving the original performance of the model. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
Self-Error-Instruct: Generalizing from Errors for LLMs Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao, Qi Zhu, Boyang Xue, Minghui Xu, Baojun Wang, Lanqing Hong, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from errors synthesize training data by extrapolating from isolated bad cases, thereby failing to generalize the extensive patterns inherent within these cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes more generalized training data from isolated bad cases by extrapolating from isolated cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes more generalized training data to address these model weaknesses. |
Reaction Miner: An Integrated System for Chemical Reaction Extraction from Textual Data (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Ming Zhong, Siru Ouyang, Yizhu Jiao, Priyanka Kargupta, Leo Luo, Yanzhen Shen, Bobby Zhou, Xianrui Zhong, Xuan Liu, Hongxiang Li, Jinfeng Xiao, Minhao Jiang, Vivian Hu, Xuan Wang, Heng Ji, Martin Burke, Huimin Zhao, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Reaction Miner is a system designed to extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that extracts chemical reactions directly from raw scientific PDFs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs. |
Writing-RL: Advancing Long-form Writing via Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Xuanyu Lei, Chenliang Li, Yuning Wu, Kaiming Liu, Weizhou Shen, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Fei Huang, Ya-Qin Zhang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled strong performance in long-form writing, but current training paradigms remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework to advance long-form writing capabilities beyond SFT. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 7B-scale writer models show that Writing-RL improves long-form writing performance over strong SFT baselines. |
Don’t Change Me! User-Controllable Selective Paraphrase Generation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new technique allows paraphrase generation to be user-controlled . a user looking for cheap hotels in New York would not find the other answer helpful . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides a user with explicit tags that can be placed around any arbitrary segment of text to mean "don't change me!" they propose allowing user-controllable paraphrase generation by fine-tuning model that exhibits this behavior . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique is language agnostic and tested in English and Chinese. |
Enhancing Court View Generation with Knowledge Injection and Guidance (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of natural language generation (NLG) rely on the extensive parameters of pretrained language models (PLMs) but their effectiveness may be compromised by insufficient domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-injected prompt encoder to incorporate domain knowledge during the training stage, thereby reducing computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms established baselines on real-world data in responsivity of claims and in the ability to transfer domain knowledge. |
Graph Reasoning Paradigm: Structured and Symbolic Reasoning with Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Runxuan Liu, Xianhao Ou, Xinyan Ma, Jiyuan Wang, Jiafeng Liang, Jiaqi Li, Tao He, Zheng Chu, Rongchuan Mu, Zekun Wang, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Ming Liu, Shijin Wang, Guoping Hu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long chain-of-thought (LCoT) are coarse-grained, reward hacking, and poor generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT) model that integrates reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards with a process-aware verification approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing the cost of training and performance bottlenecks. |
From Graph to Word Bag: Introducing Domain Knowledge to Confusing Charge Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing charge prediction methods have shown impressive performance, but they face significant challenges when dealing with confusing charges, such as Snatch and Robbery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which introduces domain knowledge regarding constituent elements to guide the model in making judgments on confusing charges, much like a judge’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach maintains exceptional performance in imbalanced label distributions. |
Browse and Concentrate: Comprehending Multimodal Content via Prior-LLM Context Fusion (2024.acl-long)
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Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) lack understanding of multi-image and interleaved inputs due to the visual features encoded by frozen encoders before being fed into the LLM backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a two phase paradigm to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively. |
Smart-Start Decoding for Neural Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural machine translation models adopt a monotonic decoding order of either left-to-right or right-to left. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts decoding target words from the right side of a median word and generates words on the left. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on three datasets. |
ResoFilter: Fine-grained Synthetic Data Filtering for Large Language Models through Data-Parameter Resonance Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing large language models lack clear metrics for evaluating data characteristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates models, data, and tasks to refine datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to full-scale fine-tuning using only half the data in mathematical tasks and exhibits strong generalization across different models and domains. |
Can Language Models Capture Human Writing Preferences for Domain-Specific Text Summarization? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies employ large language models as auxiliary tools for humancentered NLP. |
| Approach: | They construct a model to capture human writing preferences by fine-tuning pre-trained models with data and designing prompts to optimize the output of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures human writing preferences through the dimensions of length, content depth, tone & style, and summary format. |
Towards General-Domain Word Sense Disambiguation: Distilling Large Language Model into Compact Disambiguator (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Word Sense Disambiguation rely heavily on manually annotated data, which limits coverage and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models as knowledge distillers to build silver-standard WSD corpora by combining generation-based distillation and annotation-based disambiguation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on general-domain benchmarks by 50% on the most challenging test set and by 1000 times fewer parameters. |
Mitigating Demonstration Bias through Global Coevolutionary Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought prompting rely on manual demonstrations . experimental results show that GCR outperforms baseline methods without performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses random samples to generate demonstrations in zero-shot settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on ten datasets without demonstration bias. |
PALM: Pre-training an Autoencoding&Autoregressive Language Model for Context-conditioned Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for natural language understanding and generation use autoencoding and/or autoregressive objectives to train models. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised pre-training scheme that pre-trains an autoencoding and autoregressive language model on a large unlabeled corpus for generating new text conditioned on context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of language generation benchmarks covering generative question answering, abstractive summarization and conversational response generation. |
Incorporating External Knowledge into Machine Reading for Generative Question Answering (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-aware QA models do not have commonsense and background knowledge to answer nontrivial questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new neural model which exploits external knowledge to generate answers in natural language for a given question with context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves answer quality over existing models without knowledge and knowledge-aware models, a study shows . state officials in Hawaii confirmed that president Barack Obama was born in the U.S. |
Two Birds, One Stone: A Simple, Unified Model for Text Generation from Structured and Unstructured Data (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that simpler, properly tuned models are at least competitive across NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a table-to-text and neural question generation tasks to generate text from structured and unstructured data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task generates biographies based on Wikipedia infoboxes . the proposed model can achieve the state of the art in both tasks . |
Quantifying and Improving the Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Against Spurious Features in Grounding Data (2026.acl-long)
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Shiping Yang, Jie Wu, Wenbiao Ding, Ning Wu, Shining Liang, Ming Gong, Hongzhi Li, Hengyuan Zhang, Angel X. Chang, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on robustness to explicit noise (e.g., document semantics) but overlook implicit noise (spurious features). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to quantify the robustness of RAGs against spurious features by integrating a data synthesis pipeline and a taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies the robustness of RALMs against spurious features. |
Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the likelihood of sequence prediction models are based on MLE and teacher forcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative Bridging Network (GBN) that extends the point-wise ground truth to a bridge distribution conditioned on it and optimizes their KL-divergence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bridge module can improve on two recognized sequence prediction tasks and minimize learning burden. |
E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language pre-training methods use a two-step training procedure to learn visual features from image-text pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-trained model for V+L understanding and generation using a unified Transformer framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn visual representation and semantic alignments between image and text on visual-text pairs and on visual processing tasks. |
Inspecting Unification of Encoding and Matching with Transformer: A Case Study of Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that unified model outperforms other models that treat encoding and matching separately. |
| Approach: | They evaluate a unified model with Transformer layers for machine reading comprehension . they find that the model learns different modeling strategies compared with previous models . |
| Outcome: | The unified model outperforms models with Transformer layers on the machine reading comprehension task. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
Coupling Global and Local Context for Unsupervised Aspect Extraction (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on aspect extraction focus on sequence tagging models trained on human-annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel neural model capable of coupling global and local representations to discover aspect words by combining global and locale contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on laptop and restaurant reviews on two benchmarks. |
TabularMath: Understanding Math Reasoning over Tables with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Mathematical reasoning has long been a key benchmark for evaluating large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms math word problems into scalable tabular reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms math word problems into scalable and verified tabular reasoning tasks. |
EGSS: Entropy-guided Stepwise Scaling for Reliable Software Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Chenhui Mao, Yuanting Lei, Zhixiang Wei, Ming Liang, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Entropy-Guided Stepwise Scaling (EGSS) is a novel TTS framework for software engineering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-guided stepwise scaling framework that balances efficiency and effectiveness through entropic-guide encoding and robust test-suite augmentation. |
| Outcome: | EGSS boosts performance by 5–10% across all evaluated models, and reduces inference-time token usage by over 28% . compared to existing methods, EGS reduces token usage and reduce inference time by over 20% . |
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. |
From Implicit Graph Encoding to Explicit Evidence: A Training-Free LLM Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Guo Tang, Ke Cheng, Huiming Fan, Heng Chang, Wenxiang Zheng, Xianhao Ou, Junjia Xiang, Ming Liu, Yujun Zhou, Li Lanyu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with implicit modality alignment and suboptimal graph linearization. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, test-time adaptive framework that reframes TKG prediction as explicit evidence-driven reasoning. |
| Outcome: | ExE-LLM outperforms fully trained graph neural networks on four benchmarks . it achieves SOTA performance in inductive settings, significantly outperforming fully trained neural networks . |
A Neural Network Architecture for Program Understanding Inspired by Human Behaviors (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies for understanding programs do not take human behaviors as reference. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural network model that takes human behaviors as reference in understanding programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on code summarization and code clone detection tasks. |
Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with impressive capabilities, but they lack domain specificity, real-time information and face challenges in solving specialized problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by demonstrating its effectiveness and advantages in tool learning. |
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| 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. |
PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize RAG generators fail to align with RAG requirements thoroughly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for optimizing the RAG generator from multiple preference perspectives to align with RAG requirements comprehensively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of RAG generators by incorporating retrieved documents into the prompt. |
I²B-LPO: Latent Policy Optimization via Iterative Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
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Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Yue Zhu, Long Li, Zhuoyue Chen, Xinghao Zhao, Ming LI, Chuyang Zhao, Jihai Zhang, MengChang Wang, Yang Cao, Yu Kang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model reasoning suffer from exploration collapse due to the semantic homogeneity of random rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent policy optimization via iterative information bottleneck to optimize reasoning trajectories by diversifying reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with margins of up to 5.3% in accuracy and 7.4% in diversity metrics. |
VQAGuider: Guiding Multimodal Large Language Models to Answer Complex Video Questions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can grasp the intention of a question and decomposing it to a series of visual recognition sub-tasks to find out the answer with the help of an agent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal large language models to grasp the intention of a question and decompose it into a series of visual recognition sub-tasks to find out the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of complex video-related questions by 29.6% and 17.2% on CVQA and the existing VQA datasets. |
Instruct and Extract: Instruction Tuning for On-Demand Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models with instruction-following capabilities are not suitable for long-tail ad hoc extraction use cases for non-expert users. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that follows instructions to extract the desired content from the associated text and present it in a structured tabular format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing open-source models of similar size in terms of information extraction. |
TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan, Haiming Wang, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Lin Li, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks focus on symbolic inference but rarely involve understanding complex number combination reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proof and evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively. |
UniLR: Unleashing the Power of LLMs on Multiple Legal Tasks with a Unified Legal Retriever (2025.acl-long)
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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Yifei Liu, Ming Cai, Lizhi Qing, Shihang Wang, Yangyang Kang, Chengyuan Liu, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods are designed for general domains, struggling with legal knowledge, or tailored for specific legal tasks, unable to handle diverse legal knowledge types. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel retrieval method that integrates specialized knowledge into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can perform multiple legal retrieval tasks for LLMs. |
RuleR: Improving LLM Controllability by Rule-based Data Recycling (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised fine-tuning datasets are composed of general instructions without userspecified constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method incorporating multiple constraints into the original data samples according to predefined rules to create new training tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLM controllability while maintaining general instruction-following capabilities. |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
DISCO Balances the Scales: Adaptive Domain- and Difficulty-Aware Reinforcement Learning on Imbalanced Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuhang Zhou, Jing Zhu, Shengyi Qian, Zhuokai Zhao, Xiyao Wang, Xiaoyu Liu, Ming Li, Paiheng Xu, Wei Ai, Furong Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). |
| Approach: | a new study proposes a domain-informed self-consistency policy optimization extension to GRPO that addresses inter-group imbalance. |
| Outcome: | a new extension of GRPO addresses inter-group imbalance with two key innovations . the proposed method outperforms existing GR PO variants by 5% on Qwen3 models . |
Analyzing the Intensity of Complaints on Social Media (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies on identifying the existence or the type of complaints focus on building automatic classification models for identifying complaints. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure the intensity of complaints from text using Best-Worst Scaling method to estimate the popularity of posts on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can estimate the popularity of complaints on social media with best-worst scaling (BWS) method. |
A Survey on Training-free Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Birong Pan, Yongqi Li, Weiyu Zhang, Wenpeng Lu, Mayi Xu, Shen Zhou, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | a survey of large language models (LLMs) aims to ensure outputs adhere to human values, ethical standards, and legal norms. |
| Approach: | They present the first systematic review of TF alignment methods . they categorize them by stages of pre-decoding, in-decoder and post-decoration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on training-free (TF) alignment techniques . they are able to be used in open-source and closed-source environments without retraining . |
Visual Attention Reasoning via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification and replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on hallucination and safety benchmarks. |
Semantics-enhanced Cross-modal Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
Selective Reflection-Tuning: Student-Selected Data Recycling for LLM Instruction-Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Instruction tuning is critical to large language models but its success heavily relies on the training data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that synergizes a teacher LLM’s reflection and introspection with the data selection capability of the student LLM to automatically refine existing instruction-tuning data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much stronger and top-tier 7B and 13B LLMs without collecting brand-new data. |
Addressing Semantic Drift in Generative Question Answering with Auxiliary Extraction (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent work focuses on question answering based on machine reading comprehension . current approaches treat QA as extracting a consecutive piece of text to a given question. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative QA model that incorporates an extractive mechanism into a model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves quality and semantic accuracy over baseline models. |
Unveiling Inherent Visual Grounding in Multimodal LLMs for Text-Rich Images (2026.findings-acl)
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Shijie Zhou, Jihyung Kil, Ming Li, Jiuxiang Gu, Curtis Wigington, Rajiv Jain, Changyou Chen, Ruiyi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language model (MLLM) approaches struggle to align query tokens with visual–text patches, heavily relying on lengthy OCR inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an OCR-free approach that leverages the MLLM's inherent multi-head attention for multi-patch grounding. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on challenging document grounding benchmarks. |
Improving Neural Machine Translation with Soft Template Prediction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) depend on source text to generate translation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use extracted templates from tree structures as soft target templates to guide the translation procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on four benchmarks and demonstrates the effectiveness of soft target templates. |
Efficient Transformer Parameter Reuse via Zero-Token Mechanism (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to scaling up parameter counts are impractical for users with limited computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled parameter cycling strategy that employs a head-tail decoupling strategy to decouple the first (head) and last (tail) layers from the parameter cycling process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior performance under strict parameter constraints and significantly reduces computational overhead via early exits. |
Long Chain-of-Thought Fine-tuning via Understanding-to-Reasoning Transition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chenxin An, Zhihui Xie, Xiaonan Li, Ming Zhong, Shansan Gong, Lei Li, Jun Zhang, Jingjing Xu, Lingpeng Kong
| 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. |
TransCoder: Towards Unified Transferable Code Representation Learning Inspired by Human Skills (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune code intelligence models to individual tasks are costly and require large data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transferable fine-tuning strategy for Code representation learning that uses a tunable prefix encoder to capture cross-task and cross-language transferable knowledge and apply it to downstream adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can lead to superior performance on code-related tasks and encourage mutual reinforcement. |
How Instruction and Reasoning Data shape Post-Training: Data Quality through the Lens of Layer-wise Gradients (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Spectral properties of low/high-quality instruction and reasoning data are used to explain finetuning dynamics in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze layer-wise gradients induced by low/high-quality instruction and reasoning data for LLM post-training. |
| Outcome: | The results show that higher-quality data are associated with lower nuclear norms and higher effective ranks. |
ARTIST: A Transformer-based Chinese Text-to-Image Synthesizer Digesting Linguistic and World Knowledge (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-Image Synthesis (TIS) is a popular task to convert natural language texts into realistic images. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based Chinese text-to-image synthesizer for high-resolution image generation that incorporates linguistic and relational knowledge facts into the model to ensure better performance without the usage of ultra-large models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in Chinese with linguistic and relational knowledge facts. |
DoCIA: An Online Document-Level Context Incorporation Agent for Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinglin Lyu, Wei Tang, Yuang Li, Xiaofeng Zhao, Ming Zhu, Junhui Li, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Daimeng Wei, Hao Yang, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Document-level context is crucial for speech translation due to noise from ASR . incorporating document-level contextual information into ST remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They develop an online framework that integrates document-level context into machine translation . they use document-based modules to integrate document- level context into ST . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in sentence and discourse metrics . it can correct ASR transcription errors and improve translation performance . |
Mosaic-IT: Cost-Free Compositional Data Synthesis for Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current instruction tuning relies on teacher models or human intervention to generate and refine the instructions and responses for training, which are costly, non-sustainable, and may lack diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a human/model-free compositional data synthesis method that can create rich and diverse augmentations from existing instruction tuning data to enhance large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance over benchmarks and reduces training costs by 80% compared with original instruction tuning. |
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. |
CoEvo: Coevolution of LLM and Retrieval Model for Domain-Specific Information Retrieval (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Yinghao Hu, Lizhi Qing, Shihang Wang, Chengyuan Liu, Tao Wu, Adam Jatowt, Ming Cai, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Recent methods to enhance queries by generating intermediary elements can degrade retrieval performance . combining LLMs and retrievers can be difficult, resulting in unreliable or irrelevant intermediaries . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates the coevolution of large language models and retrieval models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework facilitates the coevolution of LLMs and retrieval models. |
Scaling External Knowledge Input Beyond Context Windows of LLMs via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing context window extension methods obstruct scaling external knowledge input. |
| Approach: | They develop a multi-agent framework to overcome two core bottlenecks in existing agent orchestration designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes two core bottlenecks and improves inference-time knowledge integration without longer-context training. |
DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for document layout analysis are based on rule-based or machine learning methods that ignore textual information. |
| Approach: | They present a benchmark document layout analysis dataset using a computer vision model . they build strong baselines and manually split train/dev/test sets for evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model trains on DocBank accurately recognize layout information for a variety of documents. |
FewNLU: Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Methods for Few-Shot Natural Language Understanding (2022.acl-long)
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Yanan Zheng, Jing Zhou, Yujie Qian, Ming Ding, Chonghua Liao, Li Jian, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Jie Tang, Sebastian Ruder, Zhilin Yang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation protocols for few-shot natural language understanding (NLU) tasks are inconsistent and hinder fair comparison and measuring progress. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that improves previous evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., test performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. |
PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints and some are only accessible via APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter that integrates large language models as generators and trains them to refine the retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% compared to existing methods. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
Enhancing Safe and Controllable Protein Generation via Knowledge Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Protein language models pose significant risks of generating harmful sequences, e.g., viral transmissibility, drug resistance, environmental imbalances, public health crises, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a protein-based model that integrates prior knowledge via a Protein Safety Knowledge Graph to minimize the risk of generating harmful sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the likelihood of producing hazardous sequences while maintaining high functionality. |
Jointly Learning to Repair Code and Generate Commit Message (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work performs code repair and commit message generation independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a cascaded method to repair program codes and generate commit messages in a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms baselines on a buggy-fixed-commit dataset. |
Deep Attentive Sentence Ordering Network (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentence ordering tasks rely on linguistic knowledge and are domain specific. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep attentive sentence ordering network which integrates self-attention mechanism with LSTMs in the encoding of input sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on Sentence Ordering and Order Discrimination tasks and is shown to be highly efficient. |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Text summarization is a key natural language generation task, but the high cost of inaccurate summaries raises concerns about the reliability of uncertainty estimation on text summarisation (UE-TS) evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a UE-TS benchmark that evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets, with human-annotation analysis incorporated where applicable. |
VCSearch: Bridging the Gap Between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems in Mathematical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have improved the performance of Large language models on well-defined mathematical benchmarks, but they often overlook ill-defined problems. |
| Approach: | They develop a large-scale benchmark that contains over 5,000 ill-defined mathematical problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of identifying unsolvable problems by at least 12% across different LLMs, thus achieving stronger robust mathematical reasoning ability. |
Learning Matching Models with Weak Supervision for Response Selection in Retrieval-based Chatbots (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn matching models for retrieval-based chatbots are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a sequence-to-sequence architecture model as a weak annotator to judge the matching degree of unlabeled pairs and performs learning with both the weak signals and the unlabed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two public data sets on matching models on retrieval-based chatbots. |
EasyNLP: A Comprehensive and Easy-to-use Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Chengyu Wang, Minghui Qiu, Taolin Zhang, Tingting Liu, Lei Li, Jianing Wang, Ming Wang, Jun Huang, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) have reshaped the development of natural language processing (NLP) but it is not easy to obtain high-performing PTMs without a large amount of labeled training data and deploy them online with fast inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose to make it easy to build NLP applications with knowledge-enhanced pre-training and knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | EasyNLP supports a comprehensive suite of NLP algorithms and features knowledge-enhanced pre-training, knowledge distillation and few-shot learning functionalities. |
CoSafe: Evaluating Large Language Model Safety in Multi-Turn Dialogue Coreference (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not noticed the safety risks of large language models . authors evaluated 1,400 questions in multi-turn dialogue coreference . |
| Approach: | They are the first to evaluate LLM safety in multi-turn dialogue coreference . they created a dataset of 1,400 questions and tested five open-source models . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that model safety decreases in multi-turn dialogue coreference scenarios . the highest success rate was with the LLaMA2-Chat-7b model, while the lowest was with mistral-7B-Instruct model . |
Boosting Language Models Reasoning with Chain-of-Knowledge Prompting (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can be effective on complex reasoning tasks but generates unfaithful and unfactual reasoning chains. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-knowledge prompting that elicits Large Language Models to generate explicit pieces of knowledge evidence in the form of structure triple. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves commonsense, factual, symbolic, and arithmetic reasoning tasks by estimating the reliability of the reasoning chains in terms of factuality and faithfulness. |
Uncertainty-aware Parameter-Efficient Self-training for Semi-supervised Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-trained language models rely on noisy data, which can be expensive if all parameters are updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training framework that incorporates Monte Carlo dropouts into the model and judiciously selects reliable pseudo-labeled examples based on confidence and certainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and efficiency over multiple tasks over multiple datasets. |
Compressing Sentence Representation for Semantic Retrieval via Homomorphic Projective Distillation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models produce large sentence embeddings, resulting in performance gap between large and small models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments a small Transformer encoder model with learnable projection layers to produce compact sentences while mimicking a large pre-trained language model to retain the sentence representation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.7-4.5 points performance gain on STS and SR tasks while maintaining the quality of the pre-trained language models. |
Generate & Rank: A Multi-task Framework for Math Word Problems (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies formalize MWP as a generation task but mathematical expressions are prone to minor mistakes. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking task for math word problem (MWP) that learns from its own mistakes and distinguishes between correct and incorrect expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the classical Math23k dataset and is 7% higher than the state-of-the-art. |
Breaking the Reasoning Barrier A Survey on LLM Complex Reasoning through the Lens of Self-Evolution (2025.findings-acl)
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Tao He, Hao Li, Jingchang Chen, Runxuan Liu, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao, Zihao Zheng, Zheng Chu, Jiafeng Liang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | OpenAI's O1 and subsequent projects like DeepSeek R1 have significantly advanced research on complex reasoning in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing reasoning studies from the perspective of self-evolution and summarize O1-like works from open-source projects like DeepSeek R1 and Kimi-k1.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are based on open-source models and pioneer advanced methodologies like Scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
Knowledge Prompting in Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (PLMs) introduce redundant factual knowledge from knowledge bases and require complex modules. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge prompting-based PLM framework that incorporates factual knowledge into PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be flexibly combined with existing mainstream PLMs. |
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. |
Pre-trained Language Models Can be Fully Zero-Shot Learners (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to pre-trained language models require fine-tuning on labeled datasets or manually constructing proper prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a nonparametric prompting PLM for fully zero-shot language understanding . they compare it to previous methods for text classification and text entailment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on diverse tasks. |
How do Language Models Reshape Entity Alignment? A Survey of LM-Driven EA Methods: Advances, Benchmarks, and Future (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) is critical for knowledge graph (KG) integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes methods in three stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes methods in three key stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
Exploring Continual Learning for Code Generation Models (2023.acl-short)
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Prateek Yadav, Qing Sun, Hantian Ding, Xiaopeng Li, Dejiao Zhang, Ming Tan, Parminder Bhatia, Xiaofei Ma, Ramesh Nallapati, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Mohit Bansal, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Large-scale code generation models such as Copilot and CodeT5 are expensive to train and re-train. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for Continual Learning (CL) that covers a wide range of tasks with different input and output programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on Prompt Pooling with Teacher Forcing, which suffers catastrophic forgetting due to stark distribution shifts in coding tasks. |
Multitask Pretraining with Structured Knowledge for Text-to-SQL Generation (2023.acl-long)
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Robert Giaquinto, Dejiao Zhang, Benjamin Kleiner, Yang Li, Ming Tan, Parminder Bhatia, Ramesh Nallapati, Xiaofei Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning representations of structured knowledge are limited to the minority of people with technical skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a large pretraining dataset and strategy for learning representations of text, tables, and SQL code that leverages the entire context of the problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two SQL tasks and shows a 1.7 and 2.2 percentage point improvement over existing methods. |
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks. |
Multi-Task Dense Retrieval via Model Uncertainty Fusion for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multitask dense retrieval are not effective due to corpus inconsistency. |
| Approach: | They propose to train individual dense passage retrievers for different open-domain question-answering tasks and aggregate their predictions during test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 benchmark QA datasets, with up to 10% improvement in top-100 accuracy compared to a joint-training multi-task DPR on SQuAD. |
Towards Faithful Industrial RAG: A Reinforced Co-adaptation Framework for Advertising QA (2026.acl-industry)
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Wenwei Li, Ming Xu, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA in industrial environments are inherently relational and often updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes retrieval and generation through two components: Graph-aware Retrieval and evidence-constrained reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on an internal advertising QA dataset show consistent gains across expert-judged dimensions including accuracy, completeness, safety, and URL validity. |
Molweni: A Challenge Multiparty Dialogues-based Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset with Discourse Structure (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Multiparty dialog applications such as discourse parsing and meeting summarization are now mainstream research. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a machine reading comprehension dataset with discourse structure built over multiparty dialog using a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) style. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contributes large-scale discourse dependency annotations in a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) style for all of its multiparty dialogs, and achieves only 67.7% F1 on Molweni’s questions, a 20+% significant drop as compared against its SQuAD 2.0 performance. |
Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Earlier studies of instruction tuning on Large Language Models focus on creating large, varied, and high-quality datasets with responses curated by human experts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a smaller and weaker model to fine tune a larger and stronger model . they find it can largely speed up the data filtering and improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can filter instruction data faster and better on benchmarks. |
MUSEG: Reinforcing Video Temporal Understanding via Timestamp-Aware Multi-Segment Grounding (2026.acl-long)
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Fuwen Luo, Shengfeng Lou, Chi Chen, Ziyue Wang, Chenliang Li, Weizhou Shen, Jiyue Guo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for MLLMs struggle with fine-grained temporal reasoning . despite advances in video understanding, current methods struggle with time-sensitive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a time-stamp-aware multi-segment grounding method that enhances temporal understanding by introducing timestamps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on time-sensitive tasks and generalizes well across diverse temporal understanding scenarios. |
Alleviating Over-smoothing for Unsupervised Sentence Representation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn better unsupervised sentence representations have been successful . over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentences reduces the capacity of powerful PLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve the over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentence representations by combining negatives from PLMs intermediate layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on different strong baselines on Semantic Textual Similarity and Transfer datasets. |
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Improve Low-Resource Machine Translation Leveraging Domain Monolingual Data (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning domain adaptation have overfitting problem in low-resource domains . lack of parallel data makes it difficult for model to learn domain-specific knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a Reinforcement Learning Domain Adaptation method for Neural Machine Translation that uses in-domain source monolingual data to make up for the lack of parallel data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can alleviate overfitting and reinforce the model to learn domain-specific knowledge. |
ToW: Thoughts of Words Improve Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Zhikun Xu, Ming Shen, Jacob Dineen, Zhaonan Li, Xiao Ye, Shijie Lu, Aswin Rrv, Chitta Baral, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | Unlike other data augmentation methods, thoughts of words (TOW) views next-word prediction as a core reasoning task and injects fine-grained thoughts into pre-training texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time data-augmentation method called thoughts of words (TOW) that injects fine-grained thoughts directly into a next-word prediction task and teaches the model to understand how the observed next word is related to previous contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model hallucination by 10% and improves reasoning performance by 7% to 9% on average. |
Text2World: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Symbolic World Model Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Mengkang Hu, Tianxing Chen, Yude Zou, Yuheng Lei, Qiguang Chen, Ming Li, Yao Mu, Hongyuan Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Ping Luo
| Challenge: | Recent studies have encountered limitations in leveraging large language models to generate symbolic world models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking framework based on planning domain definition language (PDDL) that employs multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning, but lacks the robustness needed to perform in world modeling. |
LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Zelin Li, Huayu Sha, Binze Hu, Yuhui Wang, Chenhao Huang, Shichun Liu, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current medical benchmarks have limitations in question design, data sources and evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark covering five core medical areas . it includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers five core medical areas and includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records and expert-designed clinical scenarios. |
MathFusion: Enhancing Mathematical Problem-solving of LLM through Instruction Fusion (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive progress in mathematical problem-solving . current approaches to enhance mathematical reasoning focus on instance-level modifications . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances mathematical reasoning through cross-problem instruction synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts mathematical reasoning by 18.0 points while maintaining high data efficiency. |
Exploring the Cost-Effectiveness of Perspective Taking in Crowdsourcing Subjective Assessment: A Case Study of Toxicity Detection (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | toxicity evaluation tasks require annotations to accurately reflect opinions of subgroups . toxicity tasks require annotators to take the opinions of a subgroup simultaneously . |
| Approach: | They propose to use perspective taking to obtain opinions from subgroups . they propose to prompt annotators to take perspectives of contrasting subgroup simultaneously . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be cost-effective and improve quality under limited budget. |
CodeContests+: High-Quality Test Case Generation for Competitive Programming (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Competitive programming has become a key task for training and evaluating large language models . but test cases of competitive programming problems are often difficult to obtain . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent system that creates high-quality test cases for competitive programming problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves code tests on a CodeContests dataset with pass/fail labels. |
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Li, Rui Xu, Jian Yang, Junnan Liu, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Likang Xiao, Ming LI, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that modulates the contribution of each source model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model merging framework outperforms strong baselines on multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages. |
EmoCaps: Emotion Capsule based Model for Conversational Emotion Recognition (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on ERC focus on context modeling but ignore representation of contextual emotional tendency. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Emoformer to extract multi-modal emotion vectors from different modalities and fuse them with sentence vector to be an emotion capsule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets. |
Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Zheng Chu, Huiming Fan, Jingchang Chen, Qianyu Wang, Mingda Yang, Jiafeng Liang, Zhongjie Wang, Hao Li, Guo Tang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, but they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses self-critique feedback to guide iterative reasoning by enabling iteration and self-evaluation of its intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA by 8.6% on three multi-hop reasoning datasets. |
Structural Contrastive Pretraining for Cross-Lingual Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train multilingual language models using pretraining tasks like mask language modeling have yielded promising results on a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to align the structural words in a parallel sentence, enhancing models’ ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves model's ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations by increasing the frequency of negative pairings. |
Bacteria Biotope Relation Extraction via Lexical Chains and Dependency Graphs (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we describe our approach for the Bacteria Biotopes relation extraction subtask in the BioNLP Shared Task 2019 . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for dependency graph construction based on lexical chains . they then propose 'neuro network' model which uses short-term memories and syntax information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the best F1 (66.3%) in the official evaluation participated by 7 teams. |
Unsupervised Chunking as Syntactic Structure Induction with a Knowledge-Transfer Approach (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting linguistic structures require labeled data . unsupervised chunking is useful for understanding linguistic structure of human languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-transfer approach that heuristically induces chunk labels from unsupervised parsing models and a hierarchical recurrent neural network (HRNN) they show that their approach bridges the gap between supervised and unsupervised chunking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the gap between supervised and unsupervised chunking. |
DQ-BART: Efficient Sequence-to-Sequence Model via Joint Distillation and Quantization (2022.acl-short)
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Zheng Li, Zijian Wang, Ming Tan, Ramesh Nallapati, Parminder Bhatia, Andrew Arnold, Bing Xiang, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Empirical analyses show that pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models can achieve a 16.5x model footprint compression ratio with little performance drop relative to full-precision counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill and quantize pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models to reduce memory and latency requirements. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model achieves 16.5x model footprint compression ratio with little performance drop relative to full-precision counterparts on multiple summarization and QA datasets. |
InfiAgent: An Infinite-Horizon Framework for General-Purpose Autonomous Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs break down on long-horizon tasks due to unbounded context growth and accumulated errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that externalizes persistent state into a file-centric state abstraction and keeps the agent’s reasoning context strictly bounded regardless of task duration. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on DeepResearch and an 80-paper literature review show that the proposed framework maintains higher long-horizon coverage than baseline models without task-specific fine-tuning. |
Triangular Architecture for Rare Language Translation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performs poor on low-resource pairs especially when Z is a rare language. |
| Approach: | They propose a triangular triangulation technique to leverage bilingual data to optimize the translation performance of low-resource pairs. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed architecture significantly improves translation quality of rare languages on MultiUN and IWSLT2012 datasets and even better when combining back-translation methods. |
Breaking Language Barriers in Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Insights and Observations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on developing powerful large language models for mathematical reasoning within monolingual languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translation to build powerful multilingual math reasoning models . they propose different training strategies to build xMR LLMs that outperform open-source LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source LLMs and surpasses ChatGPT in few-shot scenarios. |
Search-P1: Path-Centric Reward Shaping for Stable and Efficient Agentic RAG Training (2026.acl-industry)
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Tianle Xia, Ming Xu, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Wenwei Li, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, yet traditional singleround retrieval struggles with complex multistep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces path-centric reward shaping for agentic RAG training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods with an average accuracy gain of 7.7 points. |
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. |
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| 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 . |
Knowledge Graph Embedding with Atrous Convolution and Residual Learning (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods are complex and require time for training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an atrous convolution based knowledge graph embedding method that increases feature interactions by using atrous . they evaluate method on six benchmark datasets with different evaluation metrics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results on six benchmark datasets than state-of-the-art methods on most evaluation metrics. |
SPEAK: Spiking Neurons as an Entropy-Aware Tokenizer for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tokenizers fail to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness across NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a tokenizer that integrates spiking neurons to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer leverages historical tokenization results, but does not selectively leverage history based on contextual relevance. |
End-to-End Open-Domain Question Answering with BERTserini (N19-4)
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| Challenge: | a new open-domain question answering system integrates best practices from IR with a BERT-based reader to identify answers from a large corpus of Wikipedia articles. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end question answering system that integrates BERT with an IR reader. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on a standard benchmark test collection. |
FashionKLIP: Enhancing E-Commerce Image-Text Retrieval with Fashion Multi-Modal Conceptual Knowledge Graph (2023.acl-industry)
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Xiaodan Wang, Chengyu Wang, Lei Li, Zhixu Li, Ben Chen, Linbo Jin, Jun Huang, Yanghua Xiao, Ming Gao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in visual-language pre-trained (VLP) models have greatly improved cross-modal retrieval performance . however, the fine-grained interactions between objects from different modalities are far from well-established . e-commerce domain lacks sufficient training data and fine-granular cross-modulal knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-language pre-trained (VLP) image-text retrieval model that integrates cross-modal knowledge into the model to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on e-commerce image-text retrieval task by a large margin. |
InstructProtein: Aligning Human and Protein Language via Knowledge Instruction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising new approach to understanding biological sequences such as proteins. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM that can generate protein sequences in human and protein languages by pre-training an Lm on protein and natural language corpora and supervised instruction tuning to facilitate alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs on protein-text generation tasks by a large margin. |
Discover and Prove: An Open-source Agentic Framework for Hard Mode Automated Theorem Proving in Lean 4 (2026.acl-long)
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Chengwu Liu, Yichun Yin, Ye Yuan, Jiaxuan Xie, Botao Li, Siqi Li, Jianhao Shen, Yan Xu, Lifeng Shang, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solving mathematical problems fall into two broad categories: informal methods and formal methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLM natural-language reasoning to discover answers . they introduce Discover And Prove framework that rewrites Hard Mode statements into Easy Mode ones for existing ATP provers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to prove hard mode statements on ATP benchmarks. |
MT2: Towards a Multi-Task Machine Translation Model with Translation-Specific In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentence-level translation, document-level and terminology constrained translations are important in machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task machine translation model that integrates translation memory sentences . they propose 'in-context learning' paradigm that allows translation-specific context learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation memory, document-level translation, and document-constrained translation tasks. |
Structure-aware Fine-tuning for Code Pre-trained Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing CodePTMs are mainly structure-free and structurebased, but how to fine-tune them remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play fine-tuning method that incorporates structural knowledge into pre-trained code models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can benefit CodePTMs more with limited training data. |
Understanding the Thinking Process of Reasoning Models: A Perspective from Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ming Li, Nan Zhang, Chenrui Fan, Hong Jiao, Yanbin Fu, Sydney Peters, Qingshu Xu, Robert Lissitz, Tianyi Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate extensive chain-of-thought reasoning, but we lack a principled framework for understanding how these thoughts are structured. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to analyze the reasoning traces of Large Reasoning Models using Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a theoretically grounded methodology for interpreting LRM cognition and enables future work on more controllable and transparent reasoning systems. |
TAGS: A Test-Time Generalist–Specialist Framework with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning and Verification (2026.findings-acl)
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Jianghao Wu, Feilong Tang, Yulong Li, Ming Hu, Haochen Xue, Shoaib Jameel, Zongyuan Ge, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to improve medical question answering performance follow two directions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines a generalist with a domain-specific specialist without any model fine-tuning or parameter updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts GPT-4o accuracy by 13.8%, deepseek-R1 by 16.8%, and improves a vanilla 7B model from 14.1% to 23.9%. |
StructuralLM: Structural Pre-training for Form Understanding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models focus on text-only representation, neglecting cell-level layout information. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training approach to leverage cell and layout information from scanned documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in various downstream tasks . it uses 2Dposition embeddings to model word-level layout information . |
Legal Judgment Prediction based on Knowledge-enhanced Multi-Task and Multi-Label Text Classification (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is an essential task for legal AI, aiming at predicting judgments based on the facts of a case. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced approach that incorporates 'label-level knowledge' to enhance the representation of case facts for each task and 'task-level' knowledge to improve synergy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. |
ContraCLM: Contrastive Learning For Causal Language Model (2023.acl-long)
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Nihal Jain, Dejiao Zhang, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Zijian Wang, Feng Nan, Xiaopeng Li, Ming Tan, Ramesh Nallapati, Baishakhi Ray, Parminder Bhatia, Xiaofei Ma, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that causal language models lack expressiveness due to poor discrimination ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework that enhances discrimination of representations and bridges the gap with encoder-only models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves discrimination and source code generation capabilities on a variety of downstream tasks. |
Revisiting Cross-Lingual Summarization: A Corpus-based Study and A New Benchmark with Improved Annotation (2023.acl-long)
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Yulong Chen, Huajian Zhang, Yijie Zhou, Xuefeng Bai, Yueguan Wang, Ming Zhong, Jianhao Yan, Yafu Li, Judy Li, Xianchao Zhu, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing work on cross-lingual summarization (CLS) does not consider crosslingual sources for summarizing. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual conversation summarization benchmark that explicitly considers source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines on ConvSumX and 3 widely-used manual annotations. |
mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)
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Chenliang Li, Haiyang Xu, Junfeng Tian, Wei Wang, Ming Yan, Bin Bi, Jiabo Ye, He Chen, Guohai Xu, Zheng Cao, Ji Zhang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained vision-language models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language foundation model with cross-modal skip-connections that can be pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. |
Can LLMs Estimate Student Struggles? Human-AI Difficulty Alignment with Proficiency Simulation for Item Difficulty Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Accurate estimation of item (question or task) difficulty suffers from the cold start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale empirical analysis to examine human-AI Difficulty Alignment . they find that models struggle to simulate the capability limitations of students . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model size is not reliably helpful for human-AI alignment . high performance often impedes accurate difficulty estimation, the authors say . |
Pass-Tuning: Towards Structure-Aware Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Code Representation Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Code pre-trained models have been proposed and widely applied in the domain of code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a plug-and-play graph neural network module as a tunable prefix to exploit structural information of source code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits structural information of source code and could replace full fine-tuning. |
A Critical Analysis of Document Out-of-Distribution Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiuxiang Gu, Yifei Ming, Yi Zhou, Jason Kuen, Vlad Morariu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Nikolaos Barmpalios, Anqi Liu, Yixuan Li, Tong Sun, Ani Nenkova
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding models focus on single-modal inputs such as images or texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a spatial-aware adapter to adapt transformer-based language models to document domain to exploit multi-modal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the OOD detection performance compared to using a standard language model and to competitive baselines. |
CAT-probing: A Metric-based Approach to Interpret How Pre-trained Models for Programming Language Attend Code Structure (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing code pre-trained models fail to consider inherent characteristics of codes . Existing methods to interpret code pretrained model fail to take into account inherent characteristics . |
| Approach: | They propose a probing method to quantitatively interpret how CodePTMs attend code structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method denoises input code sequences and measures commonality between token-level attention scores and pair-wise distances between corresponding AST nodes. |
NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation (2023.acl-long)
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Shengming Yin, Chenfei Wu, Huan Yang, Jianfeng Wang, Xiaodong Wang, Minheng Ni, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Jianlong Fu, Ming Gong, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work generates long videos segment by segment sequentially, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Diffusion over Difference architecture for eXtremely Long video generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces the average inference time from 7.55min to 26s (94.26%) and generates high-quality long videos with both global and local coherence. |
A Training-free LLM-based Approach to General Chinese Character Error Correction (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chinese spelling correction (CSC) is a crucial task that aims to correct character errors in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that handles missing and redundant characters and an additional prompt-based large language model to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a high-quality dataset and a prompt-based large language model. |
What Happened in LLMs Layers when Trained for Fast vs. Slow Thinking: A Gradient Perspective (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2024) study shows that slow thinking can distinguish correct and irrelevant reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They investigate how fast vs. slow thinking affects layer-wise gradients in large language models . they find that slow thinking can distinguish correct and irrelevant reasoning paths . |
| Outcome: | The results show that slow thinking can distinguish correct and irrelevant reasoning paths. |
Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored using large language models to generate synthetic datasets . however, the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data is inconsistent across different classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate synthetic datasets to better understand factors that moderate the effectiveness of LLM-generated synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The results show that subjectivity is negatively associated with the performance of the model trained on synthetic data. |
QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jacob Dineen, Aswin Rrv, Qin Liu, Zhikun Xu, Xiao Ye, Ming Shen, Zhaonan Li, Shijie Lu, Chitta Baral, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | QA-LIGN decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . scalar rewards obscure which objectives drive the training signal . |
| Approach: | a new method decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . |
| Outcome: | QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . the results outperform DPO and GRPO with state-of-the-art reward models given equivalent training . |
From Scores to Preferences: Redefining Evaluation Paradigm for Speech Quality Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Cao, Changhao Jiang, Jiabao Zhuang, Jiajun Sun, Ming Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Hui Li, Shihan Dou, Yuran Wang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
| Approach: | They propose a MOS-aware reward model that incorporates MOS gap into reward function during reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
Detecting Customer Complaint Escalation with Recurrent Neural Networks and Manually-Engineered Features (N19-2)
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Wei Yang, Luchen Tan, Chunwei Lu, Anqi Cui, Han Li, Xi Chen, Kun Xiong, Muzi Wang, Ming Li, Jian Pei, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | e-commerce companies often have the option of escalating complaints by filing grievances with a government authority . this is detrimental to an ecommerce company, but this problem is challenging to solve by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and provides better recall and triage for specialized agents. |
TRIPS: Efficient Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Text-Relevant Image Patch Selection (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-and-language pre-training models suffer from long visual sequences . experimental results show that TRIPS gains a speedup of 40% over previous similar VLP models . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient vision-and-language pre-training model with text-relevant image patch selection, TRIPS, which reduces the visual sequence progressively with a text-guided patch-selection layer in the visual backbone for efficient training and inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can speed up training and inference by 40% over previous models. |
MaP: A Matrix-based Prediction Approach to Improve Span Extraction in Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict the start and end positions of answer spans generate two probability vectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extends the probability vector to a probability matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on SQuAD 1.1 and three other question answering benchmarks. |
How Does the Disclosure of AI Assistance Affect the Perceptions of Writing? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in generative AI technologies like large language models have boosted the incorporation of AI assistance in writing workflows. |
| Approach: | They conduct an experimental study to determine whether disclosure of AI assistance in the writing process would affect people's evaluation on the quality of the writing and ranking of different writings. |
| Outcome: | The disclosure of AI assistance decreases the average quality ratings for argumentative essays and creative stories, and increases the quality of the writings. |
Conjoin after Decompose: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Named Entity Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based NER models fail to detect entity boundaries, causing performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which consists of a BART encoder and a parabiotic decoder and propose ' boundary expansion strategy' to enhance the model's capability in entity type classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art models. |
When Gradient Descent Meets Derivative-Free Optimization: A Match Made in Black-Box Scenario (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are expensive and may not be open-sourced due to commercial considerations and potential risks of misuse. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce gradient descent into black-box tuning scenario . they propose a method which integrates gradient descent and derivative-free optimization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant performance gains over previous state-of-the-art methods. |
Unsolvable Problem Detection: Robust Understanding Evaluation for Large Multimodal Models (2025.acl-long)
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Atsuyuki Miyai, Jingkang Yang, Jingyang Zhang, Yifei Ming, Qing Yu, Go Irie, Yixuan Li, Hai Helen Li, Ziwei Liu, Kiyoharu Aizawa
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is widely used to assess the understanding capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a task to evaluate the robust understanding capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) they introduce a benchmark to assess performance across various ability dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can withhold answers when encountering unsolvable problems of MCQA, proving it understands the answer. |
Fine-tune BERT with Sparse Self-Attention Mechanism (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing sparse self-attention fine-tuning models have been used to improve sentiment analysis, question answering, and natural language inference tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse Self-Attention Fine-tuning model which integrates sparsity into self-attention mechanism to enhance the fine-tune performance of BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline models on sentiment analysis, question answering, and natural language inference tasks and is able to interpret the input better. |
The Digital Dunning-Kruger Effect: Decoupling Hallucinations via Geometric Hidden-state Observation for Semantic Truthfulness (2026.acl-long)
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Yueheng Mao, Min Yu, Gengwang Li, Jianguo Jiang, Gang Li, Meng Zhang, Zhen Xu, Weiqing Huang, Ming Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate overconfident yet factually incorrect hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box-based framework that captures stubborn hallucinations by integrating internal geometric dynamics with output probability distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms white-box methods and reduces computational overhead by over 90%. |
Discovering Representation Sprachbund For Multilingual Pre-Training (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models perform poorly on many languages and cross-lingual tasks due to typological differences and contradictions between some languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train multilingual pre-trained models to handle cross-lingual tasks in one model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on cross-lingual tasks compared to baselines on multiple languages . |
Profiling LLM’s Copyright Infringement Risks under Adversarial Persuasive Prompting (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in text generation but raise concerns regarding potential copyright infringement. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured persuasion workflow to analyze the influence of persuasive prompts on LLM outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method analyzes the influence of persuasive prompts on LLM outputs. |
PANDA: Preference Adaptation for Enhancing Domain-Specific Abilities of LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated considerable capabilities across various tasks . however, they often fall short of the performance achieved by domain-specific state-of-the-art models . |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free method to augment domain-specific abilities of Large language models . they leverage insights from the response preference of expert models to augment LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the expert model on 4 ScienceWorld tasks. |
Graph Neural News Recommendation with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative user and news representations fail to consider high-order connectivity underlying the user-news interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Graph Neural News Recommendation model with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement which can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph and disentangle latent preference factors by a neighborhood routing algorithm. |
InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training (2021.naacl-main)
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Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Nan Yang, Saksham Singhal, Wenhui Wang, Xia Song, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning cross-lingual representations are lacking in the field of NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves cross-lingual transferability on benchmarks. |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
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Ke Xu, Siyang Xiao, Ming Liang, Yichen Yu, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing parallel code localization agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate . specialized localization agent that operate as dedicated search components is needed to achieve high localization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel code localization system that reframes parallel code execution as a quality–efficiency co-optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches SOTA performance while being 93.6% faster. |
Open-Vocabulary Argument Role Prediction For Event Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on event extraction depend on pre-defined argument roles . despite great progress, many studies still rely on hand-crafted ontologies . |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework for customizing argument roles for event extraction . they propose a human-annotated event extraction dataset with 143 customized argument roles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on an event extraction dataset. |