Papers by Li Sun
REST: Stress Testing Large Reasoning Models by Asking Multiple Problems at Once (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) lack a narrow evaluation paradigm . a single-question evaluation setup suffers from two major limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose a stress-testing framework that exposes LRMs to multiple problems simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on reasoning benchmarks and state-of-the-art models. |
ThinkPersona: Thinking with Persona Graphs for Faithful Individualized Role-Playing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models are increasingly utilized as role-playing agents to simulate personas in interactive settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-playing agent trained to explicitly ground responses in individual identity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can generate persona-consistent responses in long-context dialogues while maintaining general instruction-following capabilities. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
From Speculation Detection to Trustworthy Relational Tuples in Information Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on speculation detection are defined at sentence level, but not all factual tuples extracted from a sentence are speculative. |
| Approach: | They propose to study speculations in OIE tuples and determine whether a tample is speculative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on the LSOIE dataset and provides labels for speculative tuples. |
Enhance Robustness of Language Models against Variation Attack through Graph Integration (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are used in many NLP applications but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks can lead to false or misleading information being distributed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate a Chinese character variation graph into pre-trained language models to increase their robustness against character variation attacks in Chinese content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing language models in combating adversarial attacks in Chinese content. |
Evolving Beyond Snapshots: Harmonizing Structure and Sequence via Entity State Tuning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) require predicting future facts by modeling structural dependencies within each snapshot and temporal evolution across snapshots. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-agnostic framework that provides persistent entity states . EST maintains a global state buffer and aligns structural evidence with sequential signals . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that EST improves diverse backbones and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
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. |
LLatrieval: LLM-Verified Retrieval for Verifiable Generation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with factual errors and often produce non-factual and fabricated content. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate text with supporting documents to enable the user to flexibly verify the answer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ALCE show that LLatrieval significantly outperforms extensive baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
AIDA-SEAT: Towards Reliable AI Doctor Assistant via State-Evaluation-Action Tree Enhanced LLMs in Online Hospital (2026.acl-industry)
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Lianxin Sun, Xiaoying Ying, Guangya Yu, Weiyan Zhang, Chenhao Guan, Hao He, Mingxi Shang, Jianhua Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on large language models or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) but these methods lack the explicit logical pathways essential for multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an AIDA-SEAT framework to provide reliable clinical decision-making support by transforming and modifying medical documents and doctors' state-evaluation-action trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.01% higher than current state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines across five departments, including common RAG-based methods. |
OIE@OIA: an Adaptable and Efficient Open Information Extraction Framework (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Different Open Information Extraction (OIE) tasks require different types of information. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt an OIE Graph to different OIE tasks with simple rules . they implement an end-to-end OIA generator and make it open-accessible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves new SOTA performance on three popular OIE tasks. |
Towards Storage-Efficient Visual Document Retrieval: An Empirical Study on Reducing Patch-Level Embeddings (2025.findings-acl)
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Yubo Ma, Jinsong Li, Yuhang Zang, Xiaobao Wu, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Cao, Haodong Duan, Jiaqi Wang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun
| Challenge: | Visualized Document Retrieval (VDR) uses large vision-language models to encode document pages into embeddings. |
| Approach: | They evaluate methods to reduce patch embeddings per page while minimizing performance degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maintains 98.2% of retrieval performance with only 11.8% of original memory usage and preserves 94.6% effectiveness at 2% memory footprint. |
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. |
Unleashing the Unseen: Harnessing Benign Datasets for Jailbreaking Large Language Models (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Despite significant efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and LLaMA 3 remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that can induce harmful behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature extraction method to extract sample-agnostic features from benign datasets in the form of adversarial suffixes and propose 'suffix maybe features' they show that adversarials generated from jailbreak attacks may contain meaningful features, i.e. appending the same suffix to different prompts results in responses exhibiting specific characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts sample-agnostic features from benign datasets and shows that they may contain meaningful features. |
RSMeM: Knowledge-Enhanced Memory Evolution for Remote Sensing Agents with Systematic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Bingxian Wu, Yu Zhang, Zonghao Guo, Tang Liu, Chen Qian, Yuxiang Lu, Xingbo Du, Yanghao Li, Yidan Zhang, Chi Chen, Ling Yao, Chenghu Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing RS agents built on general-purpose LLMs are domain-agnostic, resulting in brittle and error-prone workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced memory evolution mechanism that bootstraps RS agents with pre-distilled domain knowledge and iteratively integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the new model improves tool-use performance and accuracy . iteratively, iteration of the model integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution . |
Text AutoAugment: Learning Compositional Augmentation Policy for Text Classification (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Data augmentation aims to alleviate the overfitting issue in low-resource or class-imbalanced situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework called Text AutoAugment to enhance training samples . they use a Bayesian optimization algorithm to search for the best policy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on six benchmark datasets. |
Measuring the Effect of Influential Messages on Varying Personas (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | a new task estimates the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message . a first benchmark dataset is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed task . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to estimate the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task estimates the response a persona might have upon seeing a news message. |
Data Selection Curriculum for Abstractive Text Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive Text Summarization (ATS) models are commonly trained using large-scale data that is randomly shuffled. |
| Approach: | They propose a data selection curriculum scoring system that measures the learning difficulty of an ATS model and expected performance on an instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system surpasses baselines on CNN/DailyMail dataset, utilizing 20% of available instances. |
Mixture-of-Supernets: Improving Weight-Sharing Supernet Training with Architecture-Routed Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-acl)
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Ganesh Jawahar, Haichuan Yang, Yunyang Xiong, Zechun Liu, Dilin Wang, Fei Sun, Meng Li, Aasish Pappu, Barlas Oguz, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
| Challenge: | Neural architecture search (NAS) uses weight-sharing supernets to generate diverse subnetworks without retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a weight-sharing supernet that leverages mixture-of-experts to enhance supernet model expressiveness with minimal training overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in NAS for fast machine translation models, surpassing NAS-BERT and AutoDistil across various model sizes. |
Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that pre-trained language models have gained rich knowledge during pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to tune pre-trained language models with task-specific prompts to improve and stabilize prompttuning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on zero and few-shot text classification tasks show that prompt-tuning improves and stabilizes prompttun-ing. |
Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Consolidation for Effective Multilingual Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual video corpus moment retrieval methods are based on a two-stream structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual video corpus moment retrieval task that uses a two-stream structure to generate a query-visual similarity and a subtitle stream exploits the query-subtitle similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy on a large-scale video corpus moment retrieval dataset. |
TR-Rules: Rule-based Model for Link Forecasting on Temporal Knowledge Graph Considering Temporal Redundancy (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models suffer from temporal redundancy when leveraged under dynamic settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph extrapolation method which solves temporal redundancy issues by using cyclic rules to capture more information lurking in TKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures more information lurking in TKGs, and also mines and properly leverages acyclic rules, which has not been explored by existing models. |
ATLANTIS: Weak-to-Strong Learning via Importance Sampling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ATLANTIS is a new technique to improve the performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new technique to bridge the gap between the distribution of current datasets and the real-world data distribution by using importance sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can bring consistent and significant improvements to models’ performance and can be flexibly transferred among models with different structures. |
Coherent Comments Generation for Chinese Articles with a Graph-to-Sequence Model (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for article comment generation are too long and often result in general and irrelevant comments. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate comments with a graph-to-sequence model that models the input news as a topic interaction graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate coherent and informative comments compared with several strong baseline models. |
Contextualized Perturbation for Textual Adversarial Attack (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for generating adversarial examples are driven by local heuristic rules that are agnostic to the context, resulting in unnatural and ungrammatical outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a ContextuaLized AdversaRial Example generation model that generates fluent and grammatical outputs through a mask-then-infill procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in terms of attack success rate, textual similarity, fluency and grammaticality. |
Tab-Cleaner: Weakly Supervised Tabular Data Cleaning via Pre-training for E-commerce Catalog (2023.acl-industry)
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Kewei Cheng, Xian Li, Zhengyang Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Binxuan Huang, Yifan Ethan Xu, Xin Luna Dong, Yizhou Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for analyzing textual attributes in product catalogs are not effective on structured tabular data since they are trained on free-form natural language texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to handle error detection over tabular data following a pre-training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a real-world Amazon Product Catalog table by 16% over state-of-the-art methods and by 11% on PR AUC over attribute value validation task. |
An Empirical Study of Iterative Refinements for Non-autoregressive Translation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Iterative non-autoregressive (NAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive performance in varied generation tasks, surpassing the autoregressive Transformer. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to conduct efficient refinements without performance declines by using two simple metrics to identify potential problems existing in current refinement processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the autoregressive Transformer by around one BLEU on average. |
Mitigating Negative Interference in Multilingual Knowledge Editing through Null-Space Constraints (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing monolingual knowledge editing methods are expensive and require multiple models to maintain factual consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a null-space constrained framework to precisely isolate language-specific knowledge updates that can be mapped onto other languages’ subspaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can project parameter updates for each language onto the orthogonal complement of other languages’ subspaces while preserving multilingual generalization capabilities. |
LEGO: A Multi-agent Collaborative Framework with Role-playing and Iterative Feedback for Causality Explanation Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Causality explanation generation is a generative task that aims to explain why a given cause-effect pair is true using natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with role-playing and iterative feedback for causality explanation generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing frameworks on WIKIWHY and e-CARE datasets. |
CLaMP 3: Universal Music Information Retrieval Across Unaligned Modalities and Unseen Languages (2025.findings-acl)
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Shangda Wu, Guo Zhancheng, Ruibin Yuan, Junyan Jiang, SeungHeon Doh, Gus Xia, Juhan Nam, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Music information retrieval (MIR) is a field that aims at developing computational tools for processing, organizing, and accessing music data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns music modalities with multilingual text in a shared representation space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show CLaMP 3 performs state-of-the-art on multiple MIR tasks . it surpasses baselines and shows excellent generalization in multimodal and multilingual contexts . |
FunnelRAG: A Coarse-to-Fine Progressive Retrieval Paradigm for RAG (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted in Large Language Models, but is flat and has limitations such as a significant burden on one retriever and constant granularity limits the ceiling of retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive retrieval paradigm with coarse-to-fine granularity for RAG, termed FunnelRAG, so as to balance effectiveness and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves comparable retrieval performance while the time overhead is reduced by nearly 40%. |
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. |
Differential Privacy for Text Analytics via Natural Text Sanitization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text sanitization mechanisms provide low utility, as cursed by the high-dimensional text representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sanitized texts to samaritize training data . they propose to retrain and fine-tune the senitization-aware language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables privacypreserving natural language processing over the BERT language model with promising utility. |
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. |
Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Ruohong Zhang, Bowen Zhang, Yanghao Li, Haotian Zhang, Zhiqing Sun, Zhe Gan, Yinfei Yang, Ruoming Pang, Yiming Yang
| Challenge: | Current training recipes often rely on datasets dominated by short annotations with limited rationales, hindering the models' ability to generalize to tasks requiring comprehensive reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage post-training strategy that augments short answers with CoT reasoning generated by GPT-4o, enhancing the VLM's CoT capabilities through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy enhances the model's CoT capabilities through fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
RAGEval: Scenario Specific RAG Evaluation Dataset Generation Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Kunlun Zhu, Yifan Luo, Dingling Xu, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Shi Yu, Ruobing Wang, Shuo Wang, Yishan Li, Nan Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for RAG systems are lacking due to high costs of data construction and lack of factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate RAG systems in specialized scenarios . they propose three new metrics to evaluate LLM-generated responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms zero-shot and one-shot methods in terms of clarity, safety, conformity, and richness of generated samples. |
Rethinking Smoothness for Fast and Adaptable Entity Alignment Decoding (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs rely on entity and relation embeddings . Fig. 1 shows how to decode knowledge graph in under 6 seconds . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that only utilizes entity embeddings to decode knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reconstructs KG representation by maximizing smoothness of entity embeddings. |
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu, Jixuan Huang, Honglin Guo, Baodai Huang, Tinggang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Chenyu Liu, Jiajun Sun, Jiazheng Zhang, Dingwei Zhu, Xin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Yuming Yang, Junjie Ye, Minghe Gao, Dongrui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Guohao Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
Automated CAD Modeling Sequence Generation from Text Descriptions via Transformer-Based Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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JianXing Liao, Junyan Xu, Yatao Sun, Maowen Tang, Sicheng He, Jingxian Liao, Shui Yu, Yun Li, Xiaohong Guan
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional methods in both accuracy and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-guided framework that integrates large language models with computer-automated design to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods in accuracy and efficiency, providing a powerful tool for automating industrial workflows and generating complex CAD models from textual prompts. |
Chart-MRAG: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation on Chart-based Documents (2026.acl-long)
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null Ymyang, Jiang Zhong, Li Jin, Xiao Sun, Jingwang Huang, null Gaojinpeng, Qing Liu, Yang Bai, Jingyuan Zhang, Rui Jiang, Qin Lei, Kaiwen Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automatic framework for generating evaluation samples through multi-modal keypoint extraction, knowledge graph construction, and qa pair synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents. |
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. |
How Pre-trained Language Models Capture Factual Knowledge? A Causal-Inspired Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
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Shaobo Li, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Zhenhua Dong, Chengjie Sun, Bingquan Liu, Zhenzhou Ji, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models can fill in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts such as ”Dante was born in [MASK]” . |
| Approach: | They propose to quantitatively measure and evaluate the word-level patterns that PLMs depend on to generate the missing factual words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fills in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts by relying on effective clues or shortcut patterns. |
WaterBench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Watermarks for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have developed watermarking algorithms which restrict the generation process to leave an invisible trace for watermark detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking procedure that compares different methods to ensure consistent watermarking strength and jointly evaluates their generation and detection performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares 4 open-source watermarks on 2 LLMs under 2 watermarking strengths and observes the common struggles for current methods on maintaining the generation quality. |
Cross-Modal Commentator: Automatic Machine Commenting Based on Cross-Modal Information (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on commenting based on textual content is focused on other modalities, such as graphics and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to integrate multiple modalities into automatic commenting . they construct a large-scale dataset and propose 'co-attention' model to capture dependency between textual and visual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better performance than baselines. |
Contrastive Preference Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing discrepancies between token-level objective and overall sequence-level quality of a model are causing exposure bias and other issues in NMT. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive preference model that integrates an indicator function to fine-tune a pre-trained model in Neural Machine Translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the traditional Plackett-Luce model on three language pairs and also outperFORMs token-level and sequence-level baseline models. |
MemSearcher: Iterative Memory Integration for Search Agent via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Debing Zhang, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based search agents often concatenate the full interaction history into the context, producing long and noisy inputs and increasing compute cost and memory overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent framework that maintains a compact memory during multi-turn interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong history-concatenation (ReAct-style) baselines on a range of public datasets while maintaining nearly constant token counts across multi-turn interactions. |
Arctic-Text2SQL-R1: Simple Rewards, Strong Reasoning in Text-to-SQL (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhewei Yao, Guoheng Sun, Łukasz Borchmann, Zheyu Shen, Minghang Deng, Bohan Zhai, Hao Zhang, Ang Li, Yuxiong He
| Challenge: | Translating natural language questions into SQL is a core challenge in natural language understanding and human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework and model family to generate accurate, executable SQL using a lightweight reward signal based solely on execution correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous versions of 70B-class systems and achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy across six diverse Text2SQL benchmarks. |
Calibrating LLMs with Preference Optimization on Thought Trees for Generating Rationale in Science Question Scoring (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating rationales that justify scoring decisions are not accurate and often contain hallucinated information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework capable of generating more faithful rationales and matching performance with classifier-based scoring systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 38% improvement in QWK score compared to prior work . it can be used to match performance with classifier-based scoring systems . |
OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics (2025.findings-acl)
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Haote Yang, Xingjian Wei, Jiang Wu, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Győző Zijian Yang, Junyuan Gao, Jingchao Wang, Bowen Jiang, Shasha Wang, Nanjun Yu, Zihao Zhang, Shixin Hong, Hongwei Liu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Lijun Wu, Gábor Prószéky, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent significant strides toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). |
| Approach: | They introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. |
| Outcome: | The framework reveals intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of LLMs in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as an example. |
Is Word Segmentation Necessary for Deep Learning of Chinese Representations? (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Using word-based models, we compare word-oriented models with char-based ones . word-driven models are more vulnerable to data sparsity and the presence of out-of-vocabulary words . |
| Approach: | They benchmark word-based models with char-based model which does not involve word segmentation in four NLP benchmark tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms char-based models in four NLP benchmark tasks. |
Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
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Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
TritonBench: Benchmarking Large Language Model Capabilities for Generating Triton Operators (2025.findings-acl)
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Jianling Li, ShangZhan Li, Zhenye Gao, Qi Shi, Yuxuan Li, Zefan Wang, Jiacheng Huang, WangHaojie WangHaojie, Jianrong Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Triton is a high-level Python-like programming language for building efficient GPU kernels. |
| Approach: | They propose a TritonBench benchmark that provides a comprehensive evaluation of Tritonic operators on widely deployed GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that current LLMs struggle to generate efficient Triton operators on widely deployed GPUs aligned with industry applications. |
Few-Shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition Based on Mutlimodal Causal Intervention Graph (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal named entity recognition are limited due to limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a Few-shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition task to address these relation types by constructing a multimodal graph and a new multimodal causal intervention strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two multimodal named entity recognition datasets. |
Dependency Parsing as MRC-based Span-Span Prediction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dependency parsing address the issue that edges should be constructed at the text span/subtree level rather than word level. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs dependency trees by directly modeling span-span relations by modeling subtree-subtree relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method constructs dependency trees by modeling span-span relations . it can retrieve missing spans in the span proposal stage, which leads to higher recall . |
SLARD: A Chinese Superior Legal Article Retrieval Dataset (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results, a study finds . existing large language models lack prior knowledge of the content of superior legal articles . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese superior legal article retrieval dataset to find relevant articles with higher legal effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results. |
Unveiling the Key Factors for Distilling Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinghao Chen, Zhijing Sun, Guo Wenjin, Miaoran Zhang, Yanjun Chen, Yirong Sun, Hui Su, Yijie Pan, Dietrich Klakow, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought prompting. |
| Approach: | They examine the factors influencing CoT distillation including granularity, format and teacher model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on four teacher models and seven student models across seven mathematical and commonsense reasoning datasets. |
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evidence retrieval is used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) but in real-world applications, it often returns lengthy documents with redundant or irrelevant content, confusing downstream readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates evidence retrieval as a dynamic tree expansion process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five datasets. |
Multilingual Synopses of Movie Narratives: A Dataset for Vision-Language Story Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Story video-text alignment is a core task in computational story understanding, but its progress has been held back by the scarcity of manually annotated video- text correspondences and the heavy concentration on English narrations of Hollywood movies. |
| Approach: | They construct a multilingual video story dataset with 13,166 movie summary videos from 7 languages and manual annotations of fine-grained video-text correspondences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the SOTA methods on clip accuracy and Sentence IoU scores. |
LightningDOT: Pre-training Visual-Semantic Embeddings for Real-Time Image-Text Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models suffer from slow inference speed due to cross-modal attention in transformer architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach that accelerates the inference time of ITR by thousands of times . they extract pre-cached feature indexes offline and employ instant dot-product matching online . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models that consume 1000 times magnitude of computational hours using the same features. |
Universal Semantic Tagging for English and Mandarin Chinese (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating semantic annotations for different languages are attracting more and more interest. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend Universal Semantic Tagging to Mandarin Chinese and evaluate its performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme is only tested in four Indo–European languages . accuracies are 92.7% and 94.6% for Chinese and English respectively . |
Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Cognitive science and symbolic AI research suggest that event causality provides vital information for story understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for event causality identification that leads to material improvements in story understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves story understanding on the COPES dataset . it achieves 4.1-10.9% increase on Clip Accuracy and 4.2-13.5% increase on Sentence IoU . |
Towards Generalizable and Faithful Logic Reasoning over Natural Language via Resolution Refutation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in various natural language reasoning tasks, but struggle with performing first-order logic reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which introduces the paradigm of resolution refutation to solve first-order logic reasoning problems by extending reasoning rules and employing the principle of proof by contradiction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models while maintaining performance in simple scenarios. |
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. |
Coreferential Reasoning Learning for Language Representation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing language representation models cannot explicitly handle coreference, which is essential to the coherent understanding of the whole discourse. |
| Approach: | They propose a language representation model that captures coreferential relations in context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve significant improvements on downstream NLP tasks while maintaining comparable performance to baseline models on other common NLP task. |
On LLM-Based Scientific Inductive Reasoning Beyond Equations (2025.emnlp-main)
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Brian S. Lin, Jiaxin Yuan, Zihan Zhou, Shouli Wang, Shuo Wang, Cunliang Kong, Qi Shi, Yuxuan Li, Liner Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing research on inductive reasoning models emphasizes rule design without grounding them in specific scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to learn underlying patterns from limited examples in entirely new environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the inductive reasoning abilities of large language models in scientific settings. |
Packed Levitated Marker for Entity and Relation Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on entity and relation extraction ignores the interrelation between spans . a novel approach to extract better span representations from pre-trained languages is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a span representation approach that packs Levitated Markers to consider interrelation between spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines on six NER benchmarks and achieves a 4.1%-4.3% strict relation F1 improvement with higher speed over previous state-of-the-art models. |
1+1>2: Can Large Language Models Serve as Cross-Lingual Knowledge Aggregators? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been recognized for their impressive capabilities in natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the multilingual performance of Large Language Models by aggregating knowledge from diverse languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the performance disparity across languages and offers valuable insights for further exploration. |
Knowledge Inheritance for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
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Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Jing Yi, Jiajie Zhang, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Yusheng Su, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale pre-trained language models are mainly trained from scratch individually, ignoring that many well-taught PLMs are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training framework called knowledge inheritance and propose auxiliary supervision to efficiently learn larger PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to train large-scale language models with huge parameters and a large dataset can be adapted to domain adaptation and knowledge transfer. |
DocOIE: A Document-level Context-Aware Dataset for OpenIE (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions focus on extracting tuples at sentence level, but sentences exist as part of a document rather than standalone. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate 800 sentences from 80 documents to form a DocOIE dataset . they propose to use document-level context to improve OpenIE performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed OpenIE model improves performance by incorporating documentlevel context into the dataset. |
A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sub-Slot based task-oriented dialogs provide slot values segment by segment over multiple turns. |
| Approach: | They define a task called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) they build a Chinese dialog dataset SSD for boosting research on SSTOD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) it includes 40K dialogs and 500K utterances from Chinese names, phone numbers, ID numbers and license plate numbers . the dataset is well annotated with sub-slot values, slot values, dialog states and actions . |
IS-CoT: Breaking the Long-form Generation Collapse via Interleaved Structural Thinking (2026.acl-long)
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Zechen Sun, Yuyang Sun, Zecheng Tang, Juntao Li, Wenpeng Hu, Wenliang Chen, Zhunchen Luo, Guotong Geng, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models with reasoning capabilities suffer from a severe length collapse in open-ended writing . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that embeds a dynamic plan-write-reflect cycle into the generation process and train a model with interleaved reasoning traces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form benchmarks compared to other models on the same dataset. |
It’s Not Bragging If You Can Back It Up: Can LLMs Understand Braggings? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Bragging is a pervasive social-linguistic phenomenon that reflects complex human interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use bragging recognition, bragging explanation, and bragging generation tasks to examine bragging in large language models (LLMs) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can identify bragging intent, social appropriateness, and account for context sensitivity and provide new insights into how LLMs process bragging. |
ClusterAttn: KV Cache Compression under Intrinsic Attention Clustering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sparse attention apply the same pattern across different attention heads and inputs, but fail to capture the intrinsic attention clustering in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free sparse attention method that provides an efficient prompt cache compression scheme under intrinsic attention clustering for efficient LLM inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory usage by 10%–65% and increases throughput by 2.6–4.8 times with no accuracy loss. |
Warmup Generations: A Task-Agnostic Approach for Guiding Sequence-to-Sequence Learning with Unsupervised Initial State Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods focus on directly generating the target output without leveraging the benefits of intermediate steps or initial guidance. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic framework that enables models to generate intermediate "warmup" sequences that are iteratively refined to maximize their contribution to the final output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional supervised fine-tuning methods on translation, summarization, and multi-choice question answering tasks. |
LightFormer: Light-weight Transformer Using SVD-based Weight Transfer and Parameter Sharing (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Deploying Transformer networks on resource-constrained edge devices is challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank factorization initialized by SVD-based weight transfer and parameter sharing to compress and accelerate Transformer networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves similar performance to the baseline Transformer with 3.8 times and 1.8 times fewer parameters and achieves 2.3 times speedup and 1.5 times speed up respectively. |
Rethinking Text-to-SQL: Dynamic Multi-turn SQL Interaction for Real-world Database Exploration (2026.findings-acl)
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Linzhuang Sun, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liang, Ruitong Liu, Yuying Li, Qifeng Cai, Jingxuan Wei, Yuchen Wu, Bihui Yu, Xiangxiang Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Cui
| Challenge: | Structured Query Language (SQL) is the cornerstone for data-driven decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to rigorously evaluate Large Language Models within a dynamic interaction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to rigorously evaluate LLMs within a dynamic interaction framework. |
Beyond High-Entropy Exploration: Correctness-Aware Low-Entropy Segment-Based Advantage Shaping for Reasoning LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropies drive exploration and should receive stronger updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a correctness-aware reinforcement framework that performs fine-grained advantage modulation over low-entropy segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy over strong RL baselines across three backbones and six math benchmarks while maintaining high-entropy exploration. |
Beyond Surface Simplicity: Revealing Hidden Reasoning Attributes for Precise Commonsense Diagnosis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense question answering benchmarks often treat these aspects in isolation, resulting in evaluation accuracy differences of up to 24.8% across different difficulty levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reveals hidden reasoning attributes behind commonsense questions by leveraging the knowledge generated during the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals hidden reasoning attributes behind commonsense questions by leveraging the knowledge generated during the reasoning process. |
Towards Fine-grained Text Sentiment Transfer (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained text sentiment transfer only reverse the sentiment polarity of text, but they lack a robust and parallel learning algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-grained text sentiment transfer task that revises a sequence to satisfy a given sentiment intensity while preserving the original semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in automatic evaluation and human evaluation. |
Auto-Dialabel: Labeling Dialogue Data with Unsupervised Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialog datasets rely on human labeling, which is expensive, limited in size, and in low coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically cluster dialogue intents and slots . they collect context features, leverage an autoencoder for feature assembly, and adapt a dynamic hierarchical clustering method for intent and slot labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can promote human labeling cost to a great extent and achieve good intent clustering accuracy (84.1%) it also provides reasonable and instructive slot labeling results. |
Layer-wise Fusion with Modality Independence Modeling for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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Jun Sun, Shoukang Han, Yu-Ping Ruan, Xiaoning Zhang, Shu-Kai Zheng, Yulong Liu, Yuxin Huang, Taihao Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on developing models that exploit the unification of multiple modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to maintain modality independence by using a multi-modal transformer model that fuses all modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in multi-modal emotion recognition. |
Modeling Aspect Correlation for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Recurrent Inverse Learning Guidance (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn complex sentence with multiple aspects do not consider correlation between aspects to distinguish overlapped feature. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses aspect correlation to improve aspect correlation modeling . they use Recurrent Mechanism to improve the joint representation of aspects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is state-of-the-art in multiaspect scenarios. |
Enhancing Topic-to-Essay Generation with External Commonsense Knowledge (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for topic-to-essay generation are insufficient for generating novel, diverse, and topic-consistent paragraph-level text with a set of topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate commonsense from external knowledge base into the generator through dynamic memory mechanism and adversarial training to further improve topic-consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is more novel, diverse, and topic-consistent than existing methods in terms of both automatic and human evaluation. |
CofeNet: Context and Former-Label Enhanced Net for Complicated Quotation Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for quotation extraction use rule-based approaches and sequence labeling models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Context and Former-Label Enhanced Net for quotation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on complicated quotation extraction on two public datasets and one proprietary dataset. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
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Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field. |
ShieldLM: Empowering LLMs as Aligned, Customizable and Explainable Safety Detectors (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhexin Zhang, Yida Lu, Jingyuan Ma, Di Zhang, Rui Li, Pei Ke, Hao Sun, Lei Sha, Zhifang Sui, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing tools for detecting safety issues in LLMs are expensive and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based safety detector which annotates the safety of queries and provides explanations for its decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector outperforms baselines on four sets of query-response pairs and is effective as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs. |
Unifying Inference-Time Planning Language Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Prabhu Prakash Kagitha, Bo Sun, Ishan Desai, Andrew Zhu, Cassie Huang, Manling Li, Ziyang Li, Li Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are used to generate a formal representation of a plan in a planning language. |
| Approach: | They propose a unifying organizational framework based on intermediate representations to unify the inference-time LLM-as-formalizer methodology for classical planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework subsumes most existing work and proposes new ones that involve syntactically similar but high-resource intermediate languages. |
Anchoring-Guidance Fine-Tuning (AnGFT): Elevating Professional Response Quality in Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in various fields, notably in Role-Playing Conversational Agents (RPCAs). |
| Approach: | They propose an Anchoring-Guidance Fine-Tuning Framework to integrate relevant expert knowledge into RPCAs' training process to mitigate this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the RPCAs’ performance in handling role-specific professional queries while preserving their robust role-playing abilities. |
Improving Factuality with Explicit Working Memory (2025.acl-long)
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Mingda Chen, Yang Li, Karthik Padthe, Rulin Shao, Alicia Yi Sun, Luke Zettlemoyer, Gargi Ghosh, Wen-tau Yih
| Challenge: | Large language models can generate factually inaccurate content, a problem known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates a working memory that receives feedback from external resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on four fact-seeking datasets and increases the factuality metric by 2 to 6 points absolute. |
DMON: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Argument Structure Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Argument structure learning (ASL) involves examining relationships between sentences in unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-tower multi-scale cOnvolution neural network to analyze relationships between arguments in a text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on three domain argument mining datasets. |
LLaMA-E: Empowering E-commerce Authoring with Object-Interleaved Instruction Following (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | E-commerce authoring requires engaging, diverse, and targeted content . Large language models lack memorization of domain-specific features in e-commerce applications . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified e-commerce authoring models that address contextual preferences of customers, sellers, and platforms . they propose to integrate interleaved features presented by participating objects into the models to empower authoring applications with comprehensive scenario understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve state-of-the-art evaluation performance and exhibit the advantage in zero-shot practical applications. |
IntrAgent: An LLM Agent for Content-Grounded Information Retrieval through Literature Review (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Scientific research relies on accurate information retrieval from literature to support analytical decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that automates fine-grained information retrieval *faithfully* grounded in the provided content in response to research-driven queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 13.2% higher cross-domain accuracy than state-of-the-art RAG and research-agent baselines across seven backbone LLMs. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 . |
GTA: Supervised-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Text Classification with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning fine-tuning methods suffer from inefficient exploration and slow convergence . supervised fine- tuning methods have limited performance ceiling and less solid theoretical foundation . |
| Approach: | They propose a Guess-Think-Answer framework that combines supervised and supervised learning in a unified training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both standalone SFT and RL training models on three text classification benchmarks. |
AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling (2024.acl-long)
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Jun Zhan, Junqi Dai, Jiasheng Ye, Yunhua Zhou, Dong Zhang, Zhigeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Ruibin Yuan, Ge Zhang, Linyang Li, Hang Yan, Jie Fu, Tao Gui, Tianxiang Sun, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing language models that use discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities are limited to text generation and do not include multimodal output. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained stably without any alterations to existing models or training paradigms. |
SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents interact with the environment through extracted structured data, which can be notably lengthy (e.g., HTML) and occasionally inaccessible (e-book). |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance SeeClick with GUI grounding pre-training and devise a method to automate curation of GUI ground data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ScreenSpot, the first realistic GUI grounding benchmark that encompasses mobile, desktop, and web environments. |
FinKario: Event-Enhanced Automated Construction of Financial Knowledge Graph (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Equity research reports are crucial resources for investors, but lack professional analysis and the rapid evolution of market events outpaces their update cycles. |
| Approach: | They propose an event-Enhanced automated construction of financial knowledge graph (FinKario) that automatically integrates real-time company fundamentals and market events through prompt-driven extraction guided by professional institutional templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms financial LLMs by 18.81% and institutional strategies by 17.85% on average in backtesting. |
Sent2Span: Span Detection for PICO Extraction in the Biomedical Text without Span Annotations (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that PICO span detection results achieve much higher results for recall when compared to fully supervised methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract and then normalise PICO information from clinical trial articles and use crowdsourced sentence-level annotations to detect spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much higher results for recall when compared to fully supervised methods with PICO sentence detection at least as good as human annotations. |
Adversarial Training for Weakly Supervised Event Detection (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Detecting and identifying events is an important subtask of event extraction. |
| Approach: | They build a large event-related candidate set with good coverage and apply an adversarial training mechanism to iteratively identify informative instances from the candidate set and filter out those noisy ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two real-world datasets. |
KACC: A Multi-task Benchmark for Knowledge Abstraction, Concretization and Completion (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on partial aspects of knowledge abstraction, concretization, and completion (KACC). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified knowledge graph benchmark to improve existing benchmarks . they collect new datasets that contain larger concept graphs and cross-view links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves existing benchmarks in terms of dataset scale, task coverage, and difficulty. |
Reinforced Product Metadata Selection for Helpfulness Assessment of Customer Reviews (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a helpful review is largely concerned with the metadata of its target product . a selector learns from both the key-value product metadata and one of its reviews to take an action . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses product metadata to assess helpfulness of free-text reviews . they use two real-world datasets from amazon.com and Yelp.com to test the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve state-of-the-art performance with substantial improvements . it uses two real-world datasets from Amazon.com and Yelp.com . |
Continuous Speech Tokenizer in Text To Speech (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive modeling is a common method for processing language sequences and is effective in token prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-speech model based on continuous speech tokens and a continuous tokenizer for speech compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has better continuity and higher estimated Mean Opinion Scores (MoS) this is attributed to better information preservation rate across low and high frequencies in the frequency domain. |
Clear Up Confusion: Advancing Cross-Domain Few-Shot Relation Extraction through Relation-Aware Prompt Learning (2024.naacl-short)
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Ge Bai, Chenji Lu, Daichi Guo, Shilong Li, Ying Liu, Zhang Zhang, Guanting Dong, Ruifang Liu, Sun Yong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to few-shot Relation Extraction (RE) are prone to confusion when applying knowledge to a target domain with entirely new types of relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware prompt learning method with pre-training to clear confusion by decomposing relation types through an innovative label prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous sota methods and yields better results on cross-domain few-shot RE tasks. |
A Compliance Checking Framework Based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-based compliance checking methods are limited by their flexibility and lack structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based compliance checking framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation that integrates a static layer for storing factual knowledge, a dynamic layer for retrieval and reasoning, and an eventic graph to structurally describe regulatory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework consistently achieves state-of-the-art results across various scenarios surpassing baselines. |
CSMCIR: CoT-Enhanced Symmetric Alignment with Memory Bank for Composed Image Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhipeng Qian, Zihan Liang, Yufei Ma, Ben Chen, Huangyu Dai, Yiwei Ma, Jiayi Ji, Chenyi Lei, Han Li, Xiaoshuai Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to search for images using single-modality are limited by representation space fragmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified representation framework that achieves efficient query-target alignment . they introduce a multi-level Chain-of-Thought prompting strategy that guides MLMs to generate discriminative, semantically compatible captions for target images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves efficient query-target alignment through synergistic components. |
Personalized Large Language Model Assistant with Evolving Conditional Memory (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | With the rapid development of large language models, personalized large language model assistants like ChatGPT are limited in personalized services. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that could facilitate personalized large language model assistants with evolving conditional memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can preserve the knowledge and experience from the history dialogue with the user, which can be applied to future tailored responses that better align with the users' preferences. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion with Self-Supervised Adaptive Graph Alignment (2022.acl-long)
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Zijie Huang, Zheng Li, Haoming Jiang, Tianyu Cao, Hanqing Lu, Bing Yin, Karthik Subbian, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict missing facts in knowledge graphs are limited in language alignment . SS-AGA uses seed alignment as an edge type to fuses all KGs as a whole graph . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised adaptive graph alignment method that fuses all KGs as a whole graph by regarding alignment as 'a new edge type' they propose SS-AGA method that uses relation-aware attention weights to capture potential alignment pairs in a new paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) but language alignment is scarce and new alignment identification is noisy. |
PaperRegister: Boosting Flexible-grained Paper Search via Hierarchical Register Indexing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing paper search systems lack detailed information to support finer-grained queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a paper-based index that transforms abstract-based corpus index into hierarchical index tree and offline can support paper search queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves the SOTA performance and excels in fine-grained scenarios. |
FinMaster: A Holistic Benchmark for Full-Pipeline Financial Management with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Junzhe Jiang, Chang Yang, Aixin Cui, Sihan Jin, Yujing Zhang, Yilin Xiao, Ruiyu Wang, Bo Li, Xiao Huang, Danny Dongning Sun, Xinrun Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack domain-specific data, realistic workflow-level task design, and standardized workflow- level evaluation. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates large language models on financial management workflows . the global financial services market is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for large language models on financial management workflows reveals critical capability gaps . accuracy drops from 90% on basic tasks to 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning . the global financial services market reached $25.8 trillion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 . |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios. |
Automatic Poetry Generation with Mutual Reinforcement Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for automatic poetry generation are based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) MLE-based models tend to remember common patterns of the poetry corpus, which results in loss-evaluation mismatch. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the criteria and use them as explicit rewards to guide gradient update by reinforcement learning to motivate the model to pursue higher scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art model and improves on Chinese poetry. |
UniRE: A Unified Label Space for Entity Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing joint entity relation extraction models setup two separate label spaces for the two sub-tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to eliminate the different treatment on the two sub-tasks’ label spaces by applying a unified classifier to predict each cell’s label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive accuracy with the best extractor and is faster. |
OpenEval: Benchmarking Chinese LLMs across Capability, Alignment and Safety (2024.acl-demos)
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Chuang Liu, Linhao Yu, Jiaxuan Li, Renren Jin, Yufei Huang, Ling Shi, Junhui Zhang, Xinmeng Ji, Tingting Cui, Liutao Liutao, Jinwang Song, Hongying Zan, Sun Li, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | a rapid development of Chinese large language models poses big challenges for efficient LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation testbed that benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation platform OpenEval benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Sun, Xingyu Qian, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Chenghao Xiao, Long Li, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang, Tingyang Xu, Qifeng Bai, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Existing medical reasoning datasets are limited in scale and typically rely on incomplete data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ReasonMed to train medical reasoning models using a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The largest medical reasoning dataset to date surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%. |
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. |
Doc2Bot: Accessing Heterogeneous Documents via Conversational Bots (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Documents contain various structures that hinder the ability of machines to comprehend . user information needs are often underspecified, and the nature of heterogeneous documents poses challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for building machines that help users seek information via conversations . their dataset contains over 100,000 turns based on Chinese documents from five domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks are challenging and worthy of further research. |
E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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Jiangjie Chen, Rui Xu, Ziquan Fu, Wei Shi, Zhongqiao Li, Xinbo Zhang, Changzhi Sun, Lei Li, Yanghua Xiao, Hao Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose an explanation benchmark for analogical reasoning using a Civil Service exam . they use a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is very challenging for state-of-the-art models, it is found. |
Take a Break in the Middle: Investigating Subgoals towards Hierarchical Script Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work assumes that events are sequentially arranged in a script, while this assumption leads to linear generation that is far from sufficient for comprehensively acquiring the representation about how events are organized towards a task goal. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend goal-oriented Script Generation task from the perspective of cognitive theory by incorporating subgoals into hierarchical script generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a new dataset and human evaluation metrics. |
Automated Peer Reviewing in Paper SEA: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jianxiang Yu, Zichen Ding, Jiaqi Tan, Kangyang Luo, Zhenmin Weng, Chenghua Gong, Long Zeng, RenJing Cui, Chengcheng Han, Qiushi Sun, Zhiyong Wu, Yunshi Lan, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to review scientific papers are limited by their content or quality . SEA is a framework for automated scientific review, but its contents are generic or partial. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated scientific review using large language models . they propose to use a standardized review dataset to fine-tune an LLM to generate high-quality reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate high-quality reviews from standardized datasets and improves on the existing feedback mechanisms. |
Concept2Box: Joint Geometric Embeddings for Learning Two-View Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-acl)
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Zijie Huang, Daheng Wang, Binxuan Huang, Chenwei Zhang, Jingbo Shang, Yan Liang, Zhengyang Wang, Xian Li, Christos Faloutsos, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to embed knowledge graphs have ignored the fact that they contain two fundamentally different views: high-level ontology-view concepts and fine-grained instance-view entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel geometric representation that jointly embeds the two views of a KG using dual geometric representations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the public DBpedia KG and a newly-created industrial KG show the proposed method works well. |
TruthReader: Towards Trustworthy Document Assistant Chatbot with Reliable Attribution (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Document assistant chatbots are empowered with extensive capabilities by Large Language Models (LLMs) however, they suffer from hallucinations that are difficult to verify in the context of given documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a document assistant chatbot with reliable attribution that enables users to seek relevant information from given documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates answers with detailed inline citations, which can be attributed to the original document paragraphs, facilitating verification of factual consistency of the generated text. |
Synthetic Text Generation with Differential Privacy: A Simple and Practical Recipe (2023.acl-long)
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Xiang Yue, Huseyin Inan, Xuechen Li, Girish Kumar, Julia McAnallen, Hoda Shajari, Huan Sun, David Levitan, Robert Sim
| Challenge: | Privacy concerns have increased in data-driven products due to the tendency of machine learning models to memorize sensitive training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating useful synthetic text with a formal privacy guarantee by fine-tuning a pretrained generative language model with DP. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces synthetic text competitive in terms of utility with its non-private counterpart, while providing strong protection against potential privacy leakages. |
Navigating the Infinite Dynamic Web Space: Effective In-Context Exploration via Cognitive Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.eacl-long)
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Guozhao Mo, Yanjiang Liu, Yafei Shi, Jiawei Chen, Yang Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Bo Zheng, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic web navigation rely on greedy strategies or value estimation, struggle to achieve effective backtracking and are heavily dependent on proprietary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive multi-agent collaboration framework that enhances cyberspace exploration capability through In-Context Exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the proprietary model Claude-3.5 Sonnet on the WebArena benchmark. |
Instance-level Randomization: Toward More Stable LLM Evaluations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Evaluations of large language models suffer from instability, where small changes of random factors can lead to drastic fluctuations of scores and even model rankings. |
| Approach: | They propose an instance-level randomization method to reduce variance and improve fairness in evaluations by randomizing all factors that affect evaluation scores for every single instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces variance and improves fairness in model comparisons by using instance-level randomization. |
Preview, Attend and Review: Schema-Aware Curriculum Learning for Multi-Domain Dialogue State Tracking (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialog state tracking models neglect rich structural information in a dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose to use curriculum learning to leverage dialog state tracking data . they propose a model-agnostic framework that pre-trains a DST model with schema information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over a transformer-based and RNN-based model on WOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
An Embarrassingly Easy but Strong Baseline for Nested Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is the task to detect and classify entity spans in text. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Convolutional Neural Network to model spatial relations in NER . they use three commonly used nested NER datasets to compare their results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several proposed methods with the same pre-trained encoders in three nested NER datasets. |
Maximum Score Routing For Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks impose an expert capacity constraint to ensure GPU-friendly computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a routing paradigm that dynamically allocates input tokens to top-k experts through differentiable sparse transformations, enabling scalable model capacity while preserving computational efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves lower training losses and higher evaluation scores at equivalent FLOPs compared to constrained and unconstrained baselines. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| Challenge: | Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. |
Factual Consistency Evaluation for Text Summarization via Counterfactual Estimation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate factual consistency in text summarization neglect the intrinsic cause of factual inconsistency or rely on auxiliary tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate the factual consistency in text summarization via counterfactual estimation, which formulates the causal relationship between source document, generated summary, and the language prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric improves correlation with human judgments and convenience of usage on three public abstractive text summarization datasets. |
Memorizing is Not Enough: Deep Knowledge Injection Through Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Ruoxi Xu, Yunjie Ji, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Yingfei Sun, Xiangang Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection frameworks focus on knowledge memorization and retrieval, but static nature of large language models leads to outdated information as the real world evolves or when adapting to domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a four-tier knowledge injection framework that defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association. |
Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various NLP tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to accelerate training by disregarding computations for unimportant neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. |
IEvoAgent: Evolving Conversational Agent based on User Implicit Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize conversational agents often rely on explicit preference pairs and expert evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational agent framework that leverages the structured dependency between agent responses and user reactions to extract implicit feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on MT-Bench-101, WildBench, and FB-Bech, and shows that mining implicit feedback supports better multi-turn alignment under evolving user preferences. |
D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, WenJie Lu, Yuqi Wang, Jinyuan Li, Song Cao, He Cui, Tengfei Tian, Xuelin Zhang, Haotian Luo, Di Sun, Jun Fang, Hua Chai, Naiqiang Tan, Gang Pan
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to automate a wide spectrum of human tasks by emulating user interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative framework that leverages a fine-grained tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves SOTA among open-source general models on AndroidWorld and ScreenSpot-V2 . it leverages a fine-grained, app-specific tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process . |
Improving Attributed Text Generation of Large Language Models via Preference Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have been widely adopted in natural language processing, yet they produce unreliable content. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the attribution task as preference learning and introduce an automatic preference optimization framework that synthesizes attribution preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art citation F1 with higher answer quality than existing methods. |
Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training. |
Judge as A Judge: Improving the Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation through the Judge-Consistency of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Shuliang Liu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Cheng Yang, Zheni Zeng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Ge Yu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics cannot fairly evaluate the outputs of RAG models during training and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which prompts LLMs to generate different judgments based on various combinations of judgment dimensions and utilizes the judge-consistency to evaluate these judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more accurate evaluations for RAG models across different RAG model and datasets. |
Exploring Conditional Variational Mechanism to Pinyin Input Method for Addressing One-to-Many Mappings in Low-Resource Scenarios (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage conditional variational mechanism to simplify pinyin IME . they employ a strategy that facilitates interaction between pinyan and Chinese character information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of pinyin input method engine (IME) under low-resource conditions. |
Dissecting Human and LLM Preferences (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that human and Large Language Model preferences are important for model fine-tuning and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They dissect the preferences of human and 32 different Large Language Models to understand their quantitative composition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with 32 different large language models using real-world user-model conversations. |
What Are the Implications of Your Question? Non-Information Seeking Question-Type Identification in CNN Transcripts (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Non-information seeking questions capture subtle dynamics of human discourse . authors use dataset of over 1,500 information-seeking questions and NISQs as benchmark . |
| Approach: | They use a dataset of over 1,500 information-seeking question(ISQ) and NISQ to evaluate human and machine performance on classifying fine-grained NISq types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is the first publicly available for annotation of non-information seeking questions . it evaluates human and machine performance on classifying fine-grained questions based on models . |
Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhiyuan Zeng, Qipeng Guo, Zhaoye Fei, Zhangyue Yin, Yunhua Zhou, Linyang Li, Tianxiang Sun, Hang Yan, Dahua Lin, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Top-k router suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to unbalanced routing . some experts are overflow, where exceeding tokens are dropped, while others are empty, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k router that is unbalanced and uses a multi-gPU system to handle dropped tokens and padding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the top-1 router by 4.7% in terms of performance . the top-k router suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs . |
ConRPG: Paraphrase Generation using Contexts as Regularizer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for paraphrase generation lack reliable supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised paradigm for paraphrase generation based on contextual language models, candidate filtering and paraphrase model training based upon the selected candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing paraphrase generation methods in supervised and unsupervised setups. |
APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance. |
Beyond Human Labels: A Multi-Linguistic Auto-Generated Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Resume Parsing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Efficient resume parsing is critical for global hiring, yet the lack of dedicated benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on multilingual, structure-rich resumes hinders progress. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-in-the-loop pipeline to generate 2,500 synthetic resumes spanning 50 templates, 30 career fields, and 5 languages to evaluate large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform poorly on multilingual resumes and lack of standardized templates. |
SceneGenAgent: Precise Industrial Scene Generation with Coding Agent (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on scene generation focuses on generating 3D scenes from textual descriptions . however, the task of generating industrial scenes with LLMs is complex and requires precise measurements and positioning . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent for generating industrial scenes through C# code. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LLMs powered by SceneGenAgent exceed their original performance . the agent achieves 81.0% success rate in real-world industrial scene generation tasks . |
Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang, Beizhe Hu, Yifan Sun, Zhengjia Wang, Hengqi Zeng, Yang Li, Danding Wang, Juan Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB. |
GEAR: Graph-based Evidence Aggregating and Reasoning for Fact Verification (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract information from evidence are unable to grasp relational and logical information among the evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based evidence aggregating and reasoning framework to integrate evidence from multiple pieces of evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements on a large-scale benchmark dataset. |
To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)
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Rui Li, Xu Chen, Chaozhuo Li, Yanming Shen, Jianan Zhao, Yujing Wang, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier. |
Think Better, Not Longer: Token-Level Marginal Utility for Efficient Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate explicit Chain-of-Thought rationales, but often suffer from "overthinking". |
| Approach: | They propose a unified training framework to synthesize concise reasoning chains by identifying tokens that reduce the model’s likelihood of the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on deepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen backbones show that MUTO yields better efficiency-accuracy Pareto frontier. |
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chuhao Jin, Yutao Zhu, Lingzhen Kong, Shijie Li, Xiao Zhang, Ruihua Song, Xu Chen, Huan Chen, Yuchong Sun, Yu Chen, Jun Xu
| Challenge: | Persuasive dialogue models rely on utterance semantic matching and a key aspect has been ignored . compared with utterrance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model conversation semantics and strategies to match them using a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves state-of-the-art by 5% on a small and 37% on 'large' datasets. |
Rectified Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutao Sun, Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Yuqing Xia, Jian Chen, Yizhao Gao, Shijie Cao, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent sparse decoding methods improve efficiency but suffer from KV cache misalignment, resulting in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines block-sparse attention with periodic dense rectification to bound error accumulation and preserve alignment with the pretraining distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning, language modeling, and retrieval tasks show that ReSA achieves near-lossless generation quality with significantly improved efficiency. |
PunchBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from language shortcuts that allow models to rely on text, lack of question diversity, and narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal punchline comprehension benchmark to assess models' ability to comprehend punchlines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses in-context learning and chain-of-thought in punchline comprehension. |
AlgBench: To What Extent Do Large Reasoning Models Understand Algorithms? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for algorithmic reasoning fail to answer a critical question: do LRMs master algorithmic thinking? Empirical evaluations on leading LRM models reveal substantial performance heterogeneity, while models perform well on non-optimized tasks, accuracy drops sharply to around 49% on globally optimized algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm-centric benchmark that evaluates large reasoning models under an algorithmic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations on leading LRMs reveal substantial performance heterogeneity . models perform well on non-optimized tasks, accuracy drops sharply to around 49% . |
Semi-Supervised Lifelong Language Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Yinhe Zheng, Bowen Yu, Zhiliang Tian, Dongkyu Lee, Jian Sun, Yongbin Li, Nevin L. Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn languages only focus on supervised learning, and unlabeled data is underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised lifelong language learning setting where a model learns sequentially arriving language tasks with both labeled and unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on various language tasks and is effective and superior to existing models. |
Separating Context and Pattern: Learning Disentangled Sentence Representations for Low-Resource Extractive Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Context information is one of the key factors for extractive summarization, but other factors can be used to identify sentence importance. |
| Approach: | They propose to disentangle context and pattern factors for extractive summarization . they separate context and patterns for a better generalization ability in low-resource setting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used in the zero-shot setting or fine-tuned in the few-shot settings. |
RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Following (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing datasets mostly contribute to controlling role style and knowledge boundaries, but overlook role-following in instruction-follower scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following composite benchmark, named RoleMRC, which includes multi-turn dialogues between ideal roles and humans, including free chats or discussions upon given passages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves instruction-following without compromising general role-playing and reasoning capabilities. |
Guide the Many-to-One Assignment: Open Information Extraction via IoU-aware Optimal Transport (2023.acl-long)
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Kaiwen Wei, Yiran Yang, Li Jin, Xian Sun, Zequn Zhang, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiao Li, Linhao Zhang, Jintao Liu, Guo Zhi
| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract structured information from text without the limitations of close ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assign ground truth labels to parallelly generated tuple proposals . they leverage intersection-over-union (IoU) as assignment quality measurement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing rerankers perform poorly in complex ranking scenarios due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated reasoning-intensive training framework which generates high-quality training labels from training queries and passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines significantly and achieves much lower latency than the pointwise reranker. |
Modeling Complex Dialogue Mappings via Sentence Semantic Segmentation Guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to identify and avoid CDM to facilitate dialogue learning failed to solve the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sentence Semantic Segmentation guided Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder which can model and take advantage of the CDM data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can model and take advantages of the CDM data. |
RPC-Bench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Research Paper Comprehension (2026.acl-long)
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Yelin Chen, Fanjin Zhang, Suping Sun, Yunhe Pang, Yuanchun Wang, Jian Song, XiaoYan Li, Lei Hou, Shu Zhao, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for understanding research papers offer limited fine-grained evaluation at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale question-answering benchmark built from review–rebuttal exchanges of high-quality computer science papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on human-verified QA pairs and contains 15K questions. |
Musical Score Understanding Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models’ Comprehension of Complete Musical Scores (2026.acl-long)
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Congren Dai, Yue Yang, Krinos Li, Huichi Zhou, Shijie Liang, Zhang Bo, Enyang Liu, Ge Jin, Hongran An, Haosen Zhang, Peiyuan Jing, KinHei Lee, Zhenxuan Zhang, Xiaobing Li, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for musical score understanding are narrow in scope, focusing on isolated fragments, short excerpts, or multiple-choice formulations, rather than supporting holistic reasoning over entire scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for score-level musical understanding across textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The musical score understanding benchmark contains 1,800 question-answer pairs from works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and others. |
Mobile-Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-based Mobile Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Deng, Weikai Xu, Hongda Sun, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Liujianfeng Liujianfeng, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Rui Yan, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for LLM-based mobile agents are insufficient to evaluate their capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based mobile agents' planning capabilities . they expand UI operations by incorporating 103 APIs to accelerate task completion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 103 collected APIs and real user queries . the data is categorized into three distinct groups: SAST, SAMT, and MAMT . |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
A Middle Path for On-Premises LLM Deployment: Preserving Privacy Without Sacrificing Model Confidentiality (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Privacy-sensitive users require deploying large language models within their own infrastructure (on-premises) vulnerabilities in local environments can lead to unauthorized access and potential model theft. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that secures a few bottom layers in a secure environment . they propose metric to optimize trade-off between protection and customization flexibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on five models with 1.3B to 70B parameters. |
Evade the Trap of Mediocrity: Promoting Diversity and Novelty in Text Generation via Concentrating Attention (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that powerful Transformer architectures produce dull high-frequency phrases, severely hurting the diversity and novelty of generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to control the sharpness of the attention distribution by python code and use it to learn a Bayesian approximation of posterior attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves diversity and novelty while maintaining comparable quality on conditional and unconditional generation tasks. |
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)
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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan
| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
Enhancing Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation through Error-Aware Self-Reflection (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoyang Wu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Zhiyuan Liu, Minghe Yu, Cheng Yang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies treat SLMs as student models and use long-form Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) as supervision signals for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Existing research focuses on distilling reasoning ability from LLMs to enhance the mathematical reasoning performance of small-scale models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines teacher CoTs through an error-aware reflection process to enable the student model to construct more tailored teacher Cots. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ORION improves performance by more than 2% over all baselines. |
AttributionBench: How Hard is Automatic Attribution Evaluation? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | generative search engines enhance the reliability of large language model responses by providing cited evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate whether a large language model supports the generated responses or not . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that even a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 only achieves around 80% macro-F1 under a binary classification formulation. |
NPRF: A Neural Pseudo Relevance Feedback Framework for Ad-hoc Information Retrieval (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural IR models do not have a mechanism for treating expansion terms differently from the original query terms, making it difficult to combine them with existing PRF approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models by embedding different neural models as building blocks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two standard test collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in improving the performance of two state-of-the-art neural IR models. |
RSA-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Large Models in Real-World Acoustic Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Zhang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Shilinlu Yan, Jin Wang, Yaoqi Guo, Yitian Chen, Yalan Qin, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics that characterize authentic physical environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a robustness benchmark to stress-test Audio Large Models (ALLMs) using high-fidelity auditory scene simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on a wide range of tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech translation, and audio-based reasoning. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities. |
SOLAR: Serendipity Optimized Language Model Aligned for Recommendation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zichen Yuan, Lifan Sun, Yucen Zhuang, Yue Wang, Xinyuan Song, Tianqi Xu, Siyuan Li, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Sirui Hong, Jiaqi Chen, Joemon M. Jose, Yongxin Ni
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have shown strong potential in recommendation tasks . however, their application to serendipity-oriented recommendations remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptive instruction tuning method that aligns Large Language Models with recommendation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the domain gap between LLMs and recommendation tasks. |
Privacy Risks of Intermediate Representations: Attribute Inference in Distributed LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Distributed LLMs avoid raw inputs by transmitting intermediate hidden states, a practice widely assumed to preserve privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a distributed inference framework that transmits intermediate hidden states to avoid sending raw inputs by exposing sensitive user attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves Top-1 accuracy of 0.997 on CMS, 0.980 on Skytrax, and 0.986 on ECHR. |
CogEvolve: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Relational Reasoning in Semantic Extension (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a gap exists between human embodied logic and machine statistical learning . authors: models internalize statistical patterns or mimic static recognition . |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive linguistic benchmark to test whether large language models internalize statistical logic or not . they find that models function as "Super-Associators" expert at static recognition yet fail at causal reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails at causal reasoning and has a high-fidelity concept representation but lacks transformational operators essential for true relational understanding. |
PRDetect: Perturbation-Robust LLM-generated Text Detection Based on Syntax Tree (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods for detecting LLM-generated text have shown impressive performance, but in real-world scenarios, users often introduce perturbations to the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects syntactic trees that are minimally affected by perturbations and exhibit distinct differences between human-written and LLM-generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that it is significantly better against perturbations on the HC3 and GPT-3.5-mixed datasets and also has the shortest time expenditure. |
StreamMeCo: Long-Term Agent Memory Compression for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Junxi Wang, Te Sun, Jiayi Zhu, Junxian Li, Haowen Xu, Zichen Wen, Xuming Hu, Zhiyu li, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | StreamMeCo is an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework that evicts redundant memory nodes and introduces a time-decay memory retrieval mechanism to mitigate performance degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.87 speedup in memory retrieval while delivering an average accuracy improvement of 1.0% on three challenging benchmark datasets. |
LongAttn: Selecting Long-context Training Data via Token-level Attention (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis, which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level framework which quantifies long-range dependencies for LLMs by calculating token-based dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies long-range dependencies, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection. |
Prompting ChatGPT in MNER: Enhanced Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Refined Knowledge (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance textual entity prediction neglect the need for external knowledge or encounter high redundancy in the retrieved knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages ChatGPT as an implicit knowledge base and heuristically generates auxiliary knowledge for more efficient entity prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two classic datasets and exhibits a stronger robustness and generalization capability. |
Beyond Query Memorization: Large Language Model Routing with Query Decomposition and Historical Matching (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Lv, Jingbo Sun, Jianwei Lv, Chen Tang, Shaojie Zhang, Nayu Liu, Guoxin Yu, Zihao Li, Qichao Zhang, Dongbin Zhao, Ping Luo, Yue Yu
| Challenge: | Existing routing methods rely on direct mapping from queries to models based on surface-level features, leading to poor generalizability on out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new routing framework that recasts the routing task as a matching process of sifting similar queries from historical logs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves matching accuracy while lowering inference costs . it decouples linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements . |
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. |
Multi-Hop Open-Domain Question Answering over Structured and Unstructured Knowledge (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering systems only select one source to generate answer or conduct reasoning on structured information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Document-Entity Heterogeneous Graph Network to integrate different sources of information and conduct reasoning on heterogeneous information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on a HybirdQA dataset. |
SudokuFill: A Multi-Agent Progressive Filling Framework for Document-Level Scientific Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yang Li, Yajiao Wang, Yu Zhang, Yuanzhe Zhang, Maodi Hu, Mengting Zhang, Xi Sun, Hua Yue, Zhixiong Zhang
| Challenge: | Scientific information extraction (SciIE) is a key bottleneck for turning unstructured papers into computable knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a scientific information extraction framework that solves a Sudoku problem as a progressive filling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the GPT-4o model on a document-level adjuvant dataset. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks can manipulate the output of deep neural networks and possess high insidiousness. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual backdoor defense based on outlier word detection that can handle all the textual attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can handle all the textual backdoor attack situations. |
KS-Lottery: Finding Certified Lottery Tickets for Multilingual Transfer in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that a small subset of parameters is highly effective in fine-tuning . prior work shows that there are a few additional parameters corresponding to an intrinsic dimension in a well-trained Large Language Model. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify a small subset of LLM parameters highly effective in multilingual fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can find the certified winning tickets in the embedding layer, and fine-tuning on the found parameters is guaranteed to perform as well as full fine- tuning. |
AutoPKG: An Automated Framework for Dynamic E-commerce Product-Attribute Knowledge Graph Construction (2026.findings-acl)
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Pollawat Hongwimol, Haoning Shang, Chutong Wang, Zhichao Wan, Yi Gao, Yuanming Li, Lin Gui, Wenhao Sun, Cheng Yu
| Challenge: | Product attribute extraction in e-commerce is bottlenecked by ontologies that are inconsistent, incomplete, and costly to maintain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent Large Language Model framework that constructs a Product-attribute Knowledge Graph from multimodal product content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 0.953 WKE for product types, 0.724 WKEs for attribute keys, and 0.531 edge-level accuracy for value assertions after canonicalization on a large real-world marketplace catalog dataset from Lazada (Alibaba). |
How Far Can In-Context Alignment Go? Exploring the State of In-Context Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that In-Context Learning (ICA) can align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences without requiring parameter adjustments. |
| Approach: | They investigate the effectiveness of each part in enabling ICA to function effectively and examine how variants in these parts impact alignment performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can comprehend human instructions without parameter adjustments. |
ReFT: Reasoning with Reinforced Fine-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the generalization of large language models are using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) this approach does not show sufficient generalization ability because it only relies on the given CoT data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chain-of-Thought annotations to train Large Language Models using supervised fine-tuning to improve generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SFT on GSM8K, MathQA, and SVAMP datasets and shows a superior generalization ability. |
MisinfoBench: A Multi-Dimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Resilience to Misinformation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess factual accuracy in isolated queries but fail to evaluate LLMs’ resilience to misinformation in interactive settings. |
| Approach: | MisinfoBench is a benchmark designed to assess LLMs’ ability to discern, resist, and reject misinformation. |
| Outcome: | MisinfoBench assesses large language models’ ability to discern, resist, and reject misinformation in interactive settings. |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
LLMsPark: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Strategic Gaming Contexts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly important for their intelligence evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a game theory-based evaluation platform that measures LLMs’ decision-making strategies and social behaviors in classic game-theoretic settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system cross-evaluates 15 leading LLMs using leaderboard rankings and scoring mechanisms. |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency. |
Prototype Tuning: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (FSDLRE) aims to develop models capable of generalizing to new categories with minimal support examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-training approach to train Large Language Models to improve their ICL capabilities . they construct simulated episodes using relation types that do not overlap with test corpus . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline models on few-shot tasks. |
CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs fail to capture the nuances of human emotions, making their interactions seem impersonal or inadequate. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage automatic data generation framework to generate a Chinese dataset called CAPE . their data is a cognitive appraisal theory-based Emotional corpus that accounts for personal and situational factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate human-like responses in conversation with large language models. |
Agent-GWO: Collaborative Agents for Dynamic Prompt Optimization in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xudong Wang, Chaoning Zhang, Chenghao Li, Shuxu Chen, Qigan Sun, Jiaquan Zhang, Fachrina Dewi Puspitasari, Tae-Ho Kim, Jiwei Wei, Malu Zhang, Guoqing Wang, Yang Yang, Heng Tao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing automatic prompt optimization methods fail to optimize prompts and decoding hyperparameters within a unified framework to achieve stable global improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic prompt optimization framework for complex reasoning that unifies prompt templates and decodes hyperparameters as inheritable agent configurations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple mathematical and hybrid reasoning benchmarks show that Agent-GWO improves accuracy and stability over existing prompt optimization methods. |
MS-DETR: Natural Language Video Localization with Sampling Moment-Moment Interaction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Natural language video localization (NLVL) aims to localize a temporal moment from an untrimmed video that semantically corresponds to a given text query. |
| Approach: | They propose a proposal-based solution that generates proposals and selects the best matching proposal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution is faster than existing approaches on three public datasets. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
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Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
CogBench: Benchmarking Cognitive Alignment of Large Language Models in Educational Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) possess strong capabilities in language understanding and generation, as well as remarkable problem-solving abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the cognitive alignment capabilities of large language models in educational QA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation benchmark assesses the cognitive alignment capabilities of large language models in educational QA. |
Decoder Tuning: Efficient Language Understanding as Decoding (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt pre-trained models with parameters frozen are based on input-side adaptation, which requires thousands of API queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a model-as-a-service (MaaS) setting to provide only the inference APIs for users . they argue that input-side adaptation could be arduous due to the lack of gradient signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a 200x speed-up. |
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages. |
Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Court View Generation by Stimulating Internal Knowledge and Incorporating External Knowledge (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in language generation, but they encounter difficulties in the knowledge-intensive legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose court views into different parts, stimulate internal knowledge, and incorporate external information to unleash the power of LLMs in the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more accurate and reliable court views on two real-world datasets LAIC2021 and CJO2022. |
Training Language Model to Critique for Better Refinement (2025.findings-acl)
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Tianshu Yu, Chao Xiang, Mingchuan Yang, Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Cunxiang Wang, Jiale Cheng, Li Zhang, Xinyu Mu, Chuxiong Sun, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable evaluation and critique capabilities, providing insightful feedback and identifying flaws in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train critic models using refinement signals to generate feedback loops where critiques guide the model in refining its responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods and open-source models in terms of critique quality and refinement outcomes. |
An MRC Framework for Semantic Role Labeling (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on semantic role labels ignores the semantic connection between the two tasks . et al. (2010) defined two types of semantic roles: core roles and non-core roles. |
| Approach: | They propose to use machine reading comprehension to bridge the gap between these two tasks . they formalize predicate disambiguation as multiple-choice machine reading understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or comparable results to previous work . it uses the descriptions of candidate senses of a given predicate as options to select the correct sense . |
SongRewriter: A Chinese Song Rewriting System with Controllable Content and Rhyme Scheme (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of generating singable lyrics are based on a given melody, but there are two main challenges: generating the lyrics without knowing the melody and composing compatible melodies. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese lyric generation and editing system which rewrites lyrics of an existing song such that they are compatible with the rhythm of the existing melody. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on a randomized multi-level masking strategy and can generate new lyrics or edit fragments without prior knowledge of melody composition. |
Can Large Language Models Mine Interpretable Financial Factors More Effectively? A Neural-Symbolic Factor Mining Agent Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing factor mining models are inefficient and inefficient, resulting in a significant challenge to extract interpretable factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates the strengths of both neural and symbolic models for factor mining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the SOTA RankIC and RankICIR in predicting S&P 500 returns on real-world stock market data. |
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Guo Zhancheng, Xu Tan, Ge Zhang, Monan Zhou, Jing Chen, Xuefeng Mu, Yuejie Gao, Yuanliang Dong, Jiafeng Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) do not sufficiently address the design of complex engineering solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation system that leverages tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications. |
Logician and Orator: Learning from the Duality between Language and Knowledge in Open Domain (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results reveal dual structure between OIE and OIN tasks helps to build better OIE agents and OINE agents. |
| Approach: | They propose an Open-Domain Information Narration task as the reverse task of Open Information Extraction (OIE) they then propose an OIN task as an OIE agent and an OIR agent to implement the dual structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is the reverse task of Open Information Extraction (OIE) The proposed system is able to implement the dual structure with a reinforcement learning paradigm. |
SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on noise lack quantitative analysis and rely on intuition and empirical observation, thus failing to understand practical robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for quantifying the impact of noise intensity on LALM inputs by using a structured activation subspace derived from the model's internal representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing denoising methods and demonstrates that noise is perceived more accurately than raw audio features. |
MEIC-DT: Memory-Efficient Incremental Clustering for Long-Text Coreference Resolution with Dual-Threshold Constraints (2026.findings-acl)
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Kangyang Luo, Shuzheng Si, Yuzhuo Bai, Cheng Gao, Zhitong Wang, Cheng Huang, Yingli Shen, Yufeng Han, Wenhao Li, Cunliang Kong, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing supervised neural methods are underexplored for coreference resolution, especially in incremental clustering. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-threshold incremental clustering approach based on a lightweight Transformer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on common benchmarks show that MEIC-DT achieves highly competitive coreference performance under stringent memory constraints. |
Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Adapter (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for federated multilingual neural machine translation (Fed-MNMT) are limited in language resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that keeps PLMs frozen and only transfers lightweight adapter modules between clients. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces communication cost by over 98% while achieving similar or even better performance compared to baselines. |
Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies reveal a security threat to natural language processing models, called the Backdoor Attack. |
| Approach: | They propose to hack a model by modifying one single word embedding vector without sacrificing accuracy on clean samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more efficient and stealthier on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks. |
Pun-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Pun Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating pun sentences with word senses lack large-scale corpus for supervised learning . a pun is a clever and amusing use of a word with two meanings (word senses) |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial generative network for pun generation with a generator and a discriminator to distinguish between generated pun sentences and real sentences with specific word senses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network generates sentences that are more ambiguous and diverse in both automatic and human evaluation. |
T2I-ReasonBench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Informed Text-to-Image Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) generative models have demonstrated exceptional capability in synthesizing high-quality images from textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to explore the knowledge-driven reasoning capabilities of T2I models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the knowledge-driven reasoning capabilities of T2I models. |
Rethinking Document-level Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are weak enough for document-level translation . current models only translate sentences individually, resulting in poor document coherence . |
| Approach: | They propose to use the original Transformer model to test document-level neural machine translation . they find that the original transformer models can achieve strong results for document translation if trained properly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms sentence-level models on nine datasets and two sentence- level datasets across six languages. |
Reasoning in Flux: Enhancing Large Language Models Reasoning through Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Guidance (2024.acl-long)
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Zhangyue Yin, Qiushi Sun, Qipeng Guo, Zhiyuan Zeng, Xiaonan Li, Junqi Dai, Qinyuan Cheng, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments across various reasoning tasks demonstrate that UAG not only enhances the reasoning abilities of LLMs but consistently outperforms several strong baselines with minimal computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to guide LLMs onto an accurate and reliable trajectory by identifying and adjusting uncertainty signals within each step of the reasoning chain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines and outperformed strong models with minimal computational overhead. |
Value Compass Benchmarks: A Comprehensive, Generative and Self-Evolving Platform for LLMs’ Value Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)
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Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Shitong Duan, Jindong Wang, Yuzhuo Bai, Muhua Huang, Yang Ou, Scarlett Li, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Zhicheng Dou, Maosong Sun, James Evans, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Current evaluation methods for large language models face two key challenges: 1. evaluation validity and 2. Result interpretation reduce the pluralistic and incommensurable values to one-dimensional scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a platform for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) that provides a generative evaluation paradigm that automatically creates real-world test items co-evolving with ever-advancing LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform provides a framework for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) with fine-grained scores and case studies across 27 value dimensions for 33 leading LLMs, customized comparisons, and visualized analysis of LLM’s alignment with cultural values. |
Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompting to perform iterative refinement . they propose to combine the two methods to produce a more favorable outcome . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process . the results show that the prompt chaining method produces a more favorable outcome . |
Unlocking Black-Box Prompt Tuning Efficiency via Zeroth-Order Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prompt optimization is an important technique for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a zeroth-order approach which enables efficient prompt tuning solely via inference APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing black-box prompt tuning methods in terms of performance and convergence speed. |
P²Net: Parallel Pointer-based Network for Key Information Extraction with Complex Layouts (2025.findings-acl)
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Kaiwen Wei, Jie Yao, Jiang Zhong, Yangyang Kang, Jingyuan Zhang, Changlong Sun, Xin Zhang, Fengmao Lv, Li Jin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for key information extraction are based on a limited set of entity categories and fixed layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, human-annotated dataset for key information extraction . it is based on a human-annotated layout and 1,162 entity categories . they propose 'parallel pointer-based network' that leverages implicit relationships . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on widely-used datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining fast inference speeds. |
Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have used meta-learning to simulate the few-shot task . however, this sample-wise comparison may be severely disturbed by the various expressions in the same class. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning-based induction network to learn a generalized class-wise representation of each class in a support set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on a sentiment and dialogue intent datasets. |
Understanding the Language Model to Solve the Symbolic Multi-Step Reasoning Problem from the Perspective of Buffer Mechanism (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiwei Wang, Yunji Wang, Zhongwang Zhang, Zhangchen Zhou, Hui Jin, Tianyang Hu, Jiacheng Sun, Zhenguo Li, Yaoyu Zhang, Zhi-Qin John Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They constructed a symbolic multi-step reasoning task to investigate the information propagation mechanisms in Transformer models when solving the task through direct answering and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on 7 multi-step reasoning datasets, while introducing only 132 trainable parameters. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
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Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have a global audience, so alignment must extend to cultural resonance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs on three large language models. |
XFormParser: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Multilingual Semi-structured Form Parser (2025.coling-main)
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Xianfu Cheng, Hang Zhang, Jian Yang, Xiang Li, Weixiao Zhou, Fei Liu, Kui Wu, Xiangyuan Guan, Tao Sun, Xianjie Wu, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Document AI parsing semi-structured image form is a key information extraction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal and multilingual semi-structured FORM PARSER which integrates SER and relation extraction into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 1.79% improvement on RE tasks in multilingual and zero-shot settings. |
End-to-End Unsupervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Referring Expression Matching (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised vision-and-language pre-training methods take pre-extracted region-based visual features from external object detectors, which limits flexibility and reduces computational efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised vision-and-language pre-training task that predicts which patches contain an object referred to in natural language from the encoded visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and obtains state-of-the-art results on four vision-and-language tasks. |
Humans Need Context, What about Machines? Investigating Conversational Context in Abusive Language Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we examine the role of conversational context in abusive language detection . prior studies have ignored the contextual nature of abusive language, ignoring this aspect . toxicity, hate speech, harmful stereotypes are among the forms of harmful language . |
| Approach: | They propose to use conversational context to analyze abusive language detection using two methods . they use "abusive language" as an umbrella term to refer to various forms of harmful language . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on two datasets in English and a new dataset of French tweets annotated for hate speech and stereotypes. |
Can LMs Generalize to Future Data? An Empirical Analysis on Text Summarization (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization benchmarks overlap in time with pre-training corpora and fine-tuning datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal generalization benchmark that contains data samples from 2010 to 2022 to understand the temporal ability of abstractive summarization models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark analyzes data samples from 2010 to 2022 to understand the temporal generalization ability of abstractive summarization models. |
Leveraging Explicit Lexico-logical Alignments in Text-to-SQL Parsing (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL parsing aims to parse natural language questions into SQL queries . current attention-based approaches can only model alignments at the token level . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to leverage explicit lexico-logical alignments by identifying possible phrase-level alignments and injecting them as additional contexts into the parsing procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance by 3.4% on Squall. |
MeepleLM: A Virtual Playtester Simulating Diverse Subjective Experiences (2026.acl-long)
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Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Jianwen Sun, Yukang Feng, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Yifei Huang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have expanded the role of board games as creative co-designers . however, current systems lack the capacity to offer constructive critique grounded in the emergent user experience . |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model that internalizes persona-specific reasoning patterns to accurately simulate the subjective feedback of diverse player archetypes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms commercial models in community alignment and critique quality. |
MMEKG: Multi-modal Event Knowledge Graph towards Universal Representation across Modalities (2022.acl-demo)
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Yubo Ma, Zehao Wang, Mukai Li, Yixin Cao, Meiqi Chen, Xinze Li, Wenqi Sun, Kunquan Deng, Kun Wang, Aixin Sun, Jing Shao
| Challenge: | Recent Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store billions of world facts in a directed graph, but expression ability of such entity-centric KGs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale multi-modal event knowledge graph named MMEKG that unifies different modalities of knowledge via events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system unifies different modalities of knowledge via events, which complement and disambiguate each other. |
CodeContests-O: Powering LLMs via Feedback-Driven Iterative Test Case Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Jianfeng Cai, Jinhua Zhu, Ruopei Sun, Kangwen Zhao, Dongyun Xue, Mingxiao Feng, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to synthesize test cases using Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on the model’s intrinsic generation capabilities without external feedback, resulting in insufficiently diverse cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-driven iterative framework that leverages Large Language Models to generate initial test cases, execute them against known correct and incorrect solutions, and utilizes the failed results as feedback to guide the LLM in refining the test cases toward high fidelity and discriminability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing codecontests and codecontests+ models by 4.30% and 8.78%. |
VisAidMath: Benchmarking Visual-Aided Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Multi-modal Models lack a robust visual processing capability that is often masked by evaluation metrics that prioritize final-answer accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-layer evaluation framework that scrutinizes the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps on state-of-the-art models. |
kFolden: k-Fold Ensemble for Out-Of-Distribution Detection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies studying OOD detection in NLP often rely on external data to diversify model predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which mimics OOD detection behavior without external data . they take text classification as an archetype and compare them to existing datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can resolve in- and out-distribution examples in a natural way using existing datasets. |
MetaMem: Evolving Meta-Memory for Knowledge Utilization through Self-Reflective Symbolic Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory systems can support long-horizon human-LLM interactions by persisting historical interactions beyond limited context windows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments memory systems with a self-evolving meta-memory . meta-meso is iteratively distilling transferable knowledge utilization experiences . results show MetaMem outperforms strong baselines by over 3.6% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by over 3.6% in the long-horizon human-LLM interaction. |
Eliminating Biased Length Reliance of Direct Preference Optimization via Down-Sampled KL Divergence (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies attributed verbosity to biased labels, but new research shows that DPO can be effective in mitigating verboses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a method to reduce the amount of verbosity in LLMs by using a downsampling approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes the problem of verbosity by reducing the length reliance of the proposed algorithm. |
An Extensible Plug-and-Play Method for Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-aspect controllable text generation has attracted increasing attention . but the mutual interference of multiple prefixes limits its extensibility to training-time unseen combinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use trainable gates to normalize the intervention of prefixes to restrain the interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on constraint accuracy, text quality, and extensibility. |
NeuSym-RAG: Hybrid Neural Symbolic Retrieval with Multiview Structuring for PDF Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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Ruisheng Cao, Hanchong Zhang, Tiancheng Huang, Zhangyi Kang, Yuxin Zhang, Liangtai Sun, Hanqi Li, Yuxun Miao, Shuai Fan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation neglect PDF structure and layout . individual PDFs often exceed prompt limits and user queries may span multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural symbolic retrieval framework which combines both paradigms in an interactive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework organizes semi-structured PDF content into relational database and vectorstore . it defeats both RAG and structured baselines on three PDF-based QA datasets . |
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos . |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss. |
FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot domain adaptation and NOTA detection are two real-world challenges for few-shot relation classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate two aspects of few-shot relation classification models . they build upon the FewRel dataset by adding a new test set in a different domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can evaluate few-shot domain adaptation and few- shot none-of-the-above detection on a new domain and NOTA relation choice. |
Assist Non-native Viewers: Multimodal Cross-Lingual Summarization for How2 Videos (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal summarization methods are limited to monolingual videos . a proposed task aims to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs of videos . they propose fusion network that integrates multimodal and cross-linguistic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms existing methods on a reorganized How2 dataset on the reorganized How2 data set. |
Syntax-Aware Graph Attention Network for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to aspect-level sentiment classification focus on modeling the relationship between aspect words and their contexts with attention, and ignore the use of elaborate knowledge implicit in the context. |
| Approach: | They exploit syntactic awareness to the model by the graph attention network on the dependency tree structure and external pre-training knowledge by BERT language model, which helps to model the interaction between the context and aspect words better. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model the interaction between the context and aspect words better by using syntactic awareness and external pre-training knowledge. |
RAIDEN Benchmark: Evaluating Role-playing Conversational Agents with Measurement-Driven Custom Dialogues (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for RPCA evaluation are lacking for dialogues . authors introduce specialized judging LLM for automatic RPca evaluation . compelling role-playing agent is expected to lead to more in-depth conversations . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the effectiveness of RPCA interactions using dialogues . they introduce a specialized judging LLM tailored for automatic RPca evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark focuses on assessing particular dimensions at different stages of a conversation, facilitated through interactions conducted by annotators. |
Dynamic Memory Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that models can benefit from query-aware methods for few-shot text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic memory-based network for few-short text classification that uses static memory to adapt to unseen classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the miniRCV1 and ODIC datasets by 24% . Detailed analysis is performed to show how the proposed network achieves the new performance. |
Punctuation-Steered Representation Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PeFT) are limited due to their prohibitive size and computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fine-tunes punctuation representations to achieve performance improvements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance by altering the representation space alone . but it results in suboptimal performance due to the effects of the method on the output . |
Improving Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings from AI Feedback (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn sentence embeddings with rich semantics are limited due to the discrete nature of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI feedback to improve contrastive learning of sentence embeddings by combining human feedback and AI feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several semantic textual similarity and transfer learning tasks compared to other unsupervised and supervised contrastive learning methods. |
MdEval: Massively Multilingual Code Debugging (2026.findings-acl)
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Shukai Liu, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Jiajun Shi, He Zhu, Liran Wang, Jin Ke, Wei Zhang, Hualei Zhu, Shuyue Guo, Tao Sun, Jiaheng Liu, Yunlong Duan, Yu Hao, Liqun Yang, Guanglin Niu, Ge Zhang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are limited in terms of language diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual debugging benchmark that includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and introduces the debug instruction corpora MdEval-Instruct by injecting bugs into the correct multilingual queries and solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and covers the automated program repair task, bug localization task, and bug identification task. |
Longtriever: a Pre-trained Long Text Encoder for Dense Document Retrieval (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing PLMs are infeasible for processing long documents due to computational costs and incomprehensive document understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval model that models local semantics and global context semantics in a tightly-coupled manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overcomes three core challenges of long document retrieval: substantial computational cost, incomprehensive document understanding, and scarce annotations. |
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. |
FocusLLM: Precise Understanding of Long Context by Dynamic Condensing (2025.acl-long)
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Zhenyu Li, Yike Zhang, Tengyu Pan, Yutao Sun, Zhichao Duan, Junjie Fang, Rong Han, Zixuan Wang, Jianyong Wang
| Challenge: | Existing context condensing methods cannot accurately understand the full context, as there is a considerable amount of information loss in the condensed process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extend the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM by distilling crucial information from long sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extends the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM, allowing it to focus on relevant information from very long sequences. |
Noisy Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Self-Training for Speculative Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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Ruijie Wang, Baoyu Li, Yichen Lu, Dachun Sun, Jinning Li, Yuchen Yan, Shengzhong Liu, Hanghang Tong, Tarek Abdelzaher
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art methods fail in speculative reasoning task on knowledge graphs . state-of the-art approaches assume correctness of fact is determined by its presence in KG . |
| Approach: | They propose a speculative reasoning task on real-world knowledge graphs . they propose nPUGraph that estimates correctness of both collected and uncollected facts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the robustness of a label posterior-aware graph encoder against false positive links and identifies missing facts to provide high-quality grounds of reasoning. |
ClueAnchor: Clue-Anchored Knowledge Reasoning Exploration and Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Chen, Yukun Yan, Sen Mei, Wanxiang Che, Zhenghao Liu, Qi Shi, Xinze Li, Yuchun Fan, Pengcheng Huang, Qiushi Xiong, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing RAG systems often underutilize the retrieved documents, authors say . they fail to extract and integrate key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning . |
| Approach: | a new framework extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths . the framework optimizes the model by selecting the most appropriate reasoning path . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that ClueAnchor outperforms baseline RAG frameworks in completeness and robustness. |
EduBench: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Diverse Educational Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
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Bin Xu, Yu Bai, Huashan Sun, Yiguan Lin, Siming Liu, Xinyue Liang, Yaolin Li, Zhuangzhi Dong, Jingren Zhang, Yufan Deng, Xinyu Zou, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that focus on knowledge-intensive tasks do not reflect diverse educational scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates 9 major scenarios and 4,000 educational contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to state-of-the-art large models on the test set. |
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)
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Weilin Zhao, Tengyu Pan, Xu Han, Yudi Zhang, Sun Ao, Yuxiang Huang, Kaihuo Zhang, Weilun Zhao, Yuxuan Li, Jie Zhou, Hao Zhou, Jianyong Wang, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution. |
Introducing Semantics into Speech Encoders (2023.acl-long)
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Derek Xu, Shuyan Dong, Changhan Wang, Suyoun Kim, Zhaojiang Lin, Bing Liu, Akshat Shrivastava, Shang-Wen Li, Liang-Hsuan Tseng, Guan-Ting Lin, Alexei Baevski, Hung-yi Lee, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing self-supervised speech encoders contain primarily acoustic rather than semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic unsupervised way to incorporate semantic information from large language model (LLM) systems into self-supervised speech encoders without labeled audio transcriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves spoken language understanding (SLU) performance by over 5% on intent classification (IC), with modest gains in named entity resolution (NER) and slot filling (SF), and spoken question answering (SQA) score by over 22%. |
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)
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Xiao Cui, Yulei Qin, Yuting Gao, Enwei Zhang, Zihan Xu, Tong Wu, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods investigate divergence measures but fail to deliver effective supervision when few distribution overlap exists between teacher and student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation method that exploits the Sinkhorn distance to ensure a nuanced assessment of the disparity between teacher and student distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all kinds of LLMs with encoder-only, encoder decoder, and decoded architectures. |
Reorder and then Parse, Fast and Accurate Discontinuous Constituency Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Discontinuous constituency parsing is still being developed for its efficiency and accuracy are far behind its continuous counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform a discontinuous constituent tree into a pseudo-continuous one by reordering words in the sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transform a discontinuous constituent tree into a pseudo-continuous one by parsing and performing actions on three classical discontinuous constituency treebanks. |
Fast Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Fast kNN-MT uses the entire corpus as the datastore for the nearest neighbor search . knn-MT is two-orders slower than vanilla MT models . |
| Approach: | They propose a fast kNN-MT model that uses the entire corpus as the datastore for nearest neighbor search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is two-orders faster than kNN-MT and is only two times slower than the standard model. |
TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on video large language models lack a comprehensive feedback on temporal perception ability . current models cannot distinguish between different temporal aspects and are limited in task formats . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate temporal perception ability of video large language models . they construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that video large language models exhibit poor temporal perception ability. |
Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research lacks systematic analysis of the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection. |
| Approach: | They investigate the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection by integrating a domain-expert LLM into a VLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables transfer of domain-specific expertise from Large Language Models (LLMs) to VLMs without incurring additional training data requirements or significant computational overhead. |
Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Levina Li, Frank Wan, Xiao Liang, Sophia Yin, Yuchen Wu, Xinfeng Li, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks rely on static or rule-based topologies that fail to adapt to task requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that generates highly task-adaptive topologies . they validated the framework on multiple benchmarks and validated it on multiple platforms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks in task-adaptive communication topologies. |
READoc: A Unified Benchmark for Realistic Document Structured Extraction (2025.findings-acl)
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Zichao Li, Aizier Abulaiti, Yaojie Lu, Xuanang Chen, Jia Zheng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Document Structured Extraction (DSE) is a field of document structure analysis that aims to extract structured content from raw documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate document structured extraction systems by converting unstructured PDFs into semantically rich Markdown. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on 3,576 diverse and real-world documents from arXiv, GitHub, and Zenodo. |
InMind: Evaluating LLMs in Capturing and Applying Individual Human Reasoning Styles (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Qi Chen, Diping Song, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities across complex mathematical and scientific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess whether LLMs can capture and apply personalized reasoning styles in social deduction games. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs on the game Avalon and shows that they can capture and apply individualized reasoning styles. |
How Do LLMs Acquire New Knowledge? A Knowledge Circuits Perspective on Continual Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks . however, they struggle with knowledge updates due to dynamic nature of world knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose to identify computational subgraphs that facilitate knowledge storage and processing . they also identify a phase shift from formation to optimization in LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture factual knowledge from pre-training corpus and encapsulate it as extensive parametric knowledge. |
AutoReproduce: Automatic AI Experiment Reproduction with Paper Lineage (2026.acl-long)
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Xuanle Zhao, Zilin Sang, Yuxuan Li, Qi Shi, Weilun Zhao, Shuo Wang, Duzhen Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Efficient reproduction of research papers requires deep domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically mines implicit knowledge from the cited literature to reproduce experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines across all metrics and reproduces experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
PersonaTrace: Synthesizing Realistic Digital Footprints with LLM Agents (2026.eacl-industry)
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Minjia Wang, Yunfeng Wang, Xiao Ma, Dexin Lv, Qifan Guo, Lynn Zheng, Benliang Wang, Lei Wang, Jiannan Li, Yongwei Xing, Junzhe Xu, Zheng Sun
| Challenge: | Publicly available corpora cover only slivers of human activity, such as email threads, chat logs, purchase histories, sensor traces, and provide large-scale supervision for data-hungry machine-learning pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for synthesizing realistic digital footprints using large language model agents from a structured user profile. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse sequences of user events, producing corresponding digital artifacts such as emails, messages, calendar entries, reminders, etc. |
MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in pre-trained Transformers are a key component, storing various linguistic and factual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert a model into its MoE version with the same parameters and build expert routers to decide which experts will be used for each input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can use 10% to 30% of FFN parameters while maintaining over 95% original performance. |
Concept rather than Document: Context Compression via AMR-based Conceptual Entropy (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on lexical or token-level features that fragment semantic units and fail to capture conceptually essential content. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation to preserve essential information while filtering irrelevant text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms RAG and existing baselines while preserving essential information while filtering irrelevant text. |
Leveraging Word-Formation Knowledge for Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods have not explored word-formations in parataxis languages like Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage word-formation knowledge to enhance Chinese WSD by incorporating word-forms into sense disambiguation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines in Chinese word sense disambiguation (WSD) with word-formation knowledge, the results show. |
SGM: Sequence Generation Model for Multi-label Classification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods ignore the correlations between labels and different parts of the text can contribute differently for predicting different labels. |
| Approach: | They propose to view the multi-label classification task as a sequence generation problem and apply a decoder-based sequence generation model to solve it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform previous work by a substantial margin. |
Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods that ignore contextual knowledge fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual knowledge to update and correct LLMs' knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on a dataset that contains irrelevant questions. |
MedConQA: Medical Conversational Question Answering System based on Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical dialogue systems have the problems of weak scalability, insufficient knowledge, and poor controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical conversational question-answering system based on the knowledge graph to improve scalability and controllability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can conduct knowledge-grounded dialogues with users, using a Chinese medical knowledge graph and a large-scale dataset. |
Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract event records from text decompose complex structure prediction task into multiple subtasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can extract events from text . they propose unified event extraction, constrained decoding algorithm and curriculum learning algorithm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve competitive performance using record-level annotations in both supervised learning and transfer learning settings. |
Do Influence Functions Work on Large Language Models? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Influence functions are important for quantifying the impact of individual training data points on a model’s predictions. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic study to address a key question: do influence functions work on large language models? |
| Outcome: | The influence functions perform poorly across multiple tasks and are therefore unsuitable for large language models. |
Towards Objective Fine-tuning: How LLMs’ Prior Knowledge Causes Potential Poor Calibration? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled powerful domain-specific applications through supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognition-aware framework that applies targeted learning strategies according to the model’s prior knowledge to improve calibration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves calibration while maintaining performance, achieving an average 57% reduction in ECE compared to standard fine-tuning in Llama3-8B. |
Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing video large language models (LMMs) employ an impedance of thousands of frames to understand long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module integrated with VideoLLMs to facilitate efficient lengthy video perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module boosts the performance of open-source VideoLLMs and proprietary assistants on long-form video benchmarks. |
Community-Aware Assessment of Social Textual Engagement and Resonance: A Human-Centric Perspective on User-Generated Content Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Traditional Video Quality Assessment (VQA) focuses on aesthetic fidelity and technical distortions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task that evaluates whether a UGC item has positive community resonance based on multimodal attributes rather than visual quality alone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CASTER-Bench . it provides interpretable and empathetic reasoning paths that align with real community feedback. |
WordArt Designer: User-Driven Artistic Typography Synthesis using Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-industry)
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Jun-Yan He, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Chenyang Li, Jingdong Sun, Wangmeng Xiang, Xianhui Lin, Xiaoyang Kang, Zengke Jin, Yusen Hu, Bin Luo, Yifeng Geng, Xuansong Xie
| Challenge: | Existing typography solutions lack adaptability, creativity, and computational efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a user-driven framework for artistic typography synthesis based on the Large Language Model (LLM) the LLM Engine interprets user inputs and generates actionable prompts for the other modules, transforming abstract concepts into tangible designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates four key modules: the LLM Engine, SemTypo, StyTyPo, and TexTyPO. |
AgentGL: Towards Agentic Graph Learning with LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing agentic frameworks treat external information as unstructured text and fail to leverage topological dependencies inherent in real-world data. |
| Approach: | They propose to reframe graph learning as an interleaved process of topology-aware navigation and LLM-based inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong GraphLLMs and GraphRAG benchmarks in multiple LLM backbones. |
FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yingjia Wan, Haochen Tan, Xiao Zhu, Xinyu Zhou, Zhiwei Li, Qingsong Lv, Changxuan Sun, Jiaqi Zeng, Yi Xu, Jianqiao Lu, Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo
| Challenge: | Prior evaluation pipelines fail to evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs due to inefficiency and costly human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and strong evaluation pipeline that can evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs . they propose 'faStFact' to reduce cost of web searching and inference calling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation pipeline achieves highest alignment with human evaluation and efficiency among existing baselines. |
Subtopic-driven Multi-Document Summarization (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-document summarization model that assumes a set of documents to be summarized is on the same topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihao Ding, Siwen Luo, Yue Dai, Yanbei Jiang, Zechuan Li, Qiang Sun, Geoffrey Martin, Wei Liu, Yifan Peng
| Challenge: | Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) frameworks are a key area of research . early approaches to VRDU relied on manually crafted rules and domain-specific heuristics . conventional deep learning approaches do not integrate the diverse modalities in documents . |
| Approach: | They review recent advances in MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are scalable, reliable, and adaptable, the authors argue . their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
GLTW: Joint Improved Graph Transformer and LLM via Three-Word Language for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.findings-acl)
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Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Cheng Gao, Shuzheng Si, Zhu Liu, Yingli Shen, Zhitong Wang, Cunliang Kong, Wenhao Li, Yufei Huang, Ye Tian, Xuantang Xiong, Lei Han, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs lack the ability to integrate structural information into LLMs and output predictions deterministically. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which encodes structural information of KGs and merges it with LLMs to enhance KGC performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of KG Completion datasets on KGs by integrating structural information with LLMs. |
HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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An Wang, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Zhen Yang, Pinxue Zhao, Weidong Han, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Naoaki Okazaki, Cheng-zhong Xu
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts (MoE) models use homogeneous experts with diverse capacities, resulting in a lack of expert specialization and parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where experts differ in size and possess diverse capacities . they propose HMoE to encourage frequent activation of smaller experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms homogeneous homogenous MoE models on evaluation benchmarks and achieves lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters. |
OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu, Qiushi Sun, Zehao Li, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu, Fangzhi Xu, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Qingyun Li, Yu Qiao, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack visual-aware tutorial retrieval and historical visual context curation and pruning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an orchestrator and a Reflection-Memory Agent for robust automation. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across model scales. |
MoVa: Towards Generalizable Classification of Human Morals and Values (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziyu Chen, Junfei Sun, Chenxi Li, Tuan Dung Nguyen, Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie, Chenhao Tan, Lexing Xie
| Challenge: | Identifying human morals and values embedded in language is essential to empirical studies of communication. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generalizable classification of human morals and values . they recommend a classification strategy that scores all related concepts simultaneously . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fine-tuned models across domains and frameworks. |
SummaCoz: A Dataset for Improving the Interpretability of Factual Consistency Detection for Summarization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Summarization is an important application of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They integrate human-annotated and model-generated natural language explanations to elucidate how a summary deviates and becomes inconsistent with its source article. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides rationales for its judgments and improves its accuracy significantly. |
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)
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Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Zhe Zhao, Qi Ju, Xuefeng Yang, Rong Tian, Zhu Tao, Haoyan Liu, Han Guo, Xingyu Bai, Weiquan Mao, Yudong Li, Weigang Guo, Taiqiang Wu, Ningyuan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-linguistic similarity matching tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model using contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50% while the performance is only reduced by about 1%. |
ESPVR: Entity Spans Position Visual Regions for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for acquiring local visual information are limited . existing methods for named entity recognition are redundant or insufficient . |
| Approach: | They propose an Entity Spans Position Visual Regions module to obtain visual regions corresponding to entities in the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the SOTA on Twitter-2017 and competitive results on Twitter 2015 . previous efforts have yielded promising results, but they still fall short in selecting visual information. |
OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulation (2026.acl-long)
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Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Wenbo Li, Amirali Amini, Bo Sun, Yakov Bart, Weimin Lyu, Jiri Gesi, Tian Wang, Jing Huang, Yu Su, Upol Ehsan, Malihe Alikhani, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Lydia Chilton, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | evaluating LLMs' ability to mimic real user behavior remains an open challenge due to the lack of high-quality, publicly available datasets that capture both the observable actions and the internal reasoning of an actual user. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action collected from real human participants during online shopping sessions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first to evaluate how well current LLMs can accurately simulate the next web action of a specific user. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification with Document-level Sentiment Preference Modeling (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies consider Aspect Sentiment Classification (ASC) as an independent sentence-level classification problem aspect by aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cooperative Graph Attention Networks approach for cooperatively learning aspect-related sentence representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in document-level sentiment classification. |
Sparsifying Mamba (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing attempts to integrate sparsification with Mamba fail to leverage Mamba's internal structure for fine-grained sparsifying. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mamba to integrate sparsification into Mamba and propose a flexible and effective mechanism for parameter scalability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can independently achieve parameter scalability and has stronger performance. |
Compositional Syntactico-SemBanking for English as a Second or Foreign Language (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite the widespread use of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESFL), developing syntactico-semantic representations for it is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a Synchronous Hyperedge Replacement Grammar-based constructivist approach to address the challenges in ESFL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach bridges the gap between literal cues and intended meaning by using constructions as fundamental units. |
AdaLoGN: Adaptive Logic Graph Network for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and limitations for machine reading comprehension are insufficient for logical reasoning over text. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic approach which passes messages over a graph representing logical relations between text units to predict an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on ReClor and LogiQA. |
A Syntactically Constrained Bidirectional-Asynchronous Approach for Emotional Conversation Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural language models generate generic responses with poor logic and no emotion. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactically constrained bidirectional-asynchronous approach for emotional conversation generation using pre-generated emotion keywords and topic keywords. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the diversity of responses and boosts logic and emotion compared with baselines. |
Trigger is Not Sufficient: Exploiting Frame-aware Knowledge for Implicit Event Argument Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract event arguments focus on learning pair-wise information between arguments and the given trigger. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extract event-related arguments from a given event frame-level scope. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the RAMS dataset. |
Meta-Cognitive Analysis: Evaluating Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Datasets and Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have push NLP into a new era, moving away from traditional task-specific pre-train finetuning paradigm. |
| Approach: | They provide a comprehensive analysis of declarative and procedural knowledge for large language models and evaluate their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform better with both kinds of knowledge, but at different speeds. |
Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreak Attacks via Layer-specific Editing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing defense methods focus on detecting harmful prompts or reducing the likelihood of harmful responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-specific editing method to align LLMs to harmful prompts by supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models against jailbreak attacks while maintaining performance on benign prompts. |
AMR-TST: Abstract Meaning Representation-based Text Style Transfer (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic representation that can enhance natural language generation (NLG) by providing a logical semantic input. |
| Approach: | They propose an AMR-based text style transfer technique that converts source text to an AML graph and generates transferred text based on the AMR graph modified by a TST policy named style rewriting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results compared with baseline models in automatic and human evaluations. |
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. |
Mnemis: Dual-Route Retrieval on Hierarchical Graphs for Long-Term LLM Memory (2026.acl-long)
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Zihao Tang, Xin Yu, Ziyu Xiao, Zengxuan Wen, Zelin Li, Jiaxi Zhou, Hualei Wang, Haohua Wang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical messages are based on similarity-based mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates System-1 similarity search with a complementary System-2 mechanism, termed Global Selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on long-term memory benchmarks and 93.9 on LoCoMo and 91.6 on LongMemEval-S. |
Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning ability . despite the great success in performance, its working mechanism remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They explain language models as meta-optimizers and understand in-context learning as implicit finetuning . they find that Transformer attention has a dual form of gradient descent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict labels for unseen inputs without parameter updates . the proposed model outperforms smaller models with a single parameter update . |
On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing (2022.naacl-main)
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Yusheng Su, Xiaozhi Wang, Yujia Qin, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Kaiyue Wen, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but require much more training time than fine-timing. |
| Approach: | They empirically investigate the transferability of soft prompts across different downstream tasks and PLMs to determine what decides prompt transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but requires much more training time than fine-timing. |
MMLU-CF: A Contamination-free Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Qinzheng Sun, Shaoguang Mao, Xin Zhang, Ying Xin, Qiufeng Yin, Scarlett Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a contamination-free MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF which reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed MMLU-CF reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
DocSpiral: A Platform for Integrated Assistive Document Annotation through Human-in-the-Spiral (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Documents that are image-based are difficult to extract because of document variability. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-spiral assistive document annotation platform to extract structured data from document collections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation time by at least 41% while showing consistent performance gains over three iterations. |
CODIS: Benchmarking Context-dependent Visual Comprehension for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Fuwen Luo, Chi Chen, Zihao Wan, Zhaolu Kang, Qidong Yan, Yingjie Li, Xiaolong Wang, Siyu Wang, Ziyue Wang, Xiaoyue Mi, Peng Li, Ning Ma, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of models to use contextual information in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to extract and utilize contextual information to improve understanding of images. |
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. |
Does Acceleration Cause Hidden Instability in Vision Language Models? Uncovering Instance-Level Divergence Through a Large-Scale Empirical Study (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current acceleration evaluations focus on minimal overall performance degradation . however, accelerated models can exhibit significant changes in instance-level predictions . |
| Approach: | They investigate whether accelerated vision-Language Models can still give the same answers as before . they found that accelerated models changed original answers up to 20% of the time . |
| Outcome: | The results show that accelerated models changed their original answers up to 20% of the time. |
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Deming Ye, Chaojun Xiao, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection methods are not suitable for enhancing pre-trained language models with external knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play knowledge injection method where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a knowledge plugin. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of knowledge injection on knowledge-driven tasks while keeping model parameters frozen. |
Learning Logic Rules for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level relation extraction relied on implicitly powerful representations, which makes the model less transparent. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic model for document-level relation extraction by learning logic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in relation performance and logical consistency. |
PromptRank: Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction Using Prompt (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction methods struggle with document and candidate length discrepancies or fail to fully utilize the pre-trained language model without further fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction approach that uses a pre-trained language model to rank candidates based on document embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing keyphrase extraction approach on six benchmarks. |
Towards Fewer Hallucinations in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation via Augmentative and Contrastive Knowledge-Dialogue (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models face the hallucination problem . Existing models generate inappropriate knowledge and generate inconsistent responses . |
| Approach: | They propose an Augmentative and Contrastive Knowledge Dialogue Expansion Framework to enhance existing knowledge dialogue models by polarizing optimization objectives and weak knowledge generation ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework expands existing training sets and smooths the optimization objective that enables models to generate ground-truth with or without gold knowledge. |
Debiasing In-Context Learning by Instructing LLMs How to Follow Demonstrations (2024.findings-acl)
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Lvxue Li, Jiaqi Chen, Xinyu Lu, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose to de-biase demonstration bias in in-context learning by focusing on semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations and reducing the semantic hazard. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly improve performance on six datasets. |
Amanda: Adaptively Modality-Balanced Domain Adaptation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition is a multimodal learning method that can be used for data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Adaptively modality-balanced domain adaptation to balance the alignment of different modalities for multimodal emotion recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competing models on common datasets on multimodal emotion recognition. |
Accelerating BERT Inference for Sequence Labeling via Early-Exit (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing early-exit mechanisms are designed for sequence-level tasks, rather than sequence labeling. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend sentence-level early-exit to accelerate inference of PTMs . they propose a token-level mechanism that allows partial tokens to exit early at different layers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can save up to 66%75% inference cost with minimal performance degradation. |
Leveraging Language-based Representations for Better Solving Symbol-related Problems with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Symbols are used in abstract reasoning, chemical property prediction, and tabular question-answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that converts symbols to language-based representations to improve their accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of symbols in language-based models. |
Rethinking the Alignment of Psychotherapy Dialogue Generation with Motivational Interviewing Strategies (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is a client-centered counseling technique that encourages individuals to change behaviors through emphatic conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate more controllable dialogues with explainability by prompting LLMs to predict appropriate strategies as reasoning and utilizing these strategies to guide dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more controllable and explainable dialogues with a set of MI skills. |
Can LLM Safety Be Ensured by Constraining Parameter Regions? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are often assumed to contain parameter subsets whose modification directly influences safety behaviors. |
| Approach: | They evaluate four methods to identify parameter subsets with "safety regions" they find low overlap, but overlap drops when refinement is done using utility datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show low overlap and drop significantly when refined using utility datasets. |
Unraveling Feature Extraction Mechanisms in Neural Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks have become indispensable across a variety of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a theoretical approach based on Neural Tangent Kernels to investigate neural networks' internal mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to analyze language modeling tasks . it shows that the choice of activation function can affect feature extraction . |
ImCoref-CeS: An Improved Lightweight Pipeline for Coreference Resolution with LLM-based Checker-Splitter Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Shuzheng Si, Cheng Gao, Zhitong Wang, Yingli Shen, Wenhao Li, Zhu Liu, Yufeng Han, Jiayi Wu, Cunliang Kong, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing supervised neural methods for coreference resolution are underexplored . current methods rely on small language models, but their potential is underexploited . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an enhanced supervised model with LLM-based reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in coreference resolution. |
Open-Set Living Need Prediction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yizhou Sun, Chen Gao, Jiahuan Lei, Xinleishi Xinleishi, Hengliang Luo, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to living need prediction treat it as a closed-set classification problem, severely limiting their ability to capture diversity and complexity of living needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system leveraging large language models for unrestricted need prediction that leverages Maslow's hierarchy of needs to align predictions with human living needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms closed-set approaches on need-based life service recall by an average of 19.37% on real-world datasets. |
Continual Knowledge Distillation for Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current parallel corpora are not publicly accessible but trained models are more readily available. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to take advantage of existing translation models to improve one model of interest. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on Chinese-English and German-English datasets and is robust to malicious models. |
Mechanistic Insights into Deferred Semantic Drift in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) face a fundamental challenge with delayed disambiguation: how can a model update the meaning of an early, ambiguous token when clarifying context only appears later in the sequence? |
| Approach: | They propose a method to defer semantic re-evaluation to subsequent tokens in a process they call "Deferred Semantic Drift" they demonstrate this mechanism in metaphor comprehension and provide causal validation by steering model outputs towards literal or metaphorical meanings via targeted activation interventions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can update the meaning of an ambiguous word when clarifying context arrives only after it has been processed. |
RAP: Robustness-Aware Perturbations for Defending against Backdoor Attacks on NLP Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a serious threat to the safety of reusing deep neural networks (DNNs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient online defense mechanism based on robustness-aware perturbations to distinguish poisoned and clean samples to defend against backdoor attacks on natural language processing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better defending performance and lower computational costs than existing defense methods. |
Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for learning and deployment of neural dialogue models have been used for online chit-chat scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical inductive transfer framework to learn and deploy dialogue skills continually and efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable performance under deployment-friendly model capacity. |
Diversifying Neural Dialogue Generation via Negative Distillation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate generic responses are ignoring low-frequency but generic responses and bringing low- frequency but meaningless responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a negative training paradigm that reminds dialogue models not to generate high-frequency responses during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods in the generic response problem while minimizing low-frequency but meaningless responses. |
From Scaffolding to Assimilation: Progressive Structural Internalization for Format-Constrained Creative Text Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms rely on unreliable prompting or rigid constrained decoding strategies to achieve aesthetic unity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to embed external constraints into the model’s intrinsic intuition and use it to generate open-ended creative texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines in both strict constraint adherence and literary aesthetics. |
A Simple but Effective Pluggable Entity Lookup Table for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models cannot recall factual knowledge of entities exhibited in large-scale corpora, especially those rare entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a pluggable Entity Lookup Table (PELT) on demand by aggregating the entity’s output representations of multiple occurrences in the corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can transfer entity knowledge from out-of-domain corpora into PLMs with different architectures. |
CogniBench: A Legal-inspired Framework and Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Faithfulness of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on “factual statements” that rephrase source materials, but ignore “cognitive statements” . evaluating and detecting "faithfulness hallucinations" remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess faithfulness of cognitive statements and introduce a dataset to scale easily across models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses faithfulness of cognitive statements and scales easily across models. |
Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How? (2026.acl-long)
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Mengshi Chen, Yuxiang Sun, Tengchao Li, Jianwei Wang, Kai Wang, Xuemin Lin, Ying Zhang, Wenjie Zhang
| Challenge: | Tabular data preparation is a critical step in enhancing the usability of tabular data. |
| Approach: | They analyze how LMs can be combined with other components for different tabular data preparation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lack the ability to capture the relationships within tables and adapt to the tasks involved. |
FRoG: Evaluating Fuzzy Reasoning of Generalized Quantifiers in LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance reasoning do not consistently improve performance in tasks involving fuzzy logic. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for fuzzy reasoning that incorporates generalized quantifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing methods do not improve on FRoG . strong mathematical reasoning skills are not indicative of success, the authors show . |
VP-MEL: Visual Prompts Guided Multimodal Entity Linking (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal entity linking rely on mention words as retrieval cues, which limits their ability to effectively utilize information from both images and text. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual prompt-guided multimodal entity linking task for a text-image pair . they propose VPWiki to facilitate this task and a framework to capture latent information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on a VPWiki dataset. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
Chunks as Arms: Multi-Armed Bandit-Guided Sampling for Long-Context LLM Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Shaohua Duan, Pengcheng Huang, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Xiaoyuan Yi, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored fine-tuning Large Language Models with synthetic data to enhance their long-context capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a Multi-Armed Bandit rollout strategy to identify the most informative chunks from the given long context for sampling high-quality and diverse responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 4% improvement on long-context reasoning benchmarks on Llama and Qwen. |
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. |
Benchmarking Chinese Commonsense Reasoning of LLMs: From Chinese-Specifics to Reasoning-Memorization Correlations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, many benchmarks evaluate the commonsense reasoning of large language models (LLMs), but most are English-based, limiting non-English evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese commonsense reasoning to evaluate LLMs' commonsensing ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers both globally known and Chinese-specific commonsense reasoning abilities and can be used as a reference for future research. |
Fair-CCD: Mitigating Bias in Large Language Models for Tabular Classification Through Context-Contrastive Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work to mitigate fairness issues often employs subjective demonstration selection, leading to low controllability and limited stability across different models and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use in-context learning to insert social biases into large language models to create a structured and controllable representation of the relationship between sensitive attributes and predicted labels. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that Fair-CCD consistently improves fairness metrics without degrading task accuracy. |
Transferable Post-training via Inverse Value Learning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for post-training large datasets are requiring a large computational effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the changes at logits level during post-training using a separate neural network . they demonstrate that the value network can be seamlessly integrated with another pre-trained model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be integrated with another pre-trained model during inference, enabling similar capability enhancements. |
OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Yuxiang Zheng, Shichao Sun, Lin Qiu, Dongyu Ru, Cheng Jiayang, Xuefeng Li, Jifan Lin, Binjie Wang, Yun Luo, Renjie Pan, Yang Xu, Qingkai Min, Zizhao Zhang, Yiwen Wang, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Global scientific publications are growing annually by about 4%-5% (Pinedo et al., 2024). |
| Approach: | They introduce an AI-assisted platform that answers diverse questions from researchers using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) they develop various tools to understand queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine answers. |
| Outcome: | OpenResearcher is built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. |
LLM can Achieve Self-Regulation via Hyperparameter Aware Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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Siyin Wang, Shimin Li, Tianxiang Sun, Jinlan Fu, Qinyuan Cheng, Jiasheng Ye, Junjie Ye, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing decoding strategies and hyperparameters may not be optimal for each sample. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that auto-regulates decoding strategies and hyperparameters . this approach eliminates the need for extensive manual tuning, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model eliminates the need for extensive manual tuning, offering a more autonomous, self-regulate model behavior. |
LVPruning: An Effective yet Simple Language-Guided Vision Token Pruning Approach for Multi-modal Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) incur significant computational overhead due to the large number of vision tokens processed, limiting their practicality in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-guided vision token pruning method that can be integrated into existing MLLMs with minimal architectural changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces vision tokens by 90% and preserves model performance. |
Hidden Killer: Invisible Textual Backdoor Attacks with Syntactic Trigger (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for textual backdoor attacks insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, causing detection and blocking of backdoors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use syntactic structure as trigger in textual backdoor attacks . they propose to achieve similar attack performance but have higher invisibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves almost 100% success rate but has higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses than the insertion-based methods. |
Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that popular NLP models are vulnerable to both adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer . the authors propose to use text style to alter the style of a sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that popular models are vulnerable to both attacks based on text style transfer . the results show that the proposed methods perform better than baselines in many aspects . |
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward (2025.naacl-long)
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Ruohong Zhang, Liangke Gui, Zhiqing Sun, Yihao Feng, Keyang Xu, Yuanhan Zhang, Di Fu, Chunyuan Li, Alexander G Hauptmann, Yonatan Bisk, Yiming Yang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that direct preference optimization (DPO) can be effective in generalizing large language models, but its effectiveness in video domain remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes detailed video captions as a proxy of video content to enable language models to incorporate this information as supporting evidence for scoring video Question Answering (QA) predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it can be used to align language models with video content and improves performance on open-ended video QA tasks. |
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. |
Key Fact as Pivot: A Two-Stage Model for Low Resource Table-to-Text Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation use encoder-decoder framework, but lack of large parallel data is a problem for many domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to separate table-to-text generation into two stages: key fact prediction and surface realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 27.34 BLEU score with only 1,000 parallel data, while the baseline model only achieves 9.71 BLUE score. |
MONTROSE: LLM-driven Monte Carlo Tree Search Self-Refinement for Cross-Domain Rumor Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing feature alignment methods are susceptible to task interference during training. |
| Approach: | MONTROSE is a cross-domain rumor detection method that generates high-quality synthetic data for the target domain and a domain-sharpness-aware approach to train models with these synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MONTROSE improves in cross-domain rumor detection. |
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yifei Yu, Qian-Wen Zhang, Lingfeng Qiao, Di Yin, Fang Li, Jie Wang, Chen Zeng Xi, Suncong Zheng, Xiaolong Liang, Xing Sun
| Challenge: | Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs. |
Benchmarking Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models under Microscaling Floating Point Formats (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Microscaling Floating-Point (MXFP) is a low-precision format for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They conduct systematic evaluations of PTQ under Microscaling Floating-Point (MXFP) . they find that MXFP8 consistently achieves near-lossless performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves near-lossless performance while MXFP4 introduces substantial accuracy degradation and remains challenging. |
CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation is needed to address the problem of knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation that uses dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns to bridge the gap between academic benchmarks and spoken dialog scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contains 96,763 dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns totally. |
F-Eval: Asssessing Fundamental Abilities with Refined Evaluation Methods (2024.acl-long)
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Yu Sun, Keyuchen Keyuchen, Shujie Wang, Peiji Li, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been evaluated for their instruction-following capabilities but lack references to their fundamental abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual evaluation benchmark to evaluate the fundamental abilities of large language models including expression, commonsense and logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation methods show higher correlation coefficients and larger distinction than other evaluators. |
RESPROMPT: Residual Connection Prompting Advances Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Song Jiang, Zahra Shakeri, Aaron Chan, Maziar Sanjabi, Hamed Firooz, Yinglong Xia, Bugra Akyildiz, Yizhou Sun, Jinchao Li, Qifan Wang, Asli Celikyilmaz
| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) has impressively unlocked the reasoning potential of large language models (LLMs), but it falls short when tackling problems that require multiple reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a new prompting strategy that advances multi-step reasoning in LLMs by integrating necessary connections into prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy improves multi-step reasoning accuracy and improves reasoning accuracy across math, sequential, and commonsense domains. |
MoNET: Tackle State Momentum via Noise-Enhanced Training for Dialogue State Tracking (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that MoNET outperforms previous DST methods in alleviating state momentum issues and improving the anti-noise ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to use previous state of each turn in training data as input to learn to predict current state. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on multiWOZ datasets and shows that it can update and correct slot values and improve anti-noise ability. |
StableToolBench: Towards Stable Large-Scale Benchmarking on Tool Learning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhicheng Guo, Sijie Cheng, Hao Wang, Shihao Liang, Yujia Qin, Peng Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, prompting the exploration of tool learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual API server and stable evaluation system to assess the stability of large-scale real-time APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks demonstrate the stability of the proposed system and its caching system. |
SDGO: Self-Discrimination-Guided Optimization for Consistent Safety in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at various tasks but are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that induce harmful content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that leverages the model’s own discrimination capabilities as a reward signal to enhance generation safety through iterative self-improvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety by iterative self-improvement without additional annotated data or external models during training phase. |
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yudong Yang, Jimin Zhuang, Guangzhi Sun, Changli Tang, Yixuan Li, Peihan Li, Yifan Jiang, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on visual abilities, but audio is essential for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-centric video understanding benchmark to evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed video understanding benchmarks evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal models with a particular focus on auditory information. |
Towards Generalized Open Information Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) models are evaluated on in-domain test sets aside from the training corpus, which violates the initial task principle of domain-independence. |
| Approach: | They propose to generalize OpenIE over unseen target domains with different data distributions from source training domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats the previous methods in both in- and out-of-domain settings by 6.0% in F1 score absolutely. |
Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation in E-Commerce Platform with the Context of Historical Dialogue (2020.findings-emnlp)
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WeiSheng Zhang, Kaisong Song, Yangyang Kang, Zhongqing Wang, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu, Shoushan Li, Min Zhang, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing research on customer service dialogue generation generates generic responses from sellers . however, such cost prohibits small businesses, and multiturn dialogue generation is becoming more popular. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel and extensible dialogue generation method by leveraging sellers’ historical dialogue information to generate generic seller responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate high-quality responses that cater to specific sellers’ characteristics and exhibit consistent superiority over baselines on a real-world multi-turn customer service dialogue dataset. |
AutoAlign: Get Your LLM Aligned with Minimal Annotations (2025.acl-demo)
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Xinyu Lu, Dong Xu, Chunkang Zhang, Xinyan Guan, Junxiang Wang, Qingyu Zhang, Pengbo Wang, Yingzhi Mao, Hao Xiang, Xueru Wen, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Automated Alignment (ALM) is a set of algorithms designed to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intentions and values while minimizing manual intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit that integrates mainstream automated algorithms through a consistent interface and an accessible workflow supporting one-click execution for prompt synthesis and automatic alignment signal construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables easy reproduction of existing results through extensive benchmarks and facilitates the development of novel approaches via modular components. |
ENPMR-Bench: Benchmarking Proactive Memory Retrieval for Emotional Support Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research treats memory as a mechanism for factual retention, neglecting its role in shaping users’ emotional experiences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating Emotional Need-aware Proactive Memory Retrieval (ENPMR) it enables agents to infer users’ latent emotional needs and proactively retrieve appropriate memories to support empathetic interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes over 1,800 memory-augmented dialogues and defines structured mappings between emotional needs and supportive memory types. |
Training Verifier to Assessing Complex Real-World Tool-Use Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)
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Linzhuang Sun, Mingyang Chen, Hao Liang, Tianpeng Li, Zhou Yijie, Chenzheng Zhu, Tianyu Guo, Huanyao Zhang, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Fan Yang, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective AI agents often resort to synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for data quality control in tool-use scenarios . they construct a tool-verify dataset and release a benchmark to assess its performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on Tool-V-Bench and the previous APIGen-MT dataset. |
Recurrence Boosts Diversity! Revisiting Recurrent Latent Variable in Transformer-Based Variational AutoEncoder for Diverse Text Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) has been widely adopted in text generation due to its ability to learn flexible representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based recurrent VAE structure that imposes recurrence on segment-wise latent variables with arbitrarily separated text segments and constructs the posterior distribution with residual parameterization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed structure can deduce a non-zero lower bound of the KL term and enhance the entanglement of each segment and preceding latent variables, providing a theoretical guarantee of generation diversity. |
Heuristic-based Search Algorithm in Automatic Instruction-focused Prompt Optimization: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to remarkable achievements across a variety of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of automatic prompt optimization methods that explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. |
The Devil in Linear Transformer (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing linear transformers suffer from performance degradations on various tasks and corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a new linear attention that replaces scaling with a normalization to stabilize gradients and confine attention to neighbouring tokens in early layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vanilla transformers on the long-range arena benchmark while being significantly more space-time efficient. |
History Semantic Graph Enhanced Conversational KBQA with Temporal Information Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational KBQA assume the independence of utterances and model them in isolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a History Semantic Graph Enhanced KBQA model that models long-range semantic dependencies in conversation history while maintaining low computational cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on a widely used question type dataset. |
DetectiveNN: Imitating Human Emotional Reasoning with a Recall-Detect-Predict Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Emotion Recognition in conversations are insufficient in understanding the rich historical emotional context. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model that utilizes a "recall-detect-predict" framework to imitate human emotional reasoning by 'recalling' past interactions of a speaker to collect emotional cues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on three benchmark datasets and significantly outperformed existing methods. |
One vs. Many QA Matching with both Word-level and Sentence-level Attention Network (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on question answer matching focus on formal text . however, there exists many scenarios where the QA text is informal . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel QA matching approach using informal text from a product review site. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves word-level and sentence-level attentions for solving the noisy problem in the informal text. |
AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Sheng Yang, Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Zineng Zhou, Bin Zhu, Xiaodi Sun, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Anbang Hu, Yuan Fang, Yunsong Li, Junyan Chen, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing prompt engineering techniques are limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that iteratively develops a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best results across five tasks and demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to adoption of a minimal search strategy. |
From Experts to Bases: Orthogonal Subspace Mixture for Continual Multimodal Instruction Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing parameter-efficient approaches to multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning suffer from knowledge interference and inefficient capacity expansion, limiting scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal Continual instruction tuning that decomposes adaptation weights into a globally shared pool of orthonormal bases to capture task-invariant knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MoBLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art methods while maintaining superior parameter efficiency. |
Pre-training Language Models with Deterministic Factual Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that Pre-trained Language Models fail to capture factual knowledge robustly. |
| Approach: | They propose to let PLMs learn the deterministic relationship between context and masked content to improve their ability to capture factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve accuracy and consistency of factual knowledge capturing and boost performance of other knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Computational Linguistics for Brain Encoding and Decoding: Principles, Practices and Beyond (2024.acl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial will explore the potential of computational linguistics to help understand brain language processing. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will explore the principles and practices of using computational linguistics methods for brain encoding and decoding. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will explore the principles and practices of using computational linguistics methods for brain encoding and decoding. |
From "Aha Moments" to Controllable Thinking: Toward Meta-Cognitive Reasoning in LRMs via Decoupled Reasoning and Control (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive reasoning framework that decouples reasoning from control to enable independent optimization of control strategies. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model improves efficiency and accuracy across reasoning benchmarks. |
ResLoRA: Identity Residual Mapping in Low-Rank Adaption (2024.findings-acl)
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Shuhua Shi, Shaohan Huang, Minghui Song, Zhoujun Li, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method that adds residual paths during training and merges them together during inference to achieve better results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.5x faster convergence speed and improves performance by 14.3% on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks. |
LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset (2022.findings-acl)
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Feng Yao, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Cunchao Tu, Juanzi Li, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing legal event detection datasets only cover incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese legal event detection dataset . they use legal events as side information to promote downstream applications . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves 2.2 points precision in low-resource judgment prediction and 1.5 points precision for unsupervised case retrieval. |
Towards Verifiable Generation: A Benchmark for Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics and benchmarks to attribute large language models to structured knowledge are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution that improves upon three core concerns with conventional attributed LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves upon core concerns with conventional attributed LMs. |
Narrative Order Aware Story Generation via Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing storytelling systems suffer from insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative order aware framework to generate coherent stories with flashbacks . they propose 'bidirectional pretraining model with Optimal Transport Reward' to improve quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates coherent stories with flashbacks with a novel optimal transport reward. |
Manual Evaluation Matters: Reviewing Test Protocols of Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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Tianyu Gao, Xu Han, Yuzhuo Bai, Keyue Qiu, Zhiyu Xie, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Distantly supervised relation extraction (RE) has attracted much attention in the past few years . previous methods to evaluate models manually or directly on autolabeled data have produced inaccurate evaluations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use distant supervision to generate large-scale autolabeled data . they build manually-annotated test sets for two DS-RE datasets and evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces 53% wrong labels at the entity pair level in the popular NYT10 dataset. |
Adaption-of-Thought: Learning Question Difficulty Improves Large Language Models for Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods do not differentiate question difficulty when designing prompting methods for them. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive method to improve large language models for reasoning problems by measuring question difficulty and tailoring demonstration set construction and difficulty-adapted retrieval strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows an absolute improvement of up to 5.5% on arithmetic reasoning, 7.4% on symbolic reasoning, and 2.3% on commonsense reasoning. |
Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model in RLHF (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tackling length bias are limited by their complexity or lack of a linear length-reward relation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns and corrects underlying bias patterns by fitting a length-reward relationship into a reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves length-controlled win rate and reduces verbosity without compromising performance. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification Towards Question-Answering with Reinforced Bidirectional Attention Network (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on aspect sentiment classification focus on non-interactive reviews . a new task aims to predict sentiment polarities for specific aspects from interactive reviews based on annotated corpus . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to predict aspects from interactive QA style reviews using an annotated corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is compared with state-of-the-art methods against a high-quality corpus of data. |
ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Information (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ChineseBERT model incorporates glyph and pinyin information of Chinese characters into pretraining . proposed model achieves new performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a ChineseBERT model that incorporates glyph and pinyin information into pretraining . the glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a character, and the pinyink embeddment characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new performance boosts over baseline models with fewer training steps. |
HearSay Benchmark: Do Audio LLMs Leak What They Hear? (2026.findings-acl)
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Jin Wang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Weiliu Wang, Yitian Chen, Moayad Aloqaily, Xuehai Tang, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio large language models have led to their potential privacy implications unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to examine whether ALLMs leak user privacy through acoustic voiceprints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from over 22,000 real-world audio clips. |
Query and Output: Generating Words by Querying Distributed Word Representations for Paraphrase Generation (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models tend to memorize words instead of learning meaning of words . existing models tend not to model semantic information, resulting in incorrect sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model that generates words by querying distributed word representations . they evaluate model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks, namely text simplification and short abstractive summarization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on these benchmark datasets . |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
GraphQ IR: Unifying the Semantic Parsing of Graph Query Languages with One Intermediate Representation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural semantic parsing are limited by the semantic gap between natural and formal languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified intermediate representation for graph query languages, named GraphQ IR, which has a natural-language-like expression that bridges the semantic gap and formally defined syntax that maintains the graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representation can convert user queries into graphQ IR, which can later be losslessly compiled into various downstream graph query languages. |
Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as GPT-3 have shown strong in-context learning capabilities, which are appealing for domains such as biomedicine that feature high and diverse demands of language technologies but also high data annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare the few-shot performance of GPT-3 in-context learning with fine-tuning smaller (i.e., BERT-sized) PLMs on two representative biomedical information extraction tasks: named entity recognition and relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model underperforms on two representative biomedical information extraction tasks. |
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. |
Stop When Enough: Adaptive Early-Stopping for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that adaptively determines when to stop reasoning to mitigate overthinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by 20-55% while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to standard CoT prompting. |
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that lets agents learn shortcuts from their past tasks and use them for future task execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. |
Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li, Rongyi Sun, Qingyu Zhou, Shulin Huang, Ding Zhang, Li Yangning, Ruiyang Liu, Zhongli Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of existing CGEC models and the benchmark is excellent resource for further development. |
OpenOmni: A Collaborative Open Source Tool for Building Future-Ready Multimodal Conversational Agents (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | OpenOmni is an open-source, end-to-end pipeline benchmarking tool for multimodal conversational agents. |
| Approach: | They developed an open-source, end-to-end pipeline benchmarking tool to help solve these issues. |
| Outcome: | OpenOmni integrates speech-to-text, emotion detection, and large language models with the ability to integrate customized models. |
Probabilistic Graph Reasoning for Natural Proof Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reasoning over formal representations do not explicitly consider inter-dependency between answers and proofs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for joint answer prediction and proof generation using an induced graphical model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 10%-30% improvement on QA accuracy in evaluations under diverse conditions. |
V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Jiapeng Wang, YiFan Zhang, Zhuoma GongQue, Chong Sun, Yida Xu, Yadong Xue, Ye Tian, Zhimin Bao, Lan Yang, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Deciphering oracle bone scripts using AI technology is not an overnight task due to the evolution of written language over millennia. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) for interpreting Oracle Bone Script (OBS). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability. |
Rethinking Stealthiness of Backdoor Attack against NLP Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks are not stealthy to system deployers or users. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel backdoor attack method based on negative data augmentation and modifying word embeddings that is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
UniCoder: Scaling Code Large Language Model via Universal Code (2024.acl-long)
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Tao Sun, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Yuwei Yin, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation of algorithm steps using conventions of programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous prompting methods by a large margin . the proposed model is based on a dataset of natural-language questions and code solutions . |
LoRATK: LoRA Once, Backdoor Everywhere in the Share-and-Play Ecosystem (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hongyi Liu, Shaochen Zhong, Xintong Sun, Minghao Tian, Mohsen Hariri, Zirui Liu, Ruixiang Tang, Zhimeng Jiang, Jiayi Yuan, Yu-Neng Chuang, Li Li, Soo-Hyun Choi, Rui Chen, Vipin Chaudhary, Xia Hu
| Challenge: | distributing LLMs without a proven track record like ‘meta-llama‘ or ‘qwen‘ rarely gains community traction. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple, efficient, yet specific recipe for a backdoor LoRA to be injected into task-enhancing LoRAs and examine the mechanisms of such infections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model allows attackers to scale the distribution of compromised LoRAs with minimal effort by leveraging the rich pool of shared LoRA assets. |
LLM-as-a-Coauthor: Can Mixed Human-Written and Machine-Generated Text Be Detected? (2024.findings-naacl)
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Qihui Zhang, Chujie Gao, Dongping Chen, Yue Huang, Yixin Huang, Zhenyang Sun, Shilin Zhang, Weiye Li, Zhengyan Fu, Yao Wan, Lichao Sun
| Challenge: | Current research focuses on purely MGT detection without adequately addressing mixed scenarios including AI-revised Human-Written Text (HWT) and human-revealed MGT. |
| Approach: | They define mixtext, a form of mixed text involving both AI and human-generated content, and then use a MixSet dataset to assess their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detectors struggle to identify mixtext, particularly in dealing with subtle modifications and style adaptability. |
Syntactic Multi-view Learning for Open Information Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) aims to generate structured tuples from unstructured open-domain text. |
| Approach: | They propose to model constituency and dependency trees into word-level graphs and combine them with sentential semantic representations to extract relational tuples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates constituency and dependency trees into word-level graphs and enables neural OpenIE to learn from syntactic structures. |
STINMatch: Semi-Supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network for Financial Risk Detection via News Label Diffusion (2023.emnlp-main)
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Xurui Li, Yue Qin, Rui Zhu, Tianqianjin Lin, Yongming Fan, Yangyang Kang, Kaisong Song, Fubang Zhao, Changlong Sun, Haixu Tang, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Commercial news provides rich semantics and timely information for automated financial risk detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network, STINMatch, along with a news-enterprise knowledge graph to endorse the risk detection enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in terms of generalization and semantics and annotation. |
Stylistic Chinese Poetry Generation via Unsupervised Style Disentanglement (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Automatic Chinese poetry generation is one of the first attempts towards computer writing. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which requires no supervised style labeling to generate stylistic poems . they incorporate mutual information, a concept in information theory, into modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates stylistic poems without losing fluency and coherency . it is based on mutual information, a concept in information theory . |
Beyond Output Confidence: Epistemic-Aware Hallucination Detection with Answer-Level Signals (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations are confounded by epistemic uncertainty and cannot distinguish genuine uncertainty from fabricated content. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic metric that captures epistemic boundary deviations by measuring answer-level stability across multiple stochastic forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms strong uncertainty-only baselines and can be used to detect hallucinations on open-domain question answering, dialogue generation, and code completion. |
AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustrations via Reference-Guided Styling (2026.acl-demo)
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Zhen Lin, Qiujie Xie, Minjun Zhu, Shichen Li, QiYao Sun, Enhao Gu, Yiran Ding, Ke Sun, Fang Guo, Panzhong Lu, Zhiyuan Ning, Yixuan Weng, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing automated systems for scientific illustrations are limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific texts while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
PDAMeta: Meta-Learning Framework with Progressive Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text data augmentation methods can not ensure the diversity and quality of the generated data, which leads to sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework with progressive data augmentation for few-shot text classification using prompt-based data augmented by attention-based methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models and shows better robustness on four public few-shot text classification datasets. |
Enhancing Semantic Consistency of Large Language Models through Model Editing: An Interpretability-Oriented Approach (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models generate inconsistent and sometimes contradictory outputs when presented with a prompt that has equivalent semantics but is expressed differently from the original prompt. |
| Approach: | They propose to refine a Large Language Model (LLM) with prompt-output pairs with equivalent semantics to achieve semantic consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the semantic consistency and task performance of LLMs. |
Decoding the Multimodal Mind: Generalizable Brain-to-Text Translation via Multimodal Alignment and Adaptive Routing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to decoding language from the human brain rely on unimodal representations, neglecting the brain’s inherently multimodal processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models to align brain signals with a shared semantic space encompassing text, images, and audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an 8.48% improvement on the most commonly used benchmark on fMRI datasets with textual, visual, and auditory stimuli. |
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models . |
Paraphrase Generation as Unsupervised Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for paraphrase generation rely on labeled datasets or are limited in narrow domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for paraphrase generation by treating the task as unsupervised machine translation based on pairs of unlabeled monolingual sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can generate paraphrases on a large unlabeled monolingual corpus without relying on bilingual sentence pairs. |
BertGCN: Transductive Text Classification by Combining GNN and BERT (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text classification is a core task in natural language processing (NLP) Graph neural networks (GNNs) serve as an effective approach for transductive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that combines large scale pretraining and transductive learning for text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance on a wide range of datasets. |
Generating Relevant and Coherent Dialogue Responses using Self-Separated Conditional Variational AutoEncoders (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Conditional Variational AutoEncoders (CVAE) can enhance the diversity and informativeness of responses in open-domain dialogue generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Conditional Variational AutoEncoder (CVAE) that regularizes latent variables and introduces group information to regularize them. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model can significantly boost responses in well-established open-domain dialogue datasets. |
OS-Sentinel: Towards Safety-Enhanced Mobile GUI Agents via Hybrid Validation in Realistic Workflows (2026.acl-long)
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Qiushi Sun, Mukai Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Zhihui Xie, Fangzhi Xu, Zhangyue Yin, Kanzhi Cheng, Zehao Li, Zichen Ding, Qi Liu, Zhiyong Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ben Kao, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting unsafe mobile GUI agents are underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile agent safety detection framework that integrates a formal verifier and a VLM-based contextual judge to detect system-level violations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. |
Enhancing Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models through Self-Distillation from Resource-Rich Languages (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Contemporary large language models (LLMs) are pre-trained on multilingual corpora, but their performance lags behind in most languages compared to a few resource-rich languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the internal capabilities of large language models on resource-rich languages to enhance multilingual performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual performance while minimizing impact on original performance in resource-rich languages. |
Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a promising capability for large language models (LLMs) but its underlying mechanism remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a demonstration compression technique to expedite inference and an analysis framework for diagnosing ICL errors in GPT2-XL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ICL performance and expedites inference. |
Enhancing Code Generation Performance of Smaller Models by Distilling the Reasoning Ability of LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances in code generation through the ‘Chain-of-Thought’ prompting technique. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which aims to transfer LLMs’ reasoning capabilities to smaller models through distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the smaller model's code generation performance by over 130% on the APPS benchmark. |
Rethinking Denoised Auto-Encoding in Language Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models such as BERT have achieved success in learning sequence representations, but they tend to learn representations that are covariant with the noise of pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to train self-trained models to learn noise invariant sequence representations . they encourage consistency between original sequence and corrupted version via unsupervised instance-wise training signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 11 natural language understanding and cross-modal tasks and achieves 0.6% gain on GLUE benchmarks and 0.8% increment on NLVR2 . |
Learning to Edit Knowledge via Instruction-based Chain-of-Thought Prompting (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods focus on structured fact triples, overlooking diverse unstructured forms of factual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows LLMs to edit knowledge via **Chain of Thoughts** reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strong generalization across six diverse knowledge editing scenarios with a single round of training on three open-source language models. |
Domain Adaptive Text Style Transfer (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Text style transfer without parallel data is a promising method for learning, but in the scenario where less data is available, it may yield poor performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage available data to learn domain-adaptive text style transfer models . they evaluate two style transfer tasks where only limited non-parallel data is available . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models learn from the source domain to: (i) distinguish stylized information and generic content information; (ii) maximally preserve content information and (iv) adaptively transfer the styles in a domain-aware manner. |
Making Flexible Use of Subtasks: A Multiplex Interaction Network for Unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies aim to integrate multiple sub-tasks into a unified ABSA model but suffer from major disadvantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning approach to make use of sub-tasks for a unified ABSA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can work well when some sub-tasks are absent, and the interactive relations among subtasks not adequate. |
FoldMoE: Efficient Long Sequence MoE Training via Attention-MoE Pipelining (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training LLMs with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture on long sequences are limited by the insufficient computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a MoE training system that enables token-level overlapping across entire Transformer blocks through novel attention-MoE pipelining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves 1.49x and 2.72x speedup over state-of-the-art token-level overlapping and non-overlapping baselines on GPT-MoE models with sequences up to 32K tokens. |
HMEAE: Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing event extraction methods classify each argument role independently, ignoring conceptual correlations between different argument roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction model to provide inductive bias from the concept hierarchy of event argument roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on real-world datasets and shows that it leverages useful knowledge from the concept hierarchy. |
Effective Skill Unlearning through Intervention and Abstention (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit remarkable skills across various domains without training on task-specific datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose two lightweight, training-free machine skill unlearning techniques for LLMs . they propose to unlearning a particular skill while retaining overall capabilities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods demonstrate strong unlearning capabilities for the designated skills across seven different languages. |
MM-MATH: Advancing Multimodal Math Evaluation with Process Evaluation and Fine-grained Classification (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for multimodal reasoning in large multimodal models are underperforming on multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multimodal reasoning in large multimodal models, MM-MATH . MM's process evaluation employs LMM-as-a-judge to automatically analyze solution steps . diagram misinterpretation is the most common error, they find . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 31% accuracy, compared to 82% for humans. |
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting (2024.naacl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Shiwan Zhao, Hao Chen, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Ruiqi Sun, Xin Zhou, Enzhi Wang, Xiaohang Dong
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in natural language processing, driven by large language models such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for role-play prompting and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard zero-shot prompting approach across 12 reasoning benchmarks. |
Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that the composition of the pretraining corpus exerts a significant impact upon the performance of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of Large Language Models and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis provides insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of Large Language Models. |
Learning Low-Resource End-To-End Goal-Oriented Dialog for Fast and Reliable System Deployment (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing end-to-end dialog systems perform less effectively when data is scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Dialog System which combines meta-learning and human-machine collaboration to improve dialog learning by a new extended-bAbI dataset and a transformed MultiWOZ dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms non-meta-learning baselines on a new extended-bAbI dataset and a transformed MultiWOZ dataset for low-resource goal-oriented dialog learning. |
Interpret and Improve In-Context Learning via the Lens of Input-Label Mappings (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel at downstream NLP tasks through in-context learning . however, the internal mechanisms behind ICL remain under-explored . |
| Approach: | They propose a PC patching approach to identify modules where input-label mappings function . they observe and verify that key heads utilize input-labeled mappings to generate target labels for new queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach detects modules where input-label mappings function . it also detects that key heads use the mappings to generate labels for new queries . |
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoyun Du, LujieZheng LujieZheng, Renjun Hu, Yuyang Xu, Xiawei Li, Ying Sun, Wei Chen, Jian Wu, Haolei Cai, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yaxi Lu, Haolun Li, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Fangming Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have facilitated the development of intelligent applications like automatic web search (Qin et al., 2023) Several methods exist for generating JSON strings from LLMs, including Prompting but often miss certain schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 40K different JSON schemas to assess models' ability to generate valid JSON outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves both in generating JSON outputs and downstream tasks. |
Scaling Laws for Linear Complexity Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws for large language models are unclear, but they are useful for scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose scaling laws for linear complexity language models to establish a foundation for their scalability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models demonstrate superior linguistic proficiency and knowledge retention. |
Easy Dataset: A Unified and Extensible Framework for Synthesizing LLM Fine-Tuning Data from Unstructured Documents (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing data synthesis tools struggle to extract reliable fine-tuning data from heterogeneous documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for synthesizing fine-tuning data from unstructured documents via an intuitive graphical user interface. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract reliable data from unstructured documents via an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) it leverages persona-driven prompting approach to generate diverse question-answer pairs using public-available LLMs. |
Decoding the Silent Majority: Inducing Belief Augmented Social Graph with Large Language Model for Response Forecasting (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to forecast news media responses have limited exploration of how to best process and utilize these important features. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a large language model to induce a belief-centered graph on top of an existent social network, along with graph-based propagation to capture social dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art in experimental evaluations for both zero-shot and supervised settings, demonstrating its effectiveness in response forecasting. |
WISCA: A Lightweight Model Transition Method to Improve LLM Training via Weight Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiacheng Li, Jianchao Tan, Zhidong Yang, Pingwei Sun, Feiye Huo, Jiayu Qin, Xiangyu Zhang, Maoxin He, Guangming Tan, Weile Jia, Xunliang Cai, Tong Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in training optimization for Transformer-based large language models lack systematic optimization of weight patterns during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Weight Scaling method that rescales weights while preserving model outputs to improve model training efficiency and model quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves convergence quality and loss reduction in LLMs with Grouped Query Attention architectures and LoRA fine-tuning tasks. |
Long Context is Not Long at All: A Prospector of Long-Dependency Data for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-context modeling capabilities are important for large language models (LLMs) however, training LLMs with long context windows is insufficient since some samples do not exhibit strong semantic dependencies across long contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a data mining framework ProLong that assigns each training sample with a long dependency score and ranks and filters them according to their results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can rank and filter training samples that exhibit more powerful long-context modeling abilities. |
Towards Stable Natural Language Understanding via Information Entropy Guided Debiasing (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to debiase Natural Language Understanding models use dataset biases instead of learning the intended task. |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing framework that detects and purifies dataset biases using information entropy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the stability of performance on out-of-distribution datasets for a set of widely adopted NLU models. |
Regularizing Dialogue Generation by Imitating Implicit Scenarios (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue generation lack the flexibility to handle such freedoms. |
| Approach: | They propose to take into account dialogue history and future conversation to implicitly reconstruct the scenario knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on diversity and relevance and expresses scenario-specific knowledge. |
TESTA: Temporal-Spatial Token Aggregation for Long-form Video-Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that TESTA reduces the number of visual tokens by 75% and thus accelerates video encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to condense video semantics by aggregating similar frames and patches within each frame. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces visual tokens by 75% and accelerates video encoding. |
Improving Human-Labeled Data through Dynamic Automatic Conflict Resolution (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a scalable method for estimating the noisiness of labels produced by crowdsourcing annotation tasks is developed. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable method for estimating the noisiness of labels produced by crowdsourcing semantic annotation tasks and reducing the resulting error by 20-30%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the error of the labeling process by 20-30% compared to other common labeling strategies. |
Learn and Consolidate: Continual Adaptation for Zero-Shot and Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual neural machine translation models perform poorly on language pairs with no parallel corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage approach that encourages original models to acquire language-agnostic multilingual representations from new data and preserves the model architecture without introducing parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance in translation directions where existing models are weak and mitigates degeneration in the well-performing translation directions, offering flexibility in the real-world scenario. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
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. |
RoChBert: Towards Robust BERT Fine-tuning for Chinese (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zihan Zhang, Jinfeng Li, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Xiangyu Liu, Rong Zhang, Hui Xue, Donghong Sun, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) have been proved vulnerable to adversarial texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse Chinese phonetic and glyph features into pre-trained models by using a more comprehensive adversarial graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in significant ways on a wide range of tasks while remaining accurate on benign texts. |
Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation via Adaptive Prefix Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, especially in solving complex mathematical problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits teacher CoTs for distillation through adaptive prefix alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks by over 3%. |
Event Causality Extraction via Implicit Cause-Effect Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not exploited the interactions between the cause and effect event that could provide crucial clues for causality reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an Implicit Cause-Effect interaction framework which captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information (ground truth event types and arguments) for reasoning. |
Unraveling the Mechanics of Learning-Based Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent learning-based demonstration selection methods have proven beneficial to in-context learning (ICL) by choosing more useful exemplars. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to capture task-agnostic similarities between input and output of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods integrate task-agnostic similarities of different levels between input and output of exemplars and test cases to eliminate costly data collection. |
Diversity in Unity, Theory in Practice: Hierarchical Multitask Benchmarks for Chinese Minority Languages (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | CMiLBench is a framework to evaluate linguistically and culturally diverse minority languages . rapid evolution of LLMs has revolutionized NLP, but progress is unevenly distributed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to translate a theoretical notion of "diversity in unity" into practical evaluation for three minority languages . CMiLBench comprises 24,663 instances across 5 difficulty levels and 17 tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates 14 state-of-the-art LLMs with a hybrid framework . it integrates automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge scoring . |
Sentiment Classification towards Question-Answering with Hierarchical Matching Network (D18-1)
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Chenlin Shen, Changlong Sun, Jingjing Wang, Yangyang Kang, Shoushan Li, Xiaozhong Liu, Luo Si, Min Zhang, Guodong Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods to classify QA text contain rich sentiment information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task/method to address QA sentiment analysis by annotating QA text pair with annotation guidelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn the matching vectors of each Q-sentence, A-sentent unit. |
LLMs as Bridges: Reformulating Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) lack a strong correlation between image-text pairs and is ungroundable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models as a connecting bridge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks. |
PSST: A Benchmark for Evaluation-driven Text Public-Speaking Style Transfer (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to transfer text style focus on sentence-level data, limiting performance . current LLMs struggle to generate public speaking texts that align with human preferences . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to transform official texts into public-speaking styles by analyzing real-world data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to transform public speaking texts into public-speaking styles . the proposed framework analyzes characteristics and identifies problems of stylized texts . |
AEGIS: A Holistic Benchmark for Evaluating Forensic Analysis of AI-Generated Academic Images (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Zhang, Tzu-Yen Ma, Zichen Tang, Junpeng Ding, Zirui Wang, Yizhuo Zhao, Peilin Gao, Zijie Xi, Zixin Ding, Haiyang Sun, Haocheng Gao, Yuan Liu, Liangjia Wang, Yiling Huang, Yujie Wang, Yuyue Zhang, Ronghui Xi, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Haihong E
| Challenge: | AEGIS examines whether current models can effectively audit AI-generated images in academic papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic benchmark for forensic analysis of AI-Generated academic ImageS that reveals limitations in academic image forensics. |
| Outcome: | AEGIS compared with existing benchmarks on seven academic categories and features key advances in forensic analysis. |
From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) are fine-tuned and released for research and deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a PLM reuse paradigm that merges teacher-PLM knowledge into a student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can reduce the computational cost and environmental side-effects of retraining the PLM from scratch. |
The Critique of Critique (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | MetaCritique builds specific quantification criteria to evaluate the quality of critique . a systematic method to evaluate critique is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a critique of critique, termed MetaCritique, which builds specific quantification criteria and aggregates each AIU's judgment for the overall score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve near-human performance across 16 datasets. |
Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zichao Li, Shaojie He, Meng Liao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Yanxiong Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Document logical structuring is crucial for document intelligence due to the complexity of text segment dependencies in the document. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end, generation-based method for document logical structuring that generates the action sequence via a global context-aware generative model and updates its global context and current logical structure based on the generated actions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ChCatExt and HierDoc datasets show that Seg2Act performs better than previous methods in both supervised and transfer learning settings. |
Logic-Regularized Verifier Elicits Reasoning from LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Typical verifiers require resource-intensive supervised dataset construction, which is costly and faces limitations in data diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised verifier regularized by logical rules that uses internal activations and logical constraints on multiple reasoning paths. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 10 datasets show that the proposed verifier outperforms baselines and is comparable to the supervised verifier. |
PHEE: A Dataset for Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction from Text (2022.emnlp-main)
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Zhaoyue Sun, Jiazheng Li, Gabriele Pergola, Byron Wallace, Bino John, Nigel Greene, Joseph Kim, Yulan He
| Challenge: | Using NLP methods to discover and extract adverse drug events from unstructured textual data is difficult because it requires time-consuming manual curation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a hierarchical event schema to extract annotated events from medical case reports and biomedical literature to analyze patient data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest public dataset to date and contains over 5000 events from medical case reports and biomedical literature. |
Estimating Soft Labels for Out-of-Domain Intent Detection (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect out-of-dominance (OOD) intents are limited by the lack of OOD samples. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive soft pseudo labeling method that can estimate soft labels for pseudo OOD samples when training OOD detectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms competing methods on three benchmark datasets and consistently outperformed previous methods. |
EchoMLLM: Incentivizing Echocardiographic Video Understanding with Keyframe Grounding and Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Heyu Huang, Wanran Sun, Chi Chen, Bo Chen, Zonghao Guo, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li, Kunlun He, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Echocardiography analysis requires a dual capability: rigorous quantitative keyframe localization and comprehensive qualitative synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework designed for real-world echocardiography video understanding. |
| Outcome: | a new framework is designed to support real-world echocardiography video understanding . it reduces temporal grounding errors by up to 76% and improves report generation quality by 65% . |
Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Qiwei Zhao, Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Huaxiu Yao, Chen Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Xujiang Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over multi-step decision-making process and dynamic interactions between agents and their environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 20%. |
ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
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Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Heng Ji, Minlie Huang, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text . Experimental results show that ERICA can improve typical PLMs on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of entities and relations in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve PLMs on several language understanding tasks, especially under low-resource settings. |
CodRED: A Cross-Document Relation Extraction Dataset for Acquiring Knowledge in the Wild (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting relational facts between entity pairs within single sentences or documents. |
| Approach: | They present a problem of cross-document relation extraction (CRE) using human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first human-annotated cross-document RE dataset . it shows that it is challenging to existing RE methods including strong BERT-based models. |
Unveiling the Implicit Toxicity in Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on probing toxic outputs that can be easily detected with existing toxicity classifiers, but LLMs can generate diverse implicit toxic output that are difficult to detect via simply zero-shot prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning based attacking method to induce the implicit toxic outputs in large language models by fine-tuning toxicity classifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates implicit toxic outputs that are difficult to detect via zero-shot prompting on five widely-adopted toxicity classifiers. |
ODA: Observation-Driven Agent for integrating LLMs and Knowledge Graphs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate large language models and knowledge graphs with LLMs often ignore the rich cognitive potential inherent in KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose an observation-driven agent framework that integrates KG reasoning abilities via global observation and integrates it into the action and reflection modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on several datasets and achieves 12.87% and 8.9% accuracy improvements. |
ONSEP: A Novel Online Neural-Symbolic Framework for Event Prediction Based on Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | TKGF is a technique that requires experience during testing and relying on a single short-term history. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates dynamic causal rule mining and dual history augmented generation to enhance event prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant performance improvements across diverse datasets and significantly improves Hit@k. |
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. |
GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shuhe Wang, Xiaofei Sun, Xiaoya Li, Rongbin Ouyang, Fei Wu, Tianwei Zhang, Jiwei Li, Guoyin Wang, Chen Guo
| Challenge: | Large-scale language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for in-context learning with limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel sequence labeling task that transforms a sequence labeled as a text-generation task into a self-verification task that LLMs can adapt to. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on NER than supervised models on a variety of tasks . the proposed model can be easily adapted by LLMs to generate a text sequence . |
Delving into the Openness of CLIP (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) allows for open-vocabulary visual recognition, where the model can recognize images from an open class set in a zero-shot manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image classification as an image-to-text matching task instead of discrete category IDs to achieve open-vocabulary visual recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognize images from an open vocabulary in a zero-shot manner, but its performance deteriorates as the vocabulary expands. |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
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Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
DPGA-TextSyn: Differentially Private Genetic Algorithm for Synthetic Text Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhonghao Sun, Zhiliang Tian, Yiping Song, Yuyi Si, Juhua Zhang, Minlie Huang, Kai Lu, Zeyu Xiong, Xinwang Liu, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune large language models pose privacy risks . researchers have synthesized data with strong generation capabilities closed-source LLMs to alleviate this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine general LLMs with genetic algorithm to produce relevant and diverse synthetic text under differential privacy constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of the model in downstream tasks while ensuring privacy. |
Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiqing Sun, Sheng Shen, Shengcao Cao, Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Yikang Shen, Chuang Gan, Liangyan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang, Yiming Yang, Kurt Keutzer, Trevor Darrell
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modality can result in "hallucination" . developing LMMs faces challenges such as a lack of data and a limited number of data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm that augments the reward model with additional factual information such as image captions and ground-truth multi-choice options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the LLaVA-Bench dataset with the 96% performance level of the text-only GPT-4 and an improvement of 60% on MMHAL-BENCH over other baselines. |
Fusion Makes Perfection: An Efficient Multi-Grained Matching Approach for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract unseen relations require laborious manual annotation . a new approach uses fine-grained matching to reduce manual annotation cost . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient multi-grained matching approach that uses virtual entity matching to reduce manual annotation cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves inference efficiency and accuracy in zero-shot relation extraction tasks. |
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. |
SEE: Strategic Exploration and Exploitation for Cohesive In-Context Prompt Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Existing approaches separate the optimization of prompt instructions and in-context learning examples, leading to incohesive, suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines both prompt instructions and in-context learning examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods on 35 benchmark tasks. |
S2SQL: Injecting Syntax to Question-Schema Interaction Graph Encoder for Text-to-SQL Parsers (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based encoders for text-to-SQL do not model the syntax of natural language questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject Syntax to question-Schema graph encoder for text-to-SQL parsers and employ the decoupling constraint to induce diverse relational edge embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all existing methods when pre-training models are used, resulting in a performance ranks first on the Spider leaderboard. |
DuSQL: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Text-to-SQL Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsing methods mainly focus on English, but there is no labeled data available for the language . a larges-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset is used for cross-domain text- to-Sql task . |
| Approach: | They propose a larges-scale Chinese dataset for a cross-domain text-to-SQL task . they analyze questions from several representative applications and use an effective data construction framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 200 databases, 813 tables, and 23,797 question/SQL pairs. |
AutoVecCoder: Teaching LLMs to Generate Explicitly Vectorized Code (2026.findings-acl)
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ShangZhan Li, Xinyu Yin, Xuanyu Jin, Ye He, Yuxin Zhou, Yuxuan Li, Xu Han, Wanxiang Che, Qi Shi, Ting Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current development practices face a dichotomy between automation and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to empower LLMs with the capability of automated explicit vectorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SSE and AVX subsets of SimdBench. |
A Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Grounded Dialogues (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train grounded dialogues require large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data generation framework for grounded dialogues that takes knowledge data and heuristics to determine a dialogue flow and incrementally turn it into a dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts model performance in training data and low-resource scenarios. |
Mitigating Shortcut Learning via Smart Data Augmentation based on Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve shortcut learning performance are limited by manual definition of shortcuts and inherent confirmation bias during model training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method of Smart Data Augmentation based on Large Language Models to identify shortcuts and generate their anti-shortcut counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows an improvement of 5.61% across various natural language processing tasks. |
Self-Knowledge Guided Retrieval Augmentation for Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown superior performance without task-specific fine-tuning due to the computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which lets LLMs refer to the questions they have previously encountered and adaptively call for external resources when dealing with new questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms chain-of-thought based and fully retrieval-based methods on multiple datasets and outperformed chain- of-though, chatGPT and InstructGPT. |
TinyAlign: Boosting Lightweight Vision-Language Models by Mitigating Modal Alignment Bottlenecks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuanze Hu, Xinyu Wang, Zhichao Yang, Gen Li, Ye Qiu, Zhaoxin Fan, Yifan Sun, Wenjun wu, Jin Dong, Xiaotie Deng
| Challenge: | Lightweight Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are indispensable for resource-constrained applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that retrieves context from a memory bank to enhance alignment . they propose EMI-based approach to align vision and language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training loss, accelerates convergence, and enhances task performance with negligible computational overhead. |
Hierarchical Relation Extraction with Coarse-to-Fine Grained Attention (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction use knowledge graphs to automatically label training data . but, it suffers from the wrong labeling problem because not all sentences containing two entities can express their relations in KGs . |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision approach to automatically label training instances . they integrate hierarchical information of relations into distantly supervised relation extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a large-scale dataset. |
Layer-wise Model Pruning based on Mutual Information (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In spite of impressive results of neural networks, the huge model size has hindered their applications in cases where computation and memory resources are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for layer-wise pruning using mutual information based feature selection in SVMs and logistic regression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning strategy offers greater speedup and higher performance than weight-based pruning methods. |
Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation: A Cycled Reinforcement Learning Approach (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies for sentiment-to-sentiment "translation" only change the underlying sentiment and fail to keep the semantic content. |
| Approach: | They propose a cycled reinforcement learning method that combines neutralization module and emotionalization module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art systems on Yelp and Amazon review datasets. |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yifei Li, Hanane Nour Moussa, Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Botao Yu, Mingyi Xue, Benjamin Burns, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Vishal Dey, Zitong Lu, Chen Wei, Qianheng Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Song Gao, Xuhui Huang, Xia Ning, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages. |
Location-Aware Visual Question Generation with Lightweight Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Nicholas Suwono, Justin Chen, Tun Hung, Ting-Hao Huang, I-Bin Liao, Yung-Hui Li, Lun-Wei Ku, Shao-Hua Sun
| Challenge: | a novel task aims to generate engaging questions from location-aware information . a lightweight model can be used to generate such questions . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate engaging questions from location-aware data . they represent location-based information with surrounding images and a GPS coordinate . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines regarding human evaluation and evaluation metrics. |
Chinese SimpleQA: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Yingshui Tan, Weixun Wang, Hui Huang, Xingyuan Bu, Hangyu Guo, Chengwei Hu, Boren Zheng, Zhuoran Lin, Dekai Sun, Zhicheng Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Current frontier models sometimes generate false outputs or answers that are not substantiated by evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose Chinese SimpleQA, a Chinese benchmark to evaluate LLMs' factuality . they focus on Chinese language over 6 major topics with 99 diverse subtopics . |
| Outcome: | The Chinese SimpleQA benchmark evaluates the factuality ability of LLMs . the questions and answers are short and easy-to-evaluate . |
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. |
Beyond Superficial Tests: Adversarial Refinement for Reliable Property-Based Testing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in code generation, yet their application to Property-Based Testing (PBT) remains fraught with a superficiality gap. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic framework that hardens software properties through Adversarial Refinement. |
| Outcome: | a new framework hardens software properties through Adversarial Refinement that detects and fixes bugs in top-tier libraries. |
Migician: Revealing the Magic of Free-Form Multi-Image Grounding in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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You Li, Heyu Huang, Chi Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Chao Huang, Zonghao Guo, Zhiyuan Liu, Jinan Xu, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs still struggle to achieve precise grounding in multi-image scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Thought framework that integrates single-image grounding with multi-image comprehension to address this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in multi-image grounding tasks by 24.94% and surpasses larger 70B models. |
Jiuge: A Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System (P19-3)
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Guo Zhipeng, Xiaoyuan Yi, Maosong Sun, Wenhao Li, Cheng Yang, Jiannan Liang, Huimin Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ruoyu Li
| Challenge: | Existing systems for automatic poetry generation are model-oriented, resulting in poor user participation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-machine collaborative Chinese classical poetry generation system called Jiuge . Jiuge allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly. |
Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Non-Autoregressive Text-to-Speech (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-utterance conditional VAE to estimate posterior probability distribution of latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features from past and future sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins. |
A Length-Extrapolatable Transformer (2023.acl-long)
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Yutao Sun, Li Dong, Barun Patra, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Alon Benhaim, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing Transformers can only deal with the in-distribution size of inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a relative position embedding to explicitly maximize attention resolution . they also use blockwise causal attention during inference for better resolution a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance in interpolation and extrapolation settings. |
Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch (2025.acl-long)
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Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, XingYu XingYu, Yuqiu Ji, Guohai Xu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Debing Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese resources are small in scale and limited to specific domains, making them insufficient for LLM post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-annotated reward model and a preference dataset to address this gap . they evaluate Chinese RMs on CheemsBench and construct an RM that captures human preferences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed RM achieves state-of-the-art performance on CheemsBench and CheeMePreference. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
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. |
Point, Disambiguate and Copy: Incorporating Bilingual Dictionaries for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have been criticized for lack of integration of bilingual lexical information into the neural architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation models by introducing three new components: Pointer, Disambiguator, and Copier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the following merits inherently compared with previous efforts: (1) Pointer leverages the semantic information from bilingual dictionaries, for the first time, to better locate source words whose translation in dictionary can potentially be used; (2) Disambiguator synthesizes contextual information from source view and target view, both of which contribute to distinguishing translation of a specific source word from multiple candidates in dicaries; (3) Copier systematically connects Pointer and Disambiguators based on a hierarchical |
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. |
BEEAR: Embedding-based Adversarial Removal of Safety Backdoors in Instruction-tuned Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Safety backdoors in large language models can be triggered while evading detection during normal interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-level optimization method that uses a key insight: backdoor triggers induce a uniform drift in the model’s embedding space . inner level identifies universal perturbations to the decoder’s embedded spaces that steer the model towards defender-defined unwanted behaviors; outer level fine-tunes the model to reinforce safe behaviors against these perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mitigation method reduces the success rate of safety backdoor attacks from over 95% to 1% for general harmful behaviors and from 47% to 0% for Sleeper Agents, without compromising the model’s usefulness. |
Unified Active Retrieval for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Qinyuan Cheng, Xiaonan Li, Shimin Li, Qin Zhu, Zhangyue Yin, Yunfan Shao, Linyang Li, Tianxiang Sun, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing active retrieval methods struggle with handling various types of instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified active retrieval framework for retrieval-augmented generation . they propose to combine four orthogonal criteria into plug-and-play classification tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four representative types of user instructions on four types of instructions. |
Fuse It More Deeply! A Variational Transformer with Layer-Wise Latent Variable Inference for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational Auto-Encoders are often used for text generation tasks due to the sequential nature of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational Transformer framework that learns a series of layer-wise latent variables with each inferred from those of lower layers and tightly coupled with the hidden states by low-rank tensor product. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn latent variables from lower layers and incorporate more information. |
PEMT: Multi-Task Correlation Guided Mixture-of-Experts Enables Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an effective method for adapting pre-trained language models to various tasks efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework that captures transferable knowledge as a weighted combination of adapters trained on source tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields stable improvements over full fine-tuning and knowledge transferring methods on a broad range of tasks over 17 datasets. |
MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MM-Verifier and MM Reasoner are a powerful multimodal reasoning model . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across tasks spanning myriad domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which combines tree search and verification to generate high-quality chain-of-thought data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. |
Entity-Relation Extraction as Multi-Turn Question Answering (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Identifying entities and their relations is the prerequisite of extracting structured knowledge from unstructured raw texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for the task of entity-relation extraction . they cast the task as a multi-turn question answering problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm significantly outperforms previous best models on the ACE and CoNLL04 datasets. |
UTC-IE: A Unified Token-pair Classification Architecture for Information Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Information Extraction (IE) tasks have been solved with different models because of their output structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a Unified Token-pair Classification architecture for Information Extraction that introduces Plusformer on top of the token-pear feature matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms task-specific and unified models on all tasks in 10 datasets and achieves better results on 2 joint IE datasets. |
from Benign import Toxic: Jailbreaking the Language Model via Adversarial Metaphors (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have exposed the risk of Large Language Models (LLMs) generating harmful content by jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits AdVersArial meTAphoR to induce LLMs to calibrate harmful metaphors for jailbreaking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can successfully jailbreak Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging the AdVersArial meTAphoR (AVATAR) framework achieves state-of-the-art attack success rate across multiple advanced LLMs. |
Continual Relation Learning via Episodic Memory Activation and Reconsolidation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn incessantly emerging novel relations are overfitting the few memorized examples of old relations, causing confusion among existing relations. |
| Approach: | They introduce episodic memory activation and reconsolidation (EMAR) to continual relation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in catastrophic forgetting old relations. |
Sentence Similarity Based on Contexts (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure sentence similarity face limited dataset size and training-test gap . existing methods lack large-scale labeled datasets with labeles that are labor-intensive and expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures sentence similarity by comparing probabilities of generating two sentences given the same context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance boosts over baselines under supervised and unsupervised settings. |
TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for interpreting, augmenting, and querying semi-structured tables require pretraining on tables or special model architecture design. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset with a variety of tables and tasks for instruction tuning and evaluating LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or better performance on 7 out of 8 in-domain tasks compared with the base model on 6 out-of-domain datasets. |
Improve LLM-as-a-Judge Ability as a General Ability (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on generative judges, but only on their judge ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the generative and reasoning capabilities of large language models to evaluate LLM responses across diverse scenarios, providing accurate preference signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on RewardBench with only 2% to 40% of the data required by other training frameworks. |
From Informal to Formal – Incorporating and Evaluating LLMs on Natural Language Requirements to Verifiable Formal Proofs (2025.acl-long)
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Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Meiziniu Li, Haoyang Ma, Haokun Li, Mengda He, Cheng Wen, Le Sun, Hongyu Zhang, Shengchao Qin, Shing-Chi Cheung, Cong Tian
| Challenge: | Recent studies in formal mathematical reasoning have shown an unstoppable growth trend. |
| Approach: | They constructed 18k high-quality instruction-response pairs across five mainstream formal specification languages and evaluated them against ten open-sourced LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model compared instruction-response pairs across five formal specification languages and found that the LLMs were good at writing proof segments when given either the code, or the detailed description of proof steps. |
Hallucination Detection in Long-Form Text Generated by LLMs: A Benchmark and a Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Approach (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection are coarse-grained and lack long-range consistency checks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-form hallucination detection that incorporates diverse entity types and intricate factual dependencies spanning extended contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and robustly integrates fact-centric hyper-relational knowledge graphs. |
OpenKE: An Open Toolkit for Knowledge Embedding (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge embedding tools are available for embeddable knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework and various fundamental models to embed knowledge graphs into a continuous low-dimensional space. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit and pre-trained embeddings are available on http://openke.thunlp.org/. |
Reinforced Dynamic Reasoning for Conversational Question Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results on the recently released CoQA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method . large-scale highquality conversational question answering datasets such as CoQA and QuAC can help train models to answer sequential questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called Conversational Question Generation which generates a question based on a passage and a conversation history to generate the next question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a question-answering style conversation dataset . it can be used to generate meaningful questions on QA and SQuAD datasets . |
BayesKD: Bayesian Knowledge Distillation for Compact LLMs in Constrained Fine-tuning Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains with their remarkable capabilities, but their massive parameter sizes pose significant challenges for fine-tuning and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian Knowledge Distillation framework for compact Large Language Models in resource-constrained fine-tuning scenarios that employs Logits Dual-Scaling, Knowledge Alignment Module, and Bayes Distillations Optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on various state-of-the-art LLMs, including LLaMA, Qwen2, Bloom, and Vicuna. |
EviReport: From Reasoned Outlines to Evidence Tracked Long-Form Reports (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihan Liu, Jianhui li, Zexin Wang, Fei Sun, Jingjing LI, Zheyuan Li, Ke Xiang, Hang Cui, Houhua Gong, Changhua Pei, Gaogang Xie
| Challenge: | Evidence-intensive reports often produce fluent but under-supported drafts . eviReport is an evidence-grounded workflow for automated long-form report generation . |
| Approach: | They propose an evidence-tracked workflow that organizes corpus evidence into compact, traceable units and retrieves query-relevant subgraphs into retrieval-ready packages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow outperforms baselines in factual coverage, factual accuracy and visual evidence integration. |
CSS: Combining Self-training and Self-supervised Learning for Few-shot Dialogue State Tracking (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) methods transfer knowledge from labeled data into DST, but collecting large amount of labeles is laborious. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot dialogue state tracking framework that integrates self-training and self-supervised learning methods into the framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance in several few-shot scenarios. |
Weakly Supervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Relative Representations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Weakly supervised vision-and-language pre-training (WVLP) uses only local descriptions of images as cross-modal anchors to construct weakly-aligned image-text pairs for pre- training. |
| Approach: | They propose to take a small number of aligned image-text pairs as anchors and represent each unaligned image and text by its similarities to these anchors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the cost of pre-training while maintaining decent performance on downstream tasks. |
Simple and Effective Unsupervised Redundancy Elimination to Compress Dense Vectors for Passage Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dense passage retrieval improves ranking accuracy in open-domain question answering but at the cost of large space and memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple unsupervised pipeline that includes principal component analysis (PCA), product quantization, and hybrid search to improve space efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves good accuracy–space trade-offs, for example, 48 compression with less than 3% drop in top-100 retrieval accuracy on average or 96 compression without drop in space requirements. |
GATEAU: Selecting Influential Samples for Long Context Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Gang Chen, Yunshui Li, Kangyang Luo, Chuancheng Lv, Kaikai An, Fanchao Qi, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have attempted to scale up the available data volume by synthesizing long instruction-following samples, but a lack of a well-defined strategy for ensuring data quality may introduce low-quality samples and restrict the model’s performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to identify influential samples enriched with long-range dependency relations that can be used to align large language models to handle instructions with extremely long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies samples with long-range dependency relations and shows that the model trained on these samples exhibits better instruction-following and long-context understanding capabilities. |
Large Language Models Are Still Misled by Simple Bias Ensembles (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models are constrained to datasets where each sample is manually injected with only one type of bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-bias benchmark where each sample contains multiple types of biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing LLMs and debiasing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the challenge of eliminating compounded biases. |
An Empirical Study of LLM Reasoning Ability Under Strict Output Length Constraint (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yi Sun, Han Wang, Jiaqiang Li, Jiacheng Liu, Xiangyu Li, Hao Wen, Yizhen Yuan, Huiwen Zheng, Yan Liang, Yuanchun Li, Yunxin Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful tool for test-time scaling, but they are often used under time constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to make models think before answering questions . they also use self-correction and best-of-N decoding to encourage deeper thinking . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are able to achieve higher inference accuracy with extra inference computation under time constraints. |
Text Classification via Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) have shown the ability for in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive reasoning strategy tailored to addressing complex linguistic phenomena such as intensification, contrast, irony and limited number of tokens allowed in in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on 4 out of 5 widely-used text-classification benchmarks, while demonstrating comparable performance to SOTA on MR. |
Multilingual Translation via Grafting Pre-trained Language Models (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to graft pre-trained (masked) language models to multilingual data are limited, and they lack cross-attention component. |
| Approach: | They propose to graft separately pre-trained (masked) language models for machine translation using monolingual data and parallel data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves average improvements of 5.8 BLEU in x2en and 2.9 BLUE in en2x directions compared with the multilingual Transformer of the same size. |
Alleviating Performance Degradation Caused by Out-of-Distribution Issues in Embedding-Based Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haotong Bao, Jianjin Zhang, Qi Chen, Weihao Han, Zhengxin Zeng, Ruiheng Chang, Mingzheng Li, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies reveal query out-of-distribution issues degrading ANN performance . a distribution regularizer is introduced into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings. |
| Approach: | They introduce a distribution regularizer into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently improves retrieval performance across multiple datasets. |
Enhancing the Comprehensibility of Text Explanations via Unsupervised Concept Discovery (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing concepts-based explainable approaches do not discover unseen concepts . a recent approach to solve this problem is concept-based explanations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts comprehensible concepts automatically with no annotations . ECO-Concept uses an object-centric architecture to extract task-specific semantic concepts . |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts comprehensible concepts with no concept annotations . the proposed framework outperforms existing methods in computability tests on diverse tasks . |
Mitigating Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Model via Hallucination-targeted Direct Preference Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are known to hallucinate, which limits their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses three types of preference pairs to target hallucinations from their diverse forms and causes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses most state-of-the-art methods and shows potential for further improvements. |
Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced NLP Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using dice loss, we find that data imbalance is a common issue in many NLP tasks . data imbalance affects the performance of many tasks, such as tagging and machine reading comprehension . |
| Approach: | They propose to use dice loss to replace the standard cross-entropy objective for data-imbalanced NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training objective achieves significant performance boost on a wide range of data imbalanced tasks. |
Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Luoyang Sun, Guangyan Li, Cheng Deng, Haifeng Zhang, Jian Zhao, Yongqiang Tang, Wensheng Zhang, Jun Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment bottlenecks due to computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that exploits activation and weight sparsity . they use a three-tier routing strategy that uses magnitude-based pruning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Llama and Mistral models show that DAWS outperforms activation-weight sparsity pruning methods. |
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. |
A Dual-Channel Framework for Sarcasm Recognition by Detecting Sentiment Conflict (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Sarcasm employs ambivalence, where one says something positive but actually means negative . linguistically, it is difficult to recognize such sentiment conflict because the sentiments are mixed or even implicit . |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Channel Framework to model literal and implied sentiments separately . they propose sarcastic networks that can detect sarcasm sentiments in political debates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on political debates and Twitter datasets. |
Lingxi: A Diversity-aware Chinese Modern Poetry Generation System (2023.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Chinese modern poetry generation is a challenging task because of the word segmentation problem and decoding methods . the decoding method may induce repetition and boredom and lower the diversity of generated poetry. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese word segmentation-based decoding system that incorporates Chinese word segments into tokenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can achieve high vocabulary coverage rate with a reasonable vocabulary size. |
ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model coarse-grained linguistic information do not integrate coarse-gram information into pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance integration of coarse-grained linguistic information into pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tunes on 19 downstream tasks. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Keyu Li, Junhao Shi, Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Yunze Wu, Dayuan Fu, Shijie Xia, Xiaojie Cai, Tianze Xu, Weiye Si, Wenjie Li, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates 6 agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that closed-source models outperform open-source model (48.4% vs 32.1%) integrating models with advanced scaffolds to form autonomous agents is a paradigm shift. |
Open Information Extraction via Chunks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing OIE systems split a sentence into tokens and recognize token spans as tuple relations and arguments. |
| Approach: | They propose to split a sentence into tokens and recognize token spans as tuple relations and arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple OIE datasets showing that SaC has better properties than sentence as token sequence. |
Arg-LLaDA: Argument Summarization via Large Language Diffusion Models and Sufficiency-Aware Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to argument summarization rely on single-pass generation, offering limited support for factual correction or structural refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language diffusion framework that iteratively improves argument summarization by sufficiency-guided remasking and regeneration. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that Arg-LLaDA surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in 7 out of 10 evaluation metrics. |
VLP: Vision-Language Preference Learning for Embodied Manipulation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reward engineering are time-consuming and expensive to collect human preference labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language preference learning framework which learns from human feedback . they define three types of language-conditioned preferences and construct a visual preference dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on embodied manipulation tasks and can be applied to other tasks. |
ELLE: Efficient Lifelong Pre-training for Emerging Data (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are typically trained with static data, ignoring that streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. |
| Approach: | They propose to use function preserved model expansion to expand existing PLM's width and depth to improve efficiency of knowledge acquisition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves pre-training efficiency and performance over existing models on BERT and GPT. |
SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages (2024.emnlp-main)
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Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Akbar, Lester James Miranda, Jennifer Santoso, Elyanah Aco, Akhdan Fadhilah, Jonibek Mansurov, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Onno Kampman, Joel Moniz, Muhammad Habibi, Frederikus Hudi, Jann Montalan, Ryan Hadiwijaya, Joanito Lopo, William Nixon, Börje Karlsson, James Jaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Yuze Gao, Patrick Irawan, Bin Wang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Chenxi Whitehouse, Ivan Parmonangan, Maria Khelli, Wenyu Zhang, Lucky Susanto, Reynard Ryanda, Sonny Hermawan, Dan Velasco, Muhammad Kautsar, Willy Hendria, Yasmin Moslem, Noah Flynn, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Haochen Li, Johanes Lee, R. Damanhuri, Shuo Sun, Muhammad Qorib, Amirbek Djanibekov, Wei Qi Leong, Quyet V. Do, Niklas Muennighoff, Tanrada Pansuwan, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Yan Xu, Tai Chia, Ayu Purwarianti, Sebastian Ruder, William Tjhi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Alham Aji, Sedrick Keh, Genta Winata, Ruochen Zhang, Fajri Koto, Zheng Xin Yong, Samuel Cahyawijaya
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia (SEA) is home to over 1,300 indigenous languages and 671 million people . prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a resource center that provides standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the quality of AI models on 36 SEA languages across 13 tasks . the results highlight the importance of SEA as a culturally diverse region . |
Beyond Sentence-level Labels: Integrating Conversational Context and Personal Experience for Natural Emotional Expression (2026.findings-acl)
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Haiyang Sun, Chenyang Le, Wei Wang, Leying Zhang, Chuang Li, Bing Han, Chenda Li, Mengxiao Bi, Yanmin Qian
| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on sentence-level labels, which fails to capture the subtle nuances of human affect. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale, context-aware speech corpus derived from multi-speaker audiobooks to generate a speech that is human-like. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in terms of emotional expression accuracy and naturalness. |
CFinBench: A Comprehensive Chinese Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Ying Nie, Binwei Yan, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liu, Haoyu Wang, Wei He, Binfan Zheng, Weihao Wang, Qiang Li, Weijian Sun, Yunhe Wang, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, yet their potential in more challenging task like finance, has not been fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the financial knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in China. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is the most comprehensive evaluation benchmark to date for LLMs in finance. |
DongbaMIE: A Multimodal Information Extraction Dataset for Evaluating Semantic Understanding of Dongba Pictograms (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaojun Bi, Shuo Li, Junyao Xing, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Weizheng Qiao, Lu Han, Ziwei Sun, Peng Li, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Dongba pictographic is the only pictograph script still in use in the world. |
| Approach: | DongbaMIE is the first dataset focusing on multimodal information extraction of Dongbe pictographs. |
| Outcome: | The dataset contains 23,530 sentence-level and 2,539 paragraph-level high-quality text-image pairs. |
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuo Li, Jiajun Sun, Guodong Zheng, Xiaoran Fan, Yujiong Shen, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Yuming Yang, Wenming Tan, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. |
EasyJudge: an Easy-to-use Tool for Comprehensive Response Evaluation of LLMs (2025.coling-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-source evaluation models lack a user-friendly visualization tool and are not optimized for accelerated model inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-source evaluation models to evaluate language model responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is lightweight, precise, efficient, and user-friendly, with an intuitive visualization interface for ease of deployment and use. |
Human-Like Decision Making: Document-level Aspect Sentiment Classification via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (D19-1)
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Jingjing Wang, Changlong Sun, Shoushan Li, Jiancheng Wang, Luo Si, Min Zhang, Xiaozhong Liu, Guodong Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent neural networks have shown promising results on Document-level Aspect Sentiment Classification (DASC) however, these approaches often offer little transparency w.r.t. their inner working mechanisms and lack interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning approach to DASC that incorporates clause selection and word selection strategies to tackle the data noise problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach over the state-of-the-art approaches shows impressive performance over the current baselines. |
Analyzing the Quality of Counseling Conversations: the Tell-Tale Signs of High-quality Counseling (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Behavioral and mental health disorders are the most costly and prevalent conditions worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze counseling interactions by using aspects such as mirroring, empathy, and reflective listening to build text-based classifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to build text-based classifiers able to predict the overall quality of a counseling conversation and provide insights into the linguistic differences between low-quality and high-quality counseling. |
Dipping PLMs Sauce: Bridging Structure and Text for Effective Knowledge Graph Completion via Conditional Soft Prompting (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) often requires both KG structural and textual information to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a system which tunes the parameters of Conditional Soft Prompts generated by entities and relations representations to maintain a balance between textual and structural knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed components outperform baseline models on three static and temporal benchmarks. |
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models. |
Unveiling and Addressing Pseudo Forgetting in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in continual learning have not been studied. |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale-guided replay framework that allows models to leverage their capabilities and provide partial external correct rationales to the original instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates pseudo forgetting while maintaining model plasticity. |
Automatic Academic Paper Rating Based on Modularized Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to rate academic papers require a lot of feature engineering and can cause inequality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a novel convolutional neural network to automatically rate academic papers . they propose to build a dataset to automatically determine whether to accept academic papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by a large margin. |
A Template-based Method for Constrained Neural Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve this problem can not satisfy the following three desiderata: (1) high translation quality, (2) high match accuracy, and (3) low latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based method that can provide high translation quality and match accuracy and a low latency inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in lexically and structurally constrained translation tasks and can be used in a variety of applications. |
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. |
Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets may leak shallow heuristics via entity mentions, thus contributing to the high performance on RE benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-masked contrastive framework for relation extraction to gain a deeper understanding on textual context and type information while avoiding rote memorization of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the effectiveness and robustness of neural models in different RE scenarios. |
Vision-aided Unsupervised Constituency Parsing with Multi-MLLM Debating (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches require explicit cross-modal alignment, but new approaches address these challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for vision-aided unsupervised constituency parsing . they leverage multimodal large language models pre-trained on diverse image-text or video-text data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on image-text and video-text datasets, improving robustness and accuracy. |
Improving Cross-Domain Chinese Word Segmentation with Word Embeddings (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Chinese word segmentation (CWS) are character-based and word-based . character-driven approaches use conditional random field models to label sequences, with complex hand-crafted discrete features. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised word-based approach to improve cross-domain Chinese word segmentation given a baseline segmenter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on five datasets covering domains in novels, medicine, and patent. |
CodeEvo: Interaction-Driven Synthesis of Code-centric Data through Hybrid and Iterative Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating instruction-code pairs rely on rigid heuristics and are labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-agent architecture that integrates a Coder and a Reviewer to orchestrate the generation trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms baselines on a large-scale dataset of instruction-code pairs with stepped difficulty levels. |
Few-Shot Charge Prediction with Discriminative Legal Attributes (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing works on charge prediction perform well on high-frequency charges but are not capable of predicting few-shot charges with limited cases. |
| Approach: | They propose an attribute-attentive charge prediction model to infer attributes and charges simultaneously . they propose to use discriminative attributes as the internal mapping between fact descriptions and charges . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on real-world datasets by more than 50% . the proposed model can predict the attributes and charges simultaneously . |
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiangyang Li, Zhonghua Li, Zhao Cao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios. |
Ranking-Based Autoencoder for Extreme Multi-label Classification (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve label dependency and noisy labeling problems are limited . experimental results show the proposed method is competitive to state-of-the-art methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a deep learning XML method with word-vector-based self-attention followed by ranking-based AutoEncoder architecture to solve these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is competitive to state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
Fusion or Defusion? Flexible Vision-and-Language Pre-Training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to vision-and-language pretraining (VLP) lack effectiveness and efficiency in downstream multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible vision-and-language pre-training model by incorporating cross-modal fusions into a dual-encoder architecture and a cross-module knowledge transfer strategy to guide the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is well-equipped with effectiveness and efficiency compared with other strong VLP models. |
Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve complex natural language processing tasks require multiple steps to verify the answers. |
| Approach: | They propose to use chain of thought prompting to solve reasoning tasks with large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve reasoning performance on arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets. |
Can Language Models Understand Physical Concepts? (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models do not understand basic physical concepts in the human world. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transfer embodied knowledge from visual models to LMs . they use visual concepts and embodies concepts learned from interaction with the world . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable performance with scaling up parameters of LMs 134. |
A Predicate-Function-Argument Annotation of Natural Language for Open-Domain Information eXpression (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing OIE (Open Information Extraction) algorithms are redundant and not reusable. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline where an Open-domain Information eXpression task provides a platform for all OIE strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline provides a platform for all OIE strategies. |
Learning When to Concentrate or Divert Attention: Self-Adaptive Attention Temperature for Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation models treat decoding at each time step equally with the same matrix . conventional methods treat decoder outputs at all time steps with the identical weight matrix causing inaccuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a mechanism to control the softness of attention by means of an attention temperature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on Chinese-English and English-Vietnamese translations. |
Learning Interpretable Relationships between Entities, Relations and Concepts via Bayesian Structure Learning on Open Domain Facts (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Concept graphs are created as universal taxonomies for text understanding in the open domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn interpretable relationships from open-domain facts to enrich concept graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the identification of concepts for entities based on relations between entities on public English and Chinese datasets. |
CDAˆ2: Counterfactual Diffusion Augmentation for Cross-Domain Adaptation in Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Domain adaptation is widely employed in cross-domain sentiment analysis, but concerns have been raised regarding their robustness and sensitivity to data distribution shift. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework CDA2 for cross-domain adaptation in low-resource sentiment analysis which employs counterfactual diffusion augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality counterfactual target samples and achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. |
Summarize, Outline, and Elaborate: Long-Text Generation via Hierarchical Supervision from Extractive Summaries (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on local word prediction, and cannot make high level plans on what to generate. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipelined system that summarises, outlines and elaborates on each bullet point to generate the corresponding segment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system produces long texts with significantly better quality and faster convergence speed. |
Latent-Condensed Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) reduces the KV cache by projecting tokens into a low-dimensional latent space, while sparse attention reduces computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Latent-Condensed Attention mechanism that performs structured context condensation directly within MLA's latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces KV cache size and attention cost without adding parameters. |
Aggregation of Reasoning: A Hierarchical Framework for Enhancing Answer Selection in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Zhangyue Yin, Qiushi Sun, Qipeng Guo, Zhiyuan Zeng, Xiaonan Li, Tianxiang Sun, Cheng Chang, Qinyuan Cheng, Ding Wang, Xiaofeng Mou, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought prompting have facilitated significant breakthroughs for Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reasoning aggregation framework to address this problem . they propose dynamic sampling to adjust the number of reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing ensemble methods on complex reasoning tasks. |
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
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Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model. |
How Numerical Precision Affects Arithmetical Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Guhao Feng, Kai Yang, Yuntian Gu, Xinyue Ai, Shengjie Luo, Jiacheng Sun, Di He, Zhenguo Li, Liwei Wang
| Challenge: | Despite the success of transformer-based large language models, understanding and enhancing their mathematical capabilities remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use numerical precision as a key factor that influences LLMs' effectiveness in arithmetical tasks to determine their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform better in arithmetic tasks than transformer-based models with standard numerical precision. |
Exploring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning for Generative Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have incredible instruction-following capabilities while maintaining strong task completion ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to encourage LLMs to Forget Spurious correlations and Learn from In-context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can mitigate shortcut learning by forging spurious correlations and learning from in-context information. |
Zero-Shot Defense Against Toxic Images via Inherent Multimodal Alignment in LVLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing safeguards relying on pre-filtering or fine-tuning are costly and diminish overall utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight method that leverages LVLMs’ inherent multimodal alignment for zero-shot toxic image detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 66.9% defense success rate with only 3.2% false positive rate and 7.2% overhead. |
DAPE V2: Process Attention Score as Feature Map for Length Extrapolation (2025.acl-long)
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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Jiankai Sun, Jingyao Li, Minbin Huang, Xiaozhe Ren, Michael Ng, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that treating attention as a feature map and applying convolution as . a processing method significantly enhances Transformer performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the convolution operator to mimic the processing methods in computer vision to treat attention as a feature map and apply it to neighboring attention scores across different heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be adapted to various attention-related models and achieves high performance. |
A Semi-Autoregressive Graph Generative Model for Dependency Graph Parsing (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing parsers that capture dependency graphs are lacking in capturing explicit dependencies . graph-based parsing is a popular choice for capturing dependency relationships between words . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-autoregressive dependency parser that generates dependency graphs by adding nodes and edge groups autoregressively while pouring out all group elements in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on Enhanced Universal Dependencies of multiple languages. |
From Characters to Words: Hierarchical Pre-trained Language Model for Open-vocabulary Language Understanding (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current models for natural language understanding require a preprocessing step to convert raw text into discrete tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical open-vocabulary language model that adopts a shallow Transformer architecture to learn word representations from their characters and a deep inter-word Transformer module that contextualizes each word representation by attending to the entire word sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on various downstream tasks and is robust to textual corruption and domain shift. |
DocAgent: An Agentic Framework for Multi-Modal Long-Context Document Understanding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to document understanding are limited due to limited context length or fail to fully leverage multi-modal information. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for long-context document understanding that imitates human reading practice. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses human-level benchmarks on long-context document understanding while maintaining a short context length. |
CodeIE: Large Code Generation Models are Better Few-Shot Information Extractors (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models pre-trained on massive corpora have shown impressive few-shot learning ability on many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to recast structured output in the form of code instead of natural language and use generative LLMs of code to perform IE tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fine-tuning moderate-size pre-trained models and prompting NL-LLMs under few-shot settings. |
Dynamic Stochastic Decoding Strategy for Open-Domain Dialogue Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Stochastic sampling strategies are not widely used in open-domain dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic decoding strategy which can adjust the decoding space w.r.t. different contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed decoding strategy can improve the performance of pre-trained models when coupled with four well-used stochastic decoding algorithms. |
Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods conduct knowledge distillation statically, e.g., student model aligns output distribution to teacher model on pre-defined training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic knowledge distillation that empowers the student to adjust the learning procedure according to its competency . they find it is promising and provide discussions on potential future directions towards more efficient methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost student model performance while accelerating training . the proposed method reduces memory usage and accelerates model inference . |
Chain-of-Thought Matters: Improving Long-Context Language Models with Reasoning Path Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Zhu, Xiyu Wei, Guangxiang Zhao, Wenhao Wu, Haosheng Zou, Junfeng Ran, null XWang, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought framework that teaches models to generate high-quality reasoning paths for enhanced long-context performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes across most long-context scenarios and amplifys with increasing context length. |
Example Quality Matters: Multi-Aspects Example Augmentation for Private Library Programming (2026.acl-long)
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Yuhao Li, Haifeng Sun, Xuesong Zhang, Shu Yao, Haoyu Zheng, Yvchuan Wang, Huazheng Wang, Zirui Zhuang, Qi Qi, Jianxin Liao, Jingyu Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to code generation fail to consider the quality of retrieved examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that combines existing API examples to improve complexity and readability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 22% accuracy improvement over baseline methods. |
ENPAR:Enhancing Entity and Entity Pair Representations for Joint Entity Relation Extraction (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for joint entity relation extraction use multitask learning frameworks, but annotations for additional tasks are hard to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training method to improve the joint extraction performance with just extra entity annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on ACE05, SciERC, and NYT and outperformed BERT on other tasks. |
Multi-Perspective Context Aggregation for Semi-supervised Cloze-style Reading Comprehension (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that cloze-style reading comprehension is a popular task for measuring the progress of natural language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective framework which can be seen as joint training of heterogeneous experts and aggregate context information from different perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art over previous strong baselines on a recently released cloze-test dataset. |
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Hui Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Yifan Yang, Shujie Liu, Junyang Chen, Yanzhe Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Jinyu Li, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Yan Lu, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages. |
CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which emits predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing methods on six classification tasks yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions. |
Combating Security and Privacy Issues in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | a tutorial aims to provide a summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . a number of studies have focused on security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Approach: | This tutorial seeks to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . authors will discuss security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . it will also outline emerging challenges in security, privacy and reliability of LLMs . |
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Chenyang Song, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Xiyu Shi, Kuai Li, Chen Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Guangli Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance. |
LogitSpec: Accelerating Retrieval-based Speculative Decoding via Next Next Token Speculation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate draft tokens in a retrieval-based manner to reduce drafting overhead and improve inference speed. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests show that *LogitSpec* can achieve 2.61 speedup and 3.28 mean accepted tokens per decoding step. |
The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell Checking (2022.findings-acl)
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Yinghui Li, Qingyu Zhou, Yangning Li, Zhongli Li, Ruiyang Liu, Rongyi Sun, Zizhen Wang, Chao Li, Yunbo Cao, Hai-Tao Zheng
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors, which are caused by the phonological or visual similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose an Error-driven COntrastive Probability Optimization framework to refine the knowledge representations of pre-trained language models to avoid predicting common characters. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on SIGHAN datasets demonstrate that ECOPO is simple yet effective. |
DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset (P19-1)
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Yuan Yao, Deming Ye, Peng Li, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lixin Huang, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation extraction dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features . document-level relation extraction is a task to identify relational facts between entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text. |
LEGENT: Open Platform for Embodied Agents (2024.acl-demos)
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Zhili Cheng, Zhitong Wang, Jinyi Hu, Shengding Hu, An Liu, Yuge Tu, Pengkai Li, Lei Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing integrations of large language models and large multimodal models are limited . Existing platforms for developing embodied agents are limited and limited based on open-source software. |
| Approach: | They propose an open platform for developing embodied agents using LLMs and LMMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform surpasses GPT-4V in embodied tasks with its model training on LEGENT data. |
ModularMoE: Fast LLM Customization with Parameter-Sharing Mixture-of-Experts for Low-Resource Settings (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaxing Liu, Qi Qi, Haifeng Sun, Dunjun Li, Zirui Zhuang, Bo He, Xiang Yang, Cong Liu, Jianxin Liao, Jingyu Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models impose significant computational and storage burdens on personal devices . existing customization approaches incur excessive computational costs or lead to suboptimal performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that converts pre-trained LLMs into parameter-sharing MoE models for lightweight deployment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework outperforms state-of-the-art training frameworks at the same sparsity level while delivering up to 2.71 inference speedup. |
SoFA: Shielded On-the-fly Alignment via Priority Rule Following (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods fail to adapt to the diversity of preferences and regulatory standards. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for prioritizing rules over user instructions to minimize misalignments in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes misalignments and adapts smoothly to various unseen rules, ensuring they are shielded from hijacking and that the model responds appropriately. |