Papers by Li Tang
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. |
ITERATE: Image-Text Enhancement, Retrieval, and Alignment for Transmodal Evolution with LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for visual annotation of text-based questions is needed to improve performance . obtaining corresponding images through manual annotation often entails high costs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses visual modality to enhance the performance of text-based questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the alignment between text and images by using search engines or web scraping techniques. |
DiffuSpec: Unlocking Diffusion Language Models for Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) decoding in large language models is latency-bounded by strictly sequential token generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion-based drafter that proposes multi-token candidates and then verifies them in parallel by the target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed drafter generates multi-token proposals in a single forward pass while remaining compatible with standard AR verifiers. |
Distance-Based Propagation for Efficient Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict unseen edges in knowledge graphs (KGs) . a few recent attempts to address this problem sacrifice the performance to gain efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that aggregates path information to solve this problem by aggregating paths in a fixed window for each source-target pair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can cut down on the number of propagated messages by 90% while achieving competitive performance on multiple KG datasets. |
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiming Zhang, Qingyao Li, Xinyi Dai, Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
R2A-TLS: Reflective Retrieval-Augmented Timeline Summarization with Causal-Semantic Integration (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to capture coherent event narratives due to fragmented descriptions . Existing approaches accumulate noise through iterative retrieval strategies that lack relevance evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reflective retrieval-augmented timeline summarization with Causal-Semantic Intergration approach for open-domain timeline summarizing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the best prior published approaches. |
Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for natural language generation are pre-trained on text-only corpora, resulting in visual commonsense. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that makes pre-trained language models learn to imagine for visually-augmented natural language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with Transformer-based architecture. |
LaCo: Layer-wise Compensation for Pruned Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting performance degradations of Large Language Models (LLMs) neglect the structural distortions caused by sparsity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reorients the recovery paradigm from global adaptation to hierarchical representation alignment by sequentially optimizing each layer to reconstruct the model's hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses parameter-efficient baselines in perplexity reduction and zero-shot reasoning. |
Multi-Document Scientific Summarization from a Knowledge Graph-Centric View (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-Document Scientific Summarization (MDSS) aims to produce concise and concise summaries for clusters of topic-relevant scientific papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that incorporates knowledge graphs into paper encoding and decoding processes and propose 'decoder' for generating knowledge graph information of summary in the form of descriptive sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves on baselines on the Multi-Xscience dataset. |
Too Long, Do Re-weighting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Zhong-Zhi Li, Xiao Liang, Zihao Tang, Lei Ji, Peijie Wang, Haotian Xu, Xing W, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Yeyun Gong, Zhijiang Guo, Xiao Liu, Fei Yin, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks by leveraging extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses Extended Chain-of-Thought (EFT) to reduce the number of output tokens by nearly 40% while maintaining the accuracy of the reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the number of output tokens by nearly 40% while maintaining the accuracy of the reasoning. |
On the Analysis and Distillation of Emergent Outlier Properties in Pre-trained Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that a small subset of dimensions within language Transformers’ representation spaces emerge as "outliers" during pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prioritizes critical outlier dimensions in distillation using a weighted MSE loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art distillation methods and generalizes well across Encoder-only BERT, Decoder-only GPT-2, and Encodeer-Decoder T5 architectures. |
Boosting Multi-modal Keyphrase Prediction with Dynamic Chain-of-Thought in Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qihang Ma, Shengyu Li, Jie Tang, Dingkang Yang, null Chenshaodong, Yingyi Zhang, Chao Feng, Ran Jiao
| Challenge: | Multi-modal keyphrase prediction (MMKP) aims to produce concise, informative phrases that capture the essence of cross-modal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models to generate conclusive phrases using multiple modalities of input information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods on absence and unseen scenarios and overestimate model capability due to overlap in training tests. |
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 . |
GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Weidong Tang, Jierui Li, Yueling Hou, Zihan Mei, Can Zhang, Xinyan Wan, Zhiyuan Liang, Pengfei Zhou, Yang You, Wangbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing models for general intelligence fail to model how mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark for group-level Theory of Mind (ToM) to probe nonlinear collective behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly below human levels, exposing blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior. |
Improving Speech Translation by Understanding and Learning from the Auxiliary Text Translation Task (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pretraining and multitask learning are widely used to improve the speech translation performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a speech translation model along with an auxiliary text translation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality by more than 2 BLEU over a strong baseline and achieves state-of-the-art results on the MuST-C English-German, English-French and English-Spanish language pairs. |
DuReader_robust: A Chinese Dataset Towards Evaluating Robustness and Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension in Real-World Applications (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | In order to comprehensively verify the robustness and generalization of MRC models, we construct a real-world Chinese dataset - DuReader_robust . |
| Approach: | They introduce a real-world Chinese dataset to evaluate the robustness and generalization of MRC models from three aspects: over-sensitivity, over-stability and generalisation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to perform well on the challenge test set and may provide suggestions for future model development. |
Multilingual Speech Translation from Efficient Finetuning of Pretrained Models (2021.acl-long)
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Xian Li, Changhan Wang, Yun Tang, Chau Tran, Yuqing Tang, Juan Pino, Alexei Baevski, Alexis Conneau, Michael Auli
| Challenge: | Recent advances in text pretraining and finetuning have improved multitasking applications significantly. |
| Approach: | They propose a minimalistic LNA finetuning approach to build multilingual speech-to-text translation using a pretrained speech encoder and text decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses the cascaded ST benchmark for 36 translation directions on the large-scale multilingual ST benchmark CoVoST 2. |
RoadMapper: A Multi-Agent System for Roadmap Generation of Solving Complex Research Problems (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiacheng Liu, Zichen Tang, Zhongjun Yang, Xinyi Hu, Xueyuan Lin, Linwei Jia, Ruofei Bai, Rongjin Li, Shiyao Peng, Haocheng Gao, Haihong E
| Challenge: | Existing tools to generate structured content for research tasks are limited in their ability to generate high-quality roadmaps. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality roadmaps for solving complex research problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can improve LLMs’ ability for roadmap generation while saving 84% of the time required by human experts. |
AnRe: Analogical Replay for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) are vital for event prediction, yet current methods face limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free Analogical Replay reasoning framework that uses LLMs to extract historical contexts and generate analogical reasoning examples as contextual inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing training-free methods on four benchmarks. |
Context-Tuning: Learning Contextualized Prompts for Natural Language Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pretrained language models (PLMs) lack sufficient consideration of input semantics to generate natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a continuous prompting approach to fine-tune PLMs for natural language generation by modeling an inverse generation process from output to input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fine-tunes only 0.12% of the parameters while maintaining good performance. |
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. |
From Charts to Code: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Multimodal Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jiahao Tang, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Lijian Wu, Zijian Zhang, Yifei Tao, Dongxing Mao, Yang Wan, Jingru Tan, Min Zeng, Min Li, Alex Jinpeng Wang
| Challenge: | Chart2Code is a new benchmark for evaluating the natural language to chart code generation capabilities of large multimodal models. |
| Approach: | They introduce Chart2Code, a new benchmark for evaluating the natural language to chart code generation capabilities of large multimodal models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is the first to scale task complexity while capturing diverse scenarios. |
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. |
Rethinking Sample Polarity in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models are typically trained using reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) positive and negative self-generated rollouts are used to update the model's policy . positive samples sharpen existing correct reasoning patterns, while negative samples encourage exploration of new reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates advantage signals to key tokens across different polarities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the ability of large reasoning models to learn from their own generated rollouts. |
Legal Mathematical Reasoning with LLMs: Procedural Alignment through Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing legal mathematical reasoning models lack structured numerical reasoning . existing models perform poorly on LexNum, while LexPam improves both mathematical accuracy and legal coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a legal mathematical reasoning benchmark LexNum and LexPam to address this problem . LexPam is a two-stage reinforcement learning framework for efficient legal reasoning training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves mathematical accuracy and legal coherence . it also improves legal cohesion and generalizes effectively across tasks and domains. |
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods for knowledge base question answering are either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph retrieval framework that decouples the retrieval from the subsequent reasoning process and trains subgraphs for easier reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval and QA performance over existing methods. |
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueyang Feng, Jingsen Zhang, Jiakai Tang, Wei Li, Guohao Cai, Xu Chen, Quanyu Dai, Yue Zhu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
Instruction-following Evaluation through Verbalizer Manipulation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on common instructions that align well with what the model learned during training, but proficiency in responding to these instructions does not necessarily imply strong ability in instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a new instruction-following evaluation protocol called verbalizer manipulation that instructs the model to verbalize the task label with words aligning with model priors to different extents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol can be integrated with any classification benchmark to examine the model’s reliance on priors and its ability to override them to accurately follow the instructions. |
UHGEval: Benchmarking the Hallucination of Chinese Large Language Models via Unconstrained Generation (2024.acl-long)
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Xun Liang, Shichao Song, Simin Niu, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Bo Tang, Yezhaohui Wang, Dawei He, Cheng Peng, Zhonghao Wang, Haiying Deng
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) produce hallucinated text, compromising their practical utility in professional contexts. |
| Approach: | They have developed an unconstrained hallucination generation evaluation benchmark that contains hallucines generated by large language models with minimal restrictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on a Chinese-language dataset that is lacking in the field. |
HSUGA: LLM-Enhanced Recommendation with Hierarchical Semantic Understanding and Group-Aware Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing sequential recommendation use long interaction sequences, but they lack the ability to extract user preferences from long sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a plugin that integrates LLMs to infer user preferences from interaction sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms improve user semantic embedding extraction and utilization on three benchmark datasets. |
Towards Knowledge Checking in Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Representation Perspective (2025.naacl-long)
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Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Bingheng Li, Yuping Lin, Tianqi Zheng, Dante Everaert, Hanqing Lu, Hui Liu, Hui Liu, Yue Xing, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LLMs struggle to identify the boundaries of their own knowledge and tend to prioritize external information over internal knowledge learned during pre-training. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM representation behaviors and demonstrate the significance of using representations in knowledge checking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifiers improve performance even when dealing with noisy knowledge databases. |
MegaAgent: A Large-Scale Autonomous LLM-based Multi-Agent System Without Predefined SOPs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent systems lack agent coordination and rely on predefined procedures . existing systems lack adaptive task coordination when task is big and complex . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale autonomous LLM-based multi-agent system that generates agents based on task complexity and enables dynamic task decomposition, parallel execution, efficient communication and comprehensive system monitoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing systems in task completion efficiency and scalability. |
DEED: Dynamic Early Exit on Decoder for Accelerating Encoder-Decoder Transformer Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Encoder-decoder transformer models suffer from high inference latency due to auto-regressive decoding . Typically, the decoder takes up most of the latency because of the auto-decoding - a problem that is not solved by the current model. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to perform Dynamic Early Exit on Decoder to reduce inference latency by 20%-74% by using a multi-exit encoder-decoder transformer model trained with deep supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces inference latency by 20%-74% with comparable or even higher accuracy compared to baseline models. |
Improving Temporal Generalization of Pre-trained Language Models with Lexical Semantic Change (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve neural language models perform poorly on emerging data. |
| Approach: | They propose a lexical-level masking strategy to post-train a neural language model using static data from past years. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two pre-trained language models, two classification tasks, and four benchmark datasets. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
OptiCo: Adaptive Distributed Training Optimization via Collaborative Agent Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing distributed training frameworks are plagued by over-reliance on prior profiling and poor generalization across models/hardware. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-driven multi-agent framework that leverages Large Language Models to enable automatic and explainable distributed training strategy configuration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms expert-designed training strategies within 20 iterations. |
DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xin Liu, Zhengyang Wang, Xianfeng Tang, Shiyang Li, Xiang He, Ruijie Wang, Bing Yin, Xiao Gu, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton
| Challenge: | commercial LLMs can be difficult to use in real-world clinical decision-making . a lightweight LLM can be used to collaborate with diverse clinical tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight LLM that can be used to build medical LLMs as agents . they use recursive curriculum learning to optimize the LLM in an easy-to-hard progression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms human experts in medical examinations on diverse datasets. |
Self-supervised Meta-Prompt Learning with Meta-Gradient Regularization for Few-shot Generalization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt tuning can overfit to few-shot training samples, causing overfitting . authors propose a new framework for prompt learning with supervised meta-learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised meta-prompt learning framework with MEta-gradient Regularization for few-shot generalization that leverages self-recognized meta-learning with a diverse set of meta-tasks to learn a universal prompt initialization using only unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns a universal prompt initialization for efficient adaptation using only unlabeled data. |
mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Xin Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Wen Xie, Ziqi Dai, Jialong Tang, Huan Lin, Baosong Yang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Meishan Zhang, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for text retrieval are based on a multi-stage process that involves retrieving documents from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual text representation model and a cross-encoder reranker from scratch for text retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on long-context retrieval benchmarks. |
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Shuyue Guo, Yizhi LI, Linzheng Chai, Zhengmao Ye, Shukai Liu, Yuyang Song, Jiajun Wu, Che Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Siwei Wu, Leo L, Xudong Ma, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Yan Xing, Jianzhou Wang, Mingjie Tang, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters. |
Revealing and Mitigating the Local Pattern Shortcuts of Mamba (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Mamba excels in tasks that involve localized key information but faces challenges with tasks that require handling distributed key information. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a global gate module into Mamba to address this problem by adding 4M extra parameters to the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms attention-based models on synthetic and synthetic tasks with only 4M extra parameters. |
TS-Align: A Teacher-Student Collaborative Framework for Scalable Iterative Finetuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mainstream approaches to aligning large language models heavily rely on human preference data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fine-tunes a policy model using pairwise feedback data automatically mined from its outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the base model with an average win rate of 69.7% across seven conversational or instruction-following datasets. |
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. |
ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions (2024.findings-acl)
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Honglin Lin, Siyu Li, Guoshun Nan, Chaoyue Tang, Xueting Wang, Jingxin Xu, Rong Yankai, Zhouzhili Zhouzhili, Yutong Gao, Qimei Cui, Xiaofeng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to image retrieval from contextual descriptions (IRCD) lag behind human performance in IRCD. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that relies on a doubly contextual alignment scheme for challenging IRCD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can yield comparable results with GPT-4V, despite fewer parameters. |
Align2LLaVA: Cascaded Human and Large Language Model Preference Alignment for Multi-modal Instruction Curation (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongzhe Huang, Jiang Liu, Zhewen Yu, Li Cai, Dian Jiao, Wenqiao Zhang, Siliang Tang, Juncheng Li, Hao Jiang, Haoyuan Li, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) introduce significant variability in data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human and LLM preference alignment to compress large corpus of machine-generated multimodal instructions into a compact and high-quality form. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms LLaVA-series models in MLLM benchmarks by 90% . it uses human and LLM preference alignment to compress a large dataset . |
BlendFilter: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Query Generation Blending and Knowledge Filtering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haoyu Wang, Ruirui Li, Haoming Jiang, Jinjin Tian, Zhengyang Wang, Chen Luo, Xianfeng Tang, Monica Cheng, Tuo Zhao, Jing Gao
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models struggle with complex inputs and noisy knowledge retrieval hindering model effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a query generation method that integrates query generation blending with knowledge filtering to enhance retrieval-augmented LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks on open-domain question answering benchmarks. |
FastMem: Fast Memorization of Prompt Improves Context Awareness of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with context awareness, leading to inaccuracies in tasks requiring faithful adherence to provided information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance LLMs' context awareness by updating only the last Feed-Forward Network module to maximize the likelihood of the prompt before inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of Llama 3-8B-Inst on the NQ-SWAP dataset from 59.1% to 71.6% and reduces the output structure failure rate of Qwen 1.5-4B-Chat from 34.9% to 25.5%. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
MATO: A Model-Agnostic Training Optimization for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with strong in-house performance may struggle to generalize to diverse expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic t**raining method to improve ASTE model inference . they propose to compute the violation rate (VR) on each element of one triplet . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve aspect sentiment triplet extraction models consistent with expected results facing triplet element diversity. |
Bridging Relevance and Reasoning: Rationale Distillation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Xiaopeng Li, Zhaocheng Du, Xiangyang Li, Yichao Wang, Yuhao Wang, Qidong Liu, Maolin Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rerank and align documents based on reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) . prior work shows that LLMs have exceptional reasoning and text generation capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale extraction method that leverages reasoning capabilities of large language models to extract the rationales necessary for answering a query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compared with baseline methods on two tasks across three datasets. |
TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition (2025.acl-long)
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Tianwei Lin, Jiang Liu, Wenqiao Zhang, Yang Dai, Haoyuan Li, Zhelun Yu, Wanggui He, Juncheng Li, Jiannan Guo, Hao Jiang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning are resource-efficient, but performance often falls short . a new approach, TeamLoRA, integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce task-specific LoRA as domain experts to improve learning efficiency . teamLoRA integrates collaborative and competition modules to improve model learning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TeamLoRA improves performance in multi-task learning . teamLorea integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance . |
LEMMA: Learning from Errors for MatheMatical Advancement in LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoshi Pan, Yu Li, Honglin Lin, Qizhi Pei, Zinan Tang, Wei Wu, Chenlin Ming, H. Vicky Zhao, Conghui He, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on improving the quality of correct training data, neglecting the value contained in error data, thereby hindering the model’s reflective ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve LLM's reasoning ability by learning from error data and a grounded mistake augmentation method to collect representative errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant performance improvements over other strong models with less than 90k data. |
xDial-Eval: A Multilingual Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation Benchmark (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Currently, human evaluation is the most reliable way to holistically judge the quality of the dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English dialogue evaluation metrics to generalize them to other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics outperform OpenAI’s ChatGPT in terms of average Pearson correlations over all datasets and languages. |
Meta-Reflection: A Feedback-Free Reflection Learning Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Yaoke Wang, Yun Zhu, XintongBao XintongBao, Wenqiao Zhang, Suyang Dai, Kehan Chen, Wenqiang Li, Gang Huang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve large language models' ability to understand and reason are limited by external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-free reflection mechanism that requires only a single inference pass without external feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on an industrial e-commerce benchmark and public datasets. |
LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025.coling-main)
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Wenlin Zhang, Chuhan Wu, Xiangyang Li, Yuhao Wang, Kuicai Dong, Yichao Wang, Xinyi Dai, Xiangyu Zhao, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang
| Challenge: | Lack of training data leads to the system cold-start problem in recommendation systems, making them struggle to provide effective recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-based LLM recommendation framework which structures all items into an item tree to improve the efficiency of LLM’s item retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the baseline model in the A/B test on Huawei industrial system. |
Global Structure Knowledge-Guided Relation Extraction Method for Visually-Rich Document (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on manipulating entity features to find pairwise relations, yet neglect the more fundamental structural information that links disparate entity pairs together. |
| Approach: | They propose a Visual Relation Extraction framework that generates relation predictions on entity pairs extracted from scanned images and incorporates global structural knowledge into the representations of the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in fine-tuning setting and yields stronger data-efficient performance in the low-resource setting. |
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. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)
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Xiangru Tang, Anni Zou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ziming Li, Yilun Zhao, Xingyao Zhang, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein
| Challenge: | Large language models face unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and reasoning over specialized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-disciplinary collaboration framework that leverages LLM-based agents in a role-playing setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels at mining and harnessing medical expertise within LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities. |
LoRA-PAR: A Flexible Dual-System LoRA Partitioning Approach to Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale generative models like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-O1 benefit substantially from chain-of-thought reasoning, yet pushing their performance typically requires vast data, large model sizes, and full-parameter fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-system LoRA framework that partitions data and parameters by System 1 or System 2 demands and adopts a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance knowledge and intuition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework partitions data and parameters by System 1 or System 2 demands, using fewer yet more focused parameters for each task. |
Data Efficient RLVR via Off-Policy Influence Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Erle Zhu, Dazhi Jiang, Yuan Wang, Xujun Li, Jiale Cheng, Yuxian Gu, Yilin Niu, Aohan Zeng, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang, Hongning Wang
| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods for RLVR are heuristic-based, lacking theoretical guarantees and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose an off-policy influence estimation method that approximates data influence using offline trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational cost of policy rollouts and improves storage and computation efficiency. |
NLP for preserving Torlak, a vulnerable low-resource Slavic language (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Torlak is an endangered, low-resource Slavic language with a high degree of areal and inter-speaker variation. |
| Approach: | They aim to improve the prediction of morphosyntactic annotations for this low-resource Slavic language using the fine-tuning of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve the prediction of morphosyntactic annotations for Torlak using fine-tuning of large language models. |
DeepSynth-Eval: Objectively Evaluating Information Consolidation in Deep Survey Writing (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongzhi Zhang, Yuanze Hu, Tinghai Zhang, Jia Fu, Tao Wang, Junwei Jing, Zhaoxin Fan, Wei Bi, Ruiming Tang, Han Li, Guorui Zhou, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving towards autonomous agents . retrieval capabilities are well-benchmarked, but post-retrieval synthesis is under-evaluated due to open-ended writing. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate information consolidation capabilities using survey papers as gold standards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark analyzes the post-retrieval synthesis stage of large language models . it leverages high-quality survey papers as gold standards and reverse-engineers research requests . the proposed benchmark outperforms single-turn generation and reduces hallucinations . |
KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing language representation models (PLMs) cannot capture factual knowledge from text. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained LanguagERepresentation which integrates factual knowledge into PLMs and produces effective text-enhanced KE with the strong PLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing pre-trained language representation models and improves their performance on various NLP tasks. |
Humanity’s Last Code Exam: Can Advanced LLMs Conquer Human’s Hardest Code Competition? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiangyang Li, Xiaopeng Li, Kuicai Dong, null Zhangquanhu, Rongju Ruan, Xinyi Dai, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang
| Challenge: | o4-mini(high) and Gemini-2.5 Pro achieve pass@1 rates of only 15.9% and 11.4%, respectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a harmonized online–offline sandbox that guarantees fully reproducible evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test reflects the advanced reasoning and code generation ability of large language models. |
Reason in Chains, Learn in Trees: Self-Rectification and Grafting for Multi-turn Agent Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning for Large Language Models treat trajectories as independent chains and ignore critical steps that may disproportionally impact reasoning outcome. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that recovers latent correlated reward structure across seemingly independent trajectories by identifying and merging functionally similar steps/nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework recovers latent correlated reward structure across seemingly independent trajectories. |
Integrating Data Validation with Large Language Models for Regulation-Guided Tabular Anomaly Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tabular anomaly detection methods focus on detecting anomalies based on data distribution without considering regulatory compliance. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that leverages regulations to detect anomalies in tabular data . they also develop three new datasets to address this task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three new datasets. |
Prototype-based Prompt-Instance Interaction with Causal Intervention for Few-shot Event Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot Event Detection (FSED) requires limited labeled data and expensive manual labeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a prototype-based prompt-instance Interaction with causal Intervention model to utilize both prompts and verbalizers and effectively eliminate all biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model utilizes both prompts and verbalizers and eliminates all biases on RAMS and ACE datasets. |
Don’t Just Listen, Try Planning: Graph-based Retrieval-Generation Agent for Long-form Audio Meeting Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering (QA) datasets for long audio meetings suffer from acoustic information loss and poor long-term dependency capture. |
| Approach: | They propose a question answering dataset that captures three core dimensions of long-form audio meeting content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures three core dimensions of long-form audio meeting content: complex semantics, multi-speaker interactions, and quite long timestamps. |
EvoMD-LLM: Learning the Language of Species Evolution in Reactive Molecular Dynamics (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models operate on static molecular representations or rely on external tools for reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates species-level molecular dynamics as a symbolic temporal language modeling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms neural networks and language-based baselines on multiple temporal prediction tasks and generates plausible interpretations of reaction dynamics. |
Lifting Optimized Binaries to Canonical Compiler IR via Structure-Aware Retrieval and Iterative Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decompiling binary code are brittle due to compiler optimizations that distort control-flow and data-flow structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that lifts optimized binaries to canonical compiler intermediate representation (IR) BRIDGE uses control-flow-aware retrieval-augmented generation with feedback-driven verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms seven baselines on humanEval-Decompile and MBPP, lifting x86-64 and ARM64 binaries to LLVM IR. |
From Schema to State: Zero-Shot Scheme-Only Dialogue State Tracking via Diverse Synthetic Dialogue and Step-by-Step Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research classifies zero-shot, scheme-only DST into two main types: the cross-domain scenario and the zero-schemaonly setting. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot, scheme-only approach that generates synthetic dialogues that balance diversity with schema alignment and distills knowledge from a large language model into a smaller model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance under zero-shot, scheme-only situation and generalizes effectively to few-shot scenarios. |
Can Diffusion Model Achieve Better Performance in Text Generation ? Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference ! (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text generation use a discrete data embedding module to map the data into the continuous space. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to bridge the gap between training and inference by mapping the discrete text into the continuous space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can achieve 100 200 speedup with better performance on 6 generation tasks. |
IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchy (2025.naacl-long)
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Zhihan Zhang, Shiyang Li, Zixuan Zhang, Xin Liu, Haoming Jiang, Xianfeng Tang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Haodong Wang, Zhaoxuan Tan, Yichuan Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned language models (LMs) are increasingly deployed as interactive services across various applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to follow the instruction hierarchy by comparing their models to a set of benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 3,538 examples across nine tasks covering cases where instructions in different priorities either align or conflict. |
A Topic Augmented Text Generation Model: Joint Learning of Semantics and Structural Features (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation are limited in supervised setting and designed for specific applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a text generation model that learns semantics and structural features simultaneously . their model leverages a topic-based model to enhance the recognition of text semantics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of text perplexity and topic coherence. |
T2DR: A Two-Tier Deficiency-Resistant Framework for Incomplete Multimodal Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing incomplete multimodal learning frameworks are inadequate for integrating multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for incomplete multimodal learning that is deficiency-resistant and provides two modules to address fine-grained deficiencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the SOTA models on two well-known multimodal benchmarks. |
Leveraging Generative Large Language Models with Visual Instruction and Demonstration Retrieval for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sarcasm detection do not fully utilize cross-modal features, limiting their performance on in-domain datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal sarcasm detection model with a designed instruction template and a demonstration retrieval module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on in-domain datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
Multi-Granularity Semantic Revision for Large Language Model Distillation (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaoyu Liu, Yun Zhang, Wei Li, Simiao Li, Xudong Huang, Hanting Chen, Yehui Tang, Jie Hu, Zhiwei Xiong, Yunhe Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models rely on student-generated outputs, which introduce generation errors and misguide the distillation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity semantic revision method for LLM distillation that corrects errors using teacher-generated tokens and re-generates the sequence to minimize errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces errors and misguides distillation on student models and improves consistency between teacher and student outputs. |
FinanceReasoning: Benchmarking Financial Numerical Reasoning More Credible, Comprehensive and Challenging (2025.acl-long)
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Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Ziyan Ma, Haoyang He, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Zihua Rong, Rongjin Li, Kun Ji, Qing Huang, Xinyang Hu, Yang Liu, Qianhe Zheng
| Challenge: | Compared to existing benchmarks, FinanceReasoning provides three key advancements: (1) credibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) numerical precision; (4) complexity; (5) complexity; and (6) complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) in financial numerical reasoning problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in 67.8% of financial concepts and formulas and is credible, comprehensive, and challenging. |
DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang, Yixin Ji, Qianben Chen, Zhe Zhao, Kehai Chen, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based reward modeling methods face a recursive dependency where each verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual RM that couples discriminative and generative reward models under a non-parametric meta-reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks and even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench. |
Tool Zero: Training Tool-Augmented LLMs via Pure RL from Scratch (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yirong Zeng, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Li Du, Juyi Dai, Qiuyang Ding, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Weiwen Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve over 7% performance improvement compared to both SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic generalization-guided reward design for rule-based RL that shifts rewards from exploratory to exploitative tool-use patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves over 7% performance improvement compared to SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. |
When Backdoors Speak: Understanding LLM Backdoor Attacks Through Model-Generated Explanations (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to backdoor attacks, where triggers embedded in poisoned data can maliciously alter LLMs’ behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage LLMs' generative capabilities to generate human-readable explanations for their decisions, enabling direct comparisons between explanations of clean and poisoned data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces coherent explanations for clean inputs but logically flawed explanations on poisoned data. |
Reasoning Makes Good Annotators : An Automatic Task-specific Rules Distilling Framework for Low-resource Relation Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract knowledge from unlabeled data generate noise labels. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic task-specific rules distilling framework to generate a logic rule from unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework could power the labeling ability by discovering reliable model-labeled data. |
CLEAR: A Clinically Grounded Tabular Framework for Radiology Report Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuyang Jiang, Chacha Chen, Shengyuan Wang, Feng Li, Zecong Tang, Benjamin M. Mervak, Lydia Chelala, Christopher M Straus, Reve Chahine, Samuel G. Armato Iii, Chenhao Tan
| Challenge: | Existing metrics lack the granularity and interpretability to capture nuanced clinical differences between candidate and ground-truth radiology reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a tabular framework with E**xpert-curated labels and an attribute-level comparison for radiology report evaluation (**CLEAR) |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract clinical attributes and provide automated metrics that are strongly aligned with clinical judgment. |
ZoomRAG: Hierarchical Random-walk Zooming across Multi-scale Information Graphs for Fast and Accurate RAG (2026.findings-acl)
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Xianming Hu, Jingyang Chen, Bin Tang, Yihe Liu, Yihong Huang, Hongbo Zhao, Nuoyi Chen, Jie Zhang, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful tool for NLP applications . but it is challenging to encode large knowledge bases as compact offline structures . |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical graph inference method that uses random walks to retrieve information from a corpus of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces offline indexing costs and accelerates retrieval. |
MBA-RAG: a Bandit Approach for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Question Complexity (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG frameworks either indiscriminately perform retrieval or rely on rigid single-label classifiers to select retrieval methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically selects the most suitable retrieval strategy based on query complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple single-hop and multi-hop datasets while reducing retrieval costs. |
From Implicit Graph Encoding to Explicit Evidence: A Training-Free LLM Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Guo Tang, Ke Cheng, Huiming Fan, Heng Chang, Wenxiang Zheng, Xianhao Ou, Junjia Xiang, Ming Liu, Yujun Zhou, Li Lanyu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with implicit modality alignment and suboptimal graph linearization. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, test-time adaptive framework that reframes TKG prediction as explicit evidence-driven reasoning. |
| Outcome: | ExE-LLM outperforms fully trained graph neural networks on four benchmarks . it achieves SOTA performance in inductive settings, significantly outperforming fully trained neural networks . |
Are Message Passing Neural Networks Really Helpful for Knowledge Graph Completion? (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs are far from complete with large portions of triplets missing. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Graph Neural Networks to learn powerful embeddings to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve comparable performance to MLP models, suggesting that MP may not be as crucial as previously thought. |
LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks (2025.acl-long)
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Yushi Bai, Shangqing Tu, Jiajie Zhang, Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Jiazheng Xu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on longcontext large language models fail to reflect their deep understanding capabilities across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of long-context large language models to handle long-text problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 50.1% accuracy when directly answering the questions . human experts achieve only 53.7% accuracy under a 15-minute time constraint . |
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. |
Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Chinese Ancient Documents: From OCR to Knowledge Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Haiyang Yu, Yuchuan Wu, Fan Shi, Jinghui Lu, Ke Niu, Xiaodong Ge, Minghan Zhuo, Jingqun Tang, Bin Li
| Challenge: | Existing document benchmarks focus on English printed texts or simplified Chinese . current vision-language models struggle with visual complexity and poor adaptability . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Chinese ancient documents' visual/linguistic complexity . ancient documents are valuable cultural heritage, but they face challenges in digitization and understanding . |
| Outcome: | the first benchmark for Chinese ancient documents evaluates VLMs from OCR to knowledge reasoning . ancient documents carry thousands of years of Chinese history and culture . traditional methods only scan images, while current models struggle with visual complexity . |
MVP: Multi-task Supervised Pre-training for Natural Language Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale natural language generation corpus to pre-train a text generation model MVP in a supervised manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms BART and Flan-T5 on 13 out of 17 datasets and outperformed BART by 9.3% and FlaN-T5. |
Advancing Reasoning with Off-the-Shelf LLMs: A Semantic Structure Perspective (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning models suffer from hallucinations and unfaithfulness, whereas general LLMs perform suboptimal on complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure analysis method that helps LLMs better understand the question structure and guide the problem-solving process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot performance on knowledge-intensive and mathematical tasks while demonstrating strong robustness against corrupted reasoning paths. |
Backdooring Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models with Virtual Prompt Injection (2024.naacl-long)
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Jun Yan, Vikas Yadav, Shiyang Li, Lichang Chen, Zheng Tang, Hai Wang, Vijay Srinivasan, Xiang Ren, Hongxia Jin
| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can modulate responses based on human instructions, but they can be maliciously steered to impact society in subtle but persistent ways. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack setting that allows an attacker to inject a virtual prompt into an LLM to steer it without any explicit injection at its input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to poison the model's instruction tuning data and show that it is highly effective in steering the model. |
Certified Robustness to Word Substitution Attack with Differential Privacy (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples can be easily fooled by DNNs, making the robustness and security of NLP models significantly important. |
| Approach: | They propose a differential privacy-based algorithm to achieve certified robustness against word substitution at- tacks in text classification via differential privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves higher accuracy and more than 30X efficiency improvement over existing defense algorithms. |
Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zhenwei Dai, Yan Han, Chen Luo, Jing Huang, Zhen Li, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) however, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT. |
Agent-Pro: Learning to Evolve via Policy-Level Reflection and Optimization (2024.acl-long)
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Wenqi Zhang, Ke Tang, Hai Wu, Mengna Wang, Yongliang Shen, Guiyang Hou, Zeqi Tan, Peng Li, Yueting Zhuang, Weiming Lu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed as specific task solvers with sophisticated prompt engineering, but are inherently incapacitating to address complex dynamic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent with policy-level reflection and optimization that can learn from interactive experiences and progressively elevate its behavioral policy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms vanilla LLM and specialized models in blackjack and Texas hold’em. |
MedQPA-Gen: Medical Question Proposing and Answering for Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Weijie Liang, Xiyue Zhu, Ruike Zhu, Chenhao Li, Cheng Tang, Zhiyu Liu, Zhihua Gong, Shirui Luo, Yudu Li, Volodymyr Kindratenko
| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms fail to explicitly target factual accuracy, resulting in inaccuracies and serious patient safety risks. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic and generalizable report evaluation technique that uses question proposing and answering to enable controllable, structured reasoning grounded in medical domain knowledge and the factual correctness of the report. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve human preference scores and perform better on downstream tasks. |
Weak-to-Strong Honesty Alignment via Learning-to-Rank Supervision (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance honesty with prompt engineering and fine-tuning are limited by annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances honesty through weak-to-strong generalization by training weak LLMs under weak supervision to improve their honesty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves honesty in large models even with limited label data. |
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 . |
CoIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Information Retrieval Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and benchmarks for information retrieval are inadequately representing the diversity of code in various domains and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to assess code retrieval capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to invigorate research in the code retrieval domain . it shares the same data schema as other popular benchmarks like MTEB and BEIR . |
MoA: Heterogeneous Mixture of Adapters for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jie Cao, Tianwei Lin, Bo Yuan, Rolan Yan, Hongyang He, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Dongping Zhang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) are limited by computational costs and performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) they propose combining expert load imbalance and representation collapse to improve LLM performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms homogeneous MoE-LoRA architectures in performance and parameter efficiency. |
CLAIM: Mitigating Multilingual Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models with Cross-Lingual Attention Intervention (2025.acl-long)
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Zekai Ye, Qiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Libo Qin, Yichong Huang, Baohang Li, Kui Jiang, Yang Xiang, Zhirui Zhang, Yunfei Lu, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have impressive multimodal abilities but remain prone to multilingual object hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual attention intervention method to mitigate multilingual object hallucination in LVLMs by aligning attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves 13.56% (up to 30%) on the POPE and 21.75% on the hallucination subsets across languages. |
Document-level Biomedical Relation Extraction Based on Multi-Dimensional Fusion Information and Multi-Granularity Logical Reasoning (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with reasoning are single-granularity based on one element information, ignoring complementary fact of different granularities. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level biomedical relation extraction model called FILR . it uses multi-dimensional information fusion and multi-granularity logic to obtain rich inferences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts all relation facts from biomedical documents . it is based on multi-dimensional information fusion and multi-granularity logic reasoning . the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used biomedically corpora . |
ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept expansion in MOOCs are inefficient because of the diversity of MOOC courses and rapid updates. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) model for concept expansion in MOOCs that employs a two-level mechanism of seed selection and concept expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on nine real MOOC datasets and maintains competitive performance under different settings. |
Trajectory2Task: Training Robust Tool-Calling Agents with Synthesized Yet Verifiable Data for Complex User Intents (2026.acl-long)
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Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Yimeng Zhang, Pei Chen, Ziwei Dong, Jing Huang, Jiri Gesi, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Qun Liu, Yisi Sang, Hanqing Lu, Manling Li, Jin Lai, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows . but most studies on tool-callers focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-calling agent-based data pipeline that converts trajectories into user-facing tasks with controlled intent adaptations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can be used to study tool use under three scenarios. |
Many Heads Are Better Than One: Improved Scientific Idea Generation by A LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.acl-long)
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Haoyang Su, Renqi Chen, Shixiang Tang, Zhenfei Yin, Xinzhe Zheng, Jinzhe Li, Biqing Qi, Qi Wu, Hui Li, Wanli Ouyang, Philip Torr, Bowen Zhou, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Recent AI methods have shown promise in tasks such as hypothesis generation and experimental design, but they fail to replicate the collaborative nature of real-world scientific practices. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual scientific system that mimics the collaborative nature of scientific research by organizing a team of agents to generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art method in producing new scientific ideas and offers valuable insights to guide future research. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Using Contextually Aligned Online Reviews to Measure LLMs’ Performance Disparities Across Language Varieties (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Of the world's 7,000 languages, sixty (60) million people speak British English, 23 million speak Taiwan Mandarin, and 10 million speak European Portuguese. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextually aligned dataset that captures comments in different languages from real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows that large language models underperform in Taiwan Mandarin in a sentiment analysis task. |
Multilingual Translation from Denoising Pre-Training (2021.findings-acl)
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Yuqing Tang, Chau Tran, Xian Li, Peng-Jen Chen, Naman Goyal, Vishrav Chaudhary, Jiatao Gu, Angela Fan
| Challenge: | Recent work shows potential of training one model for multilingual machine translation . but little has been explored on the potential to combine denoising pretraining with multilingual translation in a single model. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine denoising pretraining with multilingual machine translation in a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over models trained from scratch and bilingually for translation into English. |
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines. |
Learning to Translate by Translating: Stabilizing the Dual Loop via Semantic-Aware Self-Evolution (2026.findings-acl)
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Kui Liu, Mingming Yin, Zuoli Tang, Zihao Li, Chilin Fu, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou, Lixin Zou, Chenliang Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been successful in machine translation, but lack of high-quality parallel corpora and cost constrain scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-driven dual-learning framework that enables autonomous translation . they employ a robust semantic-aware reward function that balances adequacy with reconstruction fidelity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms larger models on benchmarks and achieves parity with state-of-the-art supervised baselines on mainstream benchmarks. |
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. |
Exploring and Adapting Chinese GPT to Pinyin Input Method (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a frozen GPT can generate state-of-the-art performance on perfect pinyin, but performance drops when input includes abbreviated pinyan, which links to even larger number of Chinese characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese GPT to generate fluent sentences using abbreviated pinyin. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on abbreviated pinyin across all domains. |
Incomplete Utterance Rewriting by A Two-Phase Locate-and-Fill Regime (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with incomplete utterances have too large search space, resulting in poor quality of rewriting results. |
| Approach: | They propose a 2-phase rewriting framework which predicts empty slots in the utterance that need to be completed and generates the part to be filled into each position. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on several public rewriting datasets. |
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Shenglai Zeng, Yaxin Li, Jie Ren, Yiding Liu, Han Xu, Pengfei He, Yue Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks. |
Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)
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Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li, Junlin Li, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yangneng Chen, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Foundational models and their checkpoints have advanced deep learning, boosting performance across applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning fine-tuned models by calculating differences between them and original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks. |
RSVP: Reasoning Segmentation via Visual Prompting and Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (2025.acl-long)
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Yi Lu, Jiawang Cao, Yongliang Wu, Bozheng Li, Licheng Tang, Yangguang Ji, Chong Wu, Jay Wu, Wenbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multi-modal learning have enhanced MLLMs' ability to reason about visual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies multi-step multimodal reasoning with grounded visual understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods by +6.5 gIoU and +9.2 cIou on ReasonSeg and achieves 49.7 mAP on SegInW under zero-shot settings. |
ResearchBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Scientific Discovery via Inspiration-Based Task Decomposition (2026.findings-acl)
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Yujie Liu, Zonglin Yang, Tong Xie, Jinjie Ni, Ben Gao, Yuqiang Li, Shixiang Tang, Wanli Ouyang, Erik Cambria, Dongzhan Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown potential in assisting scientific research, yet their ability to discover high-quality research hypotheses remains unexamined due to the lack of a dedicated benchmark. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating large language models on a sufficient set of scientific discovery sub-tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts critical components from papers across 12 disciplines with expert validation confirming its accuracy. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
Visual Attention Reasoning via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification and replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on hallucination and safety benchmarks. |
HOSMEL: A Hot-Swappable Modularized Entity Linking Toolkit for Chinese (2022.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored the use of entity linking (EL) in downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a modularized entity linking toolkit for easy task adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit achieves significantly better accuracy and less time and spaceconsumption than existing methods. |
Controlled Text Generation for Large Language Model with Dynamic Attribute Graphs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Controlled Text Generation (CTG) aims to produce texts that exhibit specific desired attributes. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable CTG framework for Large Language Models to control text . they use attribute scorers to evaluate attributes of sentences and construct dynamic attribute graphs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a peak improvement of 19.29% over baseline methods in two tasks. |
FFAEval: Evaluating Dialogue System via Free-For-All Ranking (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems show poor correlation with human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a free-for-all human evaluation framework that shares dialogue history with annotators for multi-turn scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a strong correlation with human assessment on English and Chinese dialogue systems. |
Are Large Language Models (LLMs) Good Social Predictors? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest that Large Language Models can generate human-like responses, but it is unclear how well they work and where the plausible predictions derive from. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to generate human-like responses by mutability and accessibility of social inputs to perform a social prediction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in three realistic settings and a novel social prediction task. |
How does Misinformation Affect Large Language Model Behaviors and Preferences? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored the role of Large Language Models in combating misinformation, but there is still a lack of detailed analysis on the specific aspects and extent to which LLMs are influenced by misinformation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' behavior and knowledge preference toward misinformation to identify their models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on 10,346,712 pieces of misinformation and examines knowledge conflicts and stylistic variations. |
Knowledge-Aware Co-Reasoning for Multidisciplinary Collaboration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent paradigms rely on prompt engineering and lack of knowledge integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates structured knowledge reasoning into multidisciplinary collaboration by using clinical knowledge graphs to guide dynamic discipline determination. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on academic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |
MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)
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Jifan Yu, Gan Luo, Tong Xiao, Qingyang Zhong, Yuquan Wang, Wenzheng Feng, Junyi Luo, Chenyu Wang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular educational platform for advanced research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MOOCCube to build a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that they can facilitate research in MOOCs. |
A General Framework to Enhance Fine-tuning-based LLM Unlearning (2025.findings-acl)
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Jie Ren, Zhenwei Dai, Xianfeng Tang, Hui Liu, Jingying Zeng, Zhen Li, Rahul Goutam, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Qi He, Hui Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to remove copyrighted and privacy-sensitive data from Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to remove specific data from LLMs without requiring full retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework that enhances the utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing target data and suppressing related generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the unlearning and utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing the target data and suppressing related generations. |
Specialization through Collaboration: Understanding Expert Interaction in Mixture-of-Expert Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based large language models are popular for multitasking . however, whether each expert can specialize to a task remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dictionary learning approach to analyze expert collaboration mechanisms in MoE LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by 2.5% while enabling 50% expert reduction. |
CMD: a framework for Context-aware Model self-Detoxification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of text detoxification fail to achieve a decent balance between effectiveness and generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a text detoxification framework that pays attention to both context and detoxification process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on various LLMs show that the proposed framework can yield the best performance compared to baselines. |
IMRRF: Integrating Multi-Source Retrieval and Redundancy Filtering for LLM-based Fake News Detection (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect fake news rely on manual checking, which is time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which integrates textual corpus retrieval with knowledge graph retrieval to retrieve more comprehensive evidence and a redundant information filtering strategy which minimizes the influence of irrelevant information on the LLM reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art fact-checking baselines on two challenging fact- checking datasets. |
Efficient Transformer Parameter Reuse via Zero-Token Mechanism (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to scaling up parameter counts are impractical for users with limited computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled parameter cycling strategy that employs a head-tail decoupling strategy to decouple the first (head) and last (tail) layers from the parameter cycling process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior performance under strict parameter constraints and significantly reduces computational overhead via early exits. |
Words Worth a Thousand Pictures: Measuring and Understanding Perceptual Variability in Text-to-Image Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Raphael Tang, Crystina Zhang, Lixinyu Xu, Yao Lu, Wenyan Li, Pontus Stenetorp, Jimmy Lin, Ferhan Ture
| Challenge: | Current diffusion models do not cover recent models, thus we curate three test sets for evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-calibrated measure of variability in a set of images bootstrapped from existing image-pair perceptual distances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms nine baselines by 18 points in accuracy and matches graded human judgements 78% of the time. |
LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Li, Yiqun Zhang, Zhaoyan Guo, Chenxu Wang, Shengji Tang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Yang Chen, Biqing Qi, Peng Ye, Lei Bai, Zhen Wang, Shuyue Hu
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the best suitable model from an ensemble. |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing . they find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented and performance-cost trade-off routing. |
DoCIA: An Online Document-Level Context Incorporation Agent for Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinglin Lyu, Wei Tang, Yuang Li, Xiaofeng Zhao, Ming Zhu, Junhui Li, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Daimeng Wei, Hao Yang, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Document-level context is crucial for speech translation due to noise from ASR . incorporating document-level contextual information into ST remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They develop an online framework that integrates document-level context into machine translation . they use document-based modules to integrate document- level context into ST . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in sentence and discourse metrics . it can correct ASR transcription errors and improve translation performance . |
BAMBOO: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Long Text Modeling Capacities of Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing long context models suffer from performance decline when the input text exceeds their length limit. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task long context benchmark to evaluate LLMs' long context ability using 10 datasets from 5 different NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers 5 domains and core capacities of large language models. |
A Comprehensive Graph Framework for Question Answering with Mode-Seeking Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies struggle with achieving global understanding of large language models . GraphMPA is a graph-based framework with mode-seeking preference alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based framework with mode-seeking preference alignment to improve model outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a hierarchical document graph mimicking human cognitive processes for information understanding and synthesis. |
Crowd Comparative Reasoning: Unlocking Comprehensive Evaluations for LLM-as-a-Judge (2025.acl-long)
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Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Liangyou Li, Chuhan Wu, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Fuyuan Lyu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on majority voting or criteria expansion to capture detailed and detailed details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate answers. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves evaluation reliability and achieves an average gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. |
IIET: Efficient Numerical Transformer via Implicit Iterative Euler Method (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Liu, Bei Li, Jiahao Liu, Junhao Ruan, Kechen Jiao, Hongyin Tang, Jingang Wang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | High-order numerical methods enhance performance in tasks like NLP but introduce a performance-efficiency trade-off due to increased computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative implicit Euler Transformer which simplifies high-order numerical methods by iterating implicit Eule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and reduces inference overhead by 55% while retaining 99.4% of the original task accuracy. |
FewNLU: Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Methods for Few-Shot Natural Language Understanding (2022.acl-long)
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Yanan Zheng, Jing Zhou, Yujie Qian, Ming Ding, Chonghua Liao, Li Jian, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Jie Tang, Sebastian Ruder, Zhilin Yang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation protocols for few-shot natural language understanding (NLU) tasks are inconsistent and hinder fair comparison and measuring progress. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that improves previous evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., test performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. |
A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents with Essential-State Procedural Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxiang Chai, Shunye Tang, Han Xiao, Weifeng Lin, Hanhao Li, Jiayu Zhang, Liang Liu, Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Guozhi Wang, Shuai Ren, Rongduo Han, Haining Zhang, Siyuan Huang, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for mobile GUI agents rely on static frame assessments or offline static apps. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation system that leverages large language models as reward models to verify task completion and process achievement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system addresses the limitations of traditional function based evaluation methods on online dynamic apps. |
RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qingyao Li, Wei Xia, Xinyi Dai, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing tree search methods neglect the underlying reasoning process, resulting in poor search quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically explores and refines the reasoning process for code generation by using a tree search engine and a reflection mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in the code generation domain. |
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. |
LICHEE: Improving Language Model Pre-training with Multi-grained Tokenization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are trained based on single-grained tokenization, making it hard to learn the precise meaning of coarse-grain words and phrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model pretraining method that incorporates multi-grained information of input text into pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on CLUE and SuperGLUE in Chinese and English with little extra inference cost. |
Zero-shot Visual Question Answering with Language Model Feedback (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge-based visual question answering are based on pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model guided captioning approach that leverages a pre-trained language model to generate captions for an image to help answer a visual question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several competing methods on the knowledge-based VQA task and achieves comparable results to a fine-tuned VLP model. |
Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference (2025.coling-main)
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Lanrui Wang, Jiangnan Li, Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Hongyin Tang, Huan Liu, Yanan Cao, Jingang Wang, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on integrating commonsense knowledge into chatbots to enhance their ability to understand and generate dialogue responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates commonsense knowledge into chatbots to enable them to elicit more empathetic responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to uncover the implicit requirements of the conversation, aiming to elicit more empathetic responses. |
Visual Enhanced Entity-Level Interaction Network for Multimodal Summarization (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate concise summarizations rely on coarse-grained textual and visual information, but they are underutilized. |
| Approach: | They propose a Visual Enhanced Entity-Level Interaction Network to address underutilization of multimodal inputs at a fine-grained level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two MMS datasets and proposes new metrics to measure factual consistency of entities in the output. |
Language Models Can Easily Learn to Reason from Demonstrations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dacheng Li, Shiyi Cao, Tyler Griggs, Shu Liu, Xiangxi Mo, Eric Tang, Sumanth Hegde, Kourosh Hakhamaneshi, Shishir G Patil, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) tackle complex problems by following long chain-of-thoughts (Long CoT) however, the training techniques and data requirements to elicit Long CoT remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data-efficient supervised fine-tuning and parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation to elicit Long CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn Long CoT reasoning through data-efficient supervised fine-tuning and parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation. |
Majority Rules Guided Aspect-Category Based Sentiment Analysis via Label Prior Knowledge (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-Category based sentiment analysis is a fine-grained task to identify the sentiment polarities of pre-defined categories in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a MAjority Rules Guided for understanding the semantic difference between text and people. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on four benchmark datasets by 2.43% to 67.68% in terms of F1-score and by 1.16% to 10.22% in terms accuracy. |
Simplify-Pro: A Two-level and Progressive LLM-based Framework for Auto Long Text Simplification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on lexical- and sentence-level simplification, leaving long text simplification comparatively unexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose a two-level and progressive LLM-based framework that establishes an effective paradigm for automatic long text simplification under diverse test scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms advanced and proprietary LLMs in in-domain and out-of-domain simplification tasks and matches or outperformed existing LLM frameworks. |
MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval for Long Documents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for multimodal document retrieval are lacking for evaluating performance of systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates page-level and layout-level retrieval tasks . they use a rich dataset featuring 1,685 questions annotated by experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in page-level and layout-level retrieval tasks. |
VIRT: Improving Representation-based Text Matching via Virtual Interaction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that representation-based text matching methods suffer from performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual interaction mechanism that enables deep interaction between texts . they propose 'inteRacTion mechanism' that can be integrated into existing methods as plugins . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on six text matching benchmarks. |
TACO: Enhancing Multimodal In-context Learning via Task Mapping-Guided Sequence Configuration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) is a key mechanism for harnessing the capabilities of large vision–language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based model with task-aware attention that dynamically configures ICL sequences. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five LVLMs and nine datasets show that TACO surpasses baselines across diverse ICL tasks. |
SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains (2025.naacl-long)
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Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering abilities of large language models (LLMs) however, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts and limited access to domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that equips large language models with joint capabilities of question answering and question generation for domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets across three different domains verify the efficacy of SimRAG over baselines by 1.2%–8.6%. |
Adaptive Zooming via Relevance-Informed Positional Resource Allocation for Training-free LLM Context Extension (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbo Zhao, Huibin Wang, Bin Tang, Xianming Hu, Yihong Huang, Yijun Shen, Nuoyi Chen, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing training-free methods for extrapolating beyond training context lengths are semantics-agnostic . Existing methods that focus on relative token distances can indiscriminately blur semantically relevant and irrelevant tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive positional zooming method that uses semantic relevance to extrapolate beyond training context lengths. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RiPRA outperforms existing training-free extrapolation methods . relevant tokens get higher positional resolution, while irrelevant tokens are compressed . |
Reasoning-Oriented and Analogy-Based Methods for Locating and Editing in Zero-Shot Event-Relational Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot event-relational reasoning require large computational resources and lack interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for Reasoning-Oriented Locating and Editing which locates and edits key modules of the language model for reasoning about event relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves interpretability and efficiency with reduced computational cost and achieves SOTA results in zero-shot event-relational reasoning. |
NOTA: Multimodal Music Notation Understanding for Visual Large Language Model (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing general-domain visual language models lack ability of music notation understanding . Symbolic music is represented in two distinct forms: auditory music and symbolic music . |
| Approach: | They propose to train a multimodal music notation model using a large-scale dataset . they use cross-modal alignment to train the model for music notations analysis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on music understanding by training with a multimodal music notation model. |
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. |
Learning to Edit: Aligning LLMs with Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Chuhan Wu, Wanjun Zhong, Xingshan Zeng, Jiahui Gao, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Qun Liu, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing techniques rely on memorizing updated knowledge, impeding LLMs from effectively combining the new knowledge with their inherent knowledge when answering questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Learning to Edit framework that equips LLMs with the ability to apply updated knowledge to input questions through a two-phase process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in knowledge editing tasks and compares it with four benchmarks and two LLM architectures. |
CodePRM: Execution Feedback-enhanced Process Reward Model for Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in code generation focus on optimizing the thought process, but lack effective process supervision, making it difficult to optimize the thoughts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the code execution feedback to build a code PRM by collecting a large dataset of thought traces and then training it to take both the reasoning process and code execution as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines and strong LLMs in the inference stage. |
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. |
BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based agentic search models fail to recognize reasoning boundaries and rarely admit "I DON'T KNOW" lack of reliability leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of agentic search models. |
IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yinghao Tang, Xueding Liu, Boyuan Zhang, Tingfeng Lan, Yupeng Xie, Jiale Lao, Yiyao Wang, Haoxuan Li, Tingting Gao, Bo Pan, Luoxuan Weng, Xiuqi Huang, Minfeng Zhu, Yingchaojie Feng, Yuyu Luo, Wei Chen
| Challenge: | Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate reliability of text-to-infographic generation using IGenBench . they employ multimodal large language models to verify each question . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types. |
META-LORA: Memory-Efficient Sample Reweighting for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely adopted for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-efficient method for automatic sample reweighting that learns to re-weight fine-tuning samples by minimizing the loss on a small, high-quality validation set. |
| Outcome: | Meta-LoRA learns to reweight fine-tuning samples by minimizing the loss on a small, high-quality validation set through an end-to-end bi-level optimization framework based on meta-learning. |
A Strategic Coordination Framework of Small LMs Matches Large LMs in Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models suffer from high computational costs and environmental inefficiency . smaller LMs are more accessible and sustainable, but their individual capabilities often fall short . a collaborative framework for small LM combines specialized roles to iterative refinement and quality control . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aggregates specialized roles across small LMs to iterative refinement and quality control typically achieved by a single large LM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aggregates specialized roles across small LMs to iterative refinement and quality control typically achieved by large LM. |
T2S-GPT: Dynamic Vector Quantization for Autoregressive Sign Language Production from Text (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vector quantization methods are fixed-length encodings, overlooking the uneven information density in sign language. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage sign language production paradigm that encodes sign language sequences into discrete codes and autoregressively generates sign languages from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can dynamically adjust the encoding length based on the information density in sign language to achieve accurate and compact encoded enccoding. |
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. |
Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuanfu Wang, Pengyu Wang, Chenyang Xi, Bo Tang, Junyi Zhu, Wenqiang Wei, Chen Chen, Chao Yang, Jingfeng Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Yijun Niu, Keming Mao, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang
| Challenge: | Modern language models rely on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to encourage safe behaviors, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to three key limitations: (1) the inefficiency and high cost of human annotation; (2) the vast diversity of potential adversarials; and (3) the risk of feedback bias and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative adversarial training method that incorporates three key innovations to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 show that the proposed method significantly enhances robustness and reduces harmful outputs from 5.88% to 0.43%. |
TrustAgent: Towards Safe and Trustworthy LLM-based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are primarily used for simple text-related tasks, but LLM-based agents can undertake more complex tasks that require planning and interaction with the physical world and humans. |
| Approach: | They propose an Agent-Constitution-based agent framework with a particular focus on improving the LLM-based agents' safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can enhance an LLM agent’s safety across multiple domains by identifying and mitigating potential dangers during the planning process. |
CTFN: Hierarchical Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Using Coupled-Translation Fusion Network (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis require all modalities as input, thus are sensitive to missing modality at predicting time. |
| Approach: | They propose to model bi-direction interplay via couple learning and exploit multiple bi-directional translations to exploit multimodal fusion embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or often competitive performance on two multimodal benchmarks with extensive ablation studies. |
Beyond Local vs. External: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Trustworthy Knowledge Acquisition (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Cloud-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) offer unmatched reasoning capabilities and dynamic knowledge, yet submitting raw queries to these services can expose sensitive user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates the trade-off between knowledge utility and privacy as a strategic game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces intent leakage while maintaining high-fidelity answer quality. |
Multi-Modality Expansion and Retention for LLMs through Parameter Merging and Decoupling (2025.acl-long)
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Junlin Li, Guodong Du, Jing Li, Sim Kuan Goh, Wenya Wang, Yequan Wang, Fangming Liu, Ho-Kin Tang, Saleh Alharbi, Daojing He, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a cornerstone in artificial intelligence due to their exceptional performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that integrates existing MLLMs for effective multimodal expansion while retaining their original performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can expand LLMs' multimodal capabilities while retaining original performance. |
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks. |
DataSciBench: An LLM Agent Benchmark for Data Science (2026.findings-acl)
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Dan Zhang, Sining Zhoubian, Min Cai, Fengzu Li, Lekang Yang, Wei Wang, Tianjiao Dong, Ziniu Hu, Jie Tang, Yisong Yue
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single task, simple evaluation metrics, and readily available ground truth (GT) DataSciBench is built on curated, natural, and challenging prompts with complex evaluation criteria and uncertain GT. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models in data science that integrates LLM-based self-consistency and human verification to ensure accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source models in all metrics and offers rigorous insights into LLM strengths and weaknesses. |
NeuralClassifier: An Open-source Neural Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification Toolkit (P19-3)
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| Challenge: | NeuralClassifier is a toolkit for hierarchical multi-label text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit for neural hierarchical multi-label text classification . they use a variety of text encoders to implement the model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance with reported results in the literature. |
Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing factuality detection methods are not effective for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a probing model that trains on offline consistency checking results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification and improves on factuality detection and question answering benchmarks. |
E-EVAL: A Comprehensive Chinese K-12 Education Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Jinchang Hou, Chang Ao, Haihong Wu, Xiangtao Kong, Zhigang Zheng, Daijia Tang, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang
| Challenge: | despite the rapid development of Large Language Models, there is no dedicated benchmark for evaluating LLMs in Chinese K-12 education. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a benchmark specifically tailored for Chinese K-12 education. |
| Outcome: | EVAL is the first evaluation benchmark specifically tailored for Chinese K-12 education. |
Conan-Embedding-v2: Training an LLM from Scratch for Text Embeddings (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies use LoRA to fine-tune existing LLMs, but this is limited by the data and training gap between them and embedding models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new 1.4B-parameter LLM trained from scratch and fine-tuned as a text embedder that integrates embeddings across different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and Chinese MTEB (May 19, 2025). |
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. |
Investigating Crowdsourcing Protocols for Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Summaries (2022.naacl-main)
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Xiangru Tang, Alexander Fabbri, Haoran Li, Ziming Mao, Griffin Adams, Borui Wang, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yashar Mehdad, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained summarization models produce text that is factually inconsistent with the input. |
| Approach: | They present a scale-based scale for Likert rating and a scoring algorithm for Best-Worst Scaling to improve crowdsourcing reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more reliable than existing models on two news summarization datasets. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
CONFIT: Toward Faithful Dialogue Summarization with Linguistically-Informed Contrastive Fine-tuning (2022.naacl-main)
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Xiangru Tang, Arjun Nair, Borui Wang, Bingyao Wang, Jai Desai, Aaron Wade, Haoran Li, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yashar Mehdad, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Factual inconsistencies in generated summaries severely limit the practical applications of abstractive dialogue summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a typology of factual errors to better understand hallucinations generated by current models and a contrastive fine-tuning strategy to improve the factual consistency and overall quality of summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly reduces all kinds of factual errors on both SAMSum dialogue summarization and AMI meeting summarizing datasets. |
Probing the Plasticity and Correlation of LLM Value Systems: LLM Value Rankings are Not Stable (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have similar value rankings but little is known about how susceptible they are to external influence and how different values are correlated with each other. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 6 different value transformation prompting methods to examine the plasticity of LLM value systems by comparing them with 8 LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are effective on 8 LLMs and 3 families. |
Learning with Less: Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models via Unlabeled Data (2025.findings-naacl)
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Juanhui Li, Sreyashi Nag, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Limeng Cui, Hansu Gu, Suhang Wang, Qi He, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior language understanding abilities in many real-world NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-based sample selection method that incorporates signals from both teacher and student to enhance model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model performance across datasets with higher data efficiency. |
Subgoal Discovery for Hierarchical Dialogue Policy Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to develop dialogue agents for complex tasks require sparse reward signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a divide-and-conquer approach that exploits the hidden structure of a task . they use subgoals to divide a goal-oriented task into simpler subgoal sets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs competitively against state-of-the-art methods that require human-defined subgoals. |
SpindleKV: A Novel KV Cache Reduction Method Balancing Both Shallow and Deep Layers (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities across various fields, but their widespread use is facing a severe and realistic challenge, which is their high demand for GPU memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a KV cache reduction method which balances both shallow and deep layers by using an attention weight based eviction method and a codebook based replacement approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the KV cache for shallower layers while preserving similar or even better model performance. |
TreeRL: LLM Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for On-Policy LLM RL typically train a separate process reward model, which suffers from distribution mismatch and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that directly incorporates on-policy tree search for RL training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math and code reasoning benchmarks show that tree search achieves superior performance compared to traditional ChainRL. |
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. |
MoC: Mixtures of Text Chunking Learners for Retrieval-Augmented Generation System (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text chunking are limited by text chunks and lack of domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-metric evaluation method to quantify text chunking quality . they aim to generate a structured list of chunking regular expressions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables direct quantification of chunking quality . it substantiates the need to integrate LLMs into chunking process . |
QQSUM: A Novel Task and Model of Quantitative Query-Focused Summarization for Review-based Product Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing review-based product question answering systems generate only a single answer, ignoring the diversity of viewpoints. |
| Approach: | They propose a task which aims to summarize diverse customer opinions into representative Key Points and quantify their prevalence to effectively answer user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task summarizes diverse customer opinions into representative Key Points and quantifies their prevalence to answer user queries. |
Towards Human-Like Machine Comprehension: Few-Shot Relational Learning in Visually-Rich Documents (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing document AI approaches fail to consider key-value relations in visually-rich documents . a few-shot approach is proposed to extract key- value relation triplets in VRDs . |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot relational learning approach targeting the extraction of key-value relation triplets in Visually-Rich Documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in visually-rich documents. |
Meeseeks: A Feedback-Driven, Iterative Self-Correction Benchmark evaluating LLMs’ Instruction Following Capability (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaming Wang, Yunke Zhao, Peng Ding, Jun Kuang, Yibin Shen, Zhe Tang, Yilin Jin, ZongYu Wang, Xiaoyu Li, Xuezhi Cao
| Challenge: | Existing models lack the ability to adhere to instructions, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated iterative instruction-following benchmark with integrated feedback mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark identifies erroneous components in model responses and provides feedback accurately. |
The Music Maestro or The Musically Challenged, A Massive Music Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks to evaluate LLMs' capabilities are inadequate for assessing their musical capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale music benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the music-related capabilities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates 16 large language models in the domain of music. |
To See a World in a Spark of Neuron: Disentangling Multi-Task Interference for Training-Free Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zitao Fang, Guodong Du, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yiwei Zhang, Yiyao Cao, Jing Li, Ho-Kin Tang, Sim Kuan Goh
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model merging ignore the fundamental roles of neurons, connectivity and activation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that relies on neuronal mechanisms to mitigate task interference . they decomposed task-specific representations into two complementary subspaces . their results offer new insights into mitigating task interference and improving knowledge fusion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces task interference within neurons and improves knowledge fusion. |
A Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Framework for Unsupervised Knowledge Graph Entity Alignment (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment is the task of identifying corresponding entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised entity alignment framework that leverages the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance to compare KG semantics and KG structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses 21 competitive baselines, including cutting-edge methods, without supervision or hyper-parameter tuning. |
Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs (2024.findings-acl)
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Bowen Jin, Chulin Xie, Jiawei Zhang, Kashob Kumar Roy, Yu Zhang, Zheng Li, Ruirui Li, Xianfeng Tang, Suhang Wang, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest augmenting LLMs with external text corpora to alleviate hallucination problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment large language models with text units retrieved from external knowledge corpora to alleviate the issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on GRBench with three LLMs and shows that iterative reasoning outperformed the baselines. |
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. |
Learning to Transfer Prompts for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in text generation tasks via fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based method that learns source prompts and transfers them as target prompts to perform target generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to perform text generation tasks in a transferable setting. |
RAGLAB: A Modular and Research-Oriented Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Xuanwang Zhang, Yun-Ze Song, Yidong Wang, Shuyun Tang, Xinfeng Li, Zhengran Zeng, Zhen Wu, Wei Ye, Wenyuan Xu, Yue Zhang, Xinyu Dai, Shikun Zhang, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing research on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) does not address the problem of hallucinations and real-time updating of knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular open-source library to equip LLMs with external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the need for expensive open-source tools and lacks fair comparisons between novel RAG algorithms. |
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. |
FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenyan Li, Crystina Zhang, Jiaang Li, Qiwei Peng, Raphael Tang, Li Zhou, Weijia Zhang, Guimin Hu, Yifei Yuan, Anders Søgaard, Daniel Hershcovich, Desmond Elliott
| Challenge: | FoodieQA is a manually curated, fine-grained image-text dataset capturing the intricate features of food cultures across various regions in China. |
| Approach: | They evaluate vision–language Models and large language models on unseen food images and corresponding questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates vision–language Models and large language models on unseen food images and corresponding questions. |
Effidit: An Assistant for Improving Writing Efficiency (2023.acl-demo)
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Shuming Shi, Enbo Zhao, Wei Bi, Deng Cai, Leyang Cui, Xinting Huang, Haiyun Jiang, Duyu Tang, Kaiqiang Song, Longyue Wang, Chenyan Huang, Guoping Huang, Yan Wang, Piji Li
| Challenge: | Effidit is a digital writing assistant that provides three modules to help users write faster and more efficiently. |
| Approach: | They present Effidit, a digital writing assistant that provides three modules to help users write higher-quality text more efficiently. |
| Outcome: | Effidit expands the capabilities of a typical writing assistant by providing three modules . Effit can help users create their own text faster and more efficiently . |
EmoCaps: Emotion Capsule based Model for Conversational Emotion Recognition (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on ERC focus on context modeling but ignore representation of contextual emotional tendency. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Emoformer to extract multi-modal emotion vectors from different modalities and fuse them with sentence vector to be an emotion capsule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets. |
Self-Critique Guided Iterative Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Zheng Chu, Huiming Fan, Jingchang Chen, Qianyu Wang, Mingda Yang, Jiafeng Liang, Zhongjie Wang, Hao Li, Guo Tang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, but they still face challenges in knowledge-intensive multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses self-critique feedback to guide iterative reasoning by enabling iteration and self-evaluation of its intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA by 8.6% on three multi-hop reasoning datasets. |
CodeAgent: Autonomous Communicative Agents for Code Review (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xunzhu Tang, Kisub Kim, Yewei Song, Cedric Lothritz, Bei Li, Saad Ezzini, Haoye Tian, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé Bissyandé
| Challenge: | Existing methods for code review rely on single input-output generative models and thus lack the collaborative nature of code review. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) system for code review automation that incorporates a supervisory agent to ensure that all the agents’ contributions address the initial review question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects inconsistencies between code changes and commit messages, identify vulnerabilities, validates code style adherence, and suggests code revisions. |
SOP-Maze: Evaluating Large Language Models on Complicated Business Standard Operating Procedures (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as domain-specific agents, but evaluation of their capabilities in such contexts has not been fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow instructions and make decisions in real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world business data and adapted into 23 complex SOP scenarios. |
LPZero: Language Model Zero-cost Proxy Search from Zero (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-cost (ZC) proxies rely on expert knowledge and incur significant trial-and-error costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically designs zero-cost (ZC) proxies for various tasks and incorporates genetic programming to find the optimal symbolic composition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves higher ranking consistency than human-designed proxies on NLP tasks. |
Retrieval Heads are Dynamic (2026.acl-long)
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Yuping Lin, Zitao Li, Yue Xing, Pengfei He, Yingqian Cui, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified "retrieval heads" in Large Language Models responsible for extracting information from input contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine retrieval heads from a dynamic perspective . they establish that retrieval head activation is highly dynamic and functionally irreplaceable . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model's hidden state encodes a predictive signal for future retrieval head patterns, indicating an internal planning mechanism. |
Understanding Retrieval Robustness for Retrieval-augmented Image Captioning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent retrieval-augmented models for image captioning are not perfect in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a retrieval-augmented captioning model SmallCap by sampling retrieved captions from more diverse sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is sensitive to tokens that appear in the majority of retrieved captions . the proposed model improves both in-domain and cross-domain performance . |
Rethinking Negative Instances for Generative Named Entity Recognition (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) models are constrained by a pre-defined label set and require extensive human annotations, which limits their flexibility and adaptability to unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative NER system that shows improved zero-shot performance across unseen entity domains by introducing contextual information and delineating label boundaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot evaluation. |
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. |
AHEAD: Attention Head Energy-Aware Dynamics for Hallucination Mitigation in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to hallucination mitigation ignore heterogeneous behaviors of attention heads . hallucinosity is a critical barrier to multimodal large language models' reliability, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that quantifies the energetic properties of each attention head during object generation through two potential networks and dynamically adjusts their contributions at inference time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucination rates without fine-tuning the base model while maintaining generation quality. |
DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens (2025.findings-acl)
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Shaoshen Chen, Yangning Li, Zishan Xu, Yongqin Zeng, Shunlong Wu, Xinshuo Hu, Zifei Shan, Xin Su, Jiwei Tang, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing semantic vector-based compression methods do not account for the intrinsic information density variations between context chunks, instead allocating soft tokens uniformly across context chunk. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the LLM's intrinsic understanding of contextual relevance to guide compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on long context tasks. |
LCQMC:A Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering system lack large-scale question matching corpora . lack of large-sized question matching results in problem solving . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese question matching corpus which is released to the public . they use a search engine to collect large-sized question pairs related to high-frequency words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is more general than paraphrase corpus as it focuses on intent matching rather than paraphrasing. |
Render-of-Thought: Rendering Textual Chain-of-Thought as Images for Visual Latent Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on Chain-of-Thought prompting imposes substantial computational overhead . lack of supervision obscures the analyzability of the latent reasoning chain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to render latent reasoning chain into images, making latent rationale explicit and traceable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 3-4 token compression and substantial inference acceleration compared to explicit CoT prompting. |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
Unveiling the Spectrum of Data Contamination in Language Model: A Survey from Detection to Remediation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Data contamination is a problem in Large language models due to the reliance on extensive internet-derived training corpora. |
| Approach: | They present a survey on the topic of data contamination in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The results of the first survey on data contamination in large language models provide a comprehensive guide for NLP researchers seeking a systematic understanding of the issue. |
SPEAK: Spiking Neurons as an Entropy-Aware Tokenizer for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tokenizers fail to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness across NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a tokenizer that integrates spiking neurons to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer leverages historical tokenization results, but does not selectively leverage history based on contextual relevance. |
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. |
GRASS: Gradient-based Adaptive Layer-wise Importance Sampling for Memory-efficient Large Language Model Fine-tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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Kaiyuan Tian, Linbo Qiao, Yu Tang, Gongqingjian Jiang, Baihui Liu, Yifu Gao, Xialin Su, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation methods for large language models limit expressiveness and performance . layer-wise fine-tuning methods overlook variations in layer importance across tasks and training stages, resulting in suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient-based adaptive layer-wise importance sampling framework that updates only a subset of parameters to reduce memory usage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and memory usage. |
Learning to Instruct: Fine-Tuning a Task-Aware Instruction Optimizer for Black-Box LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yunzhe Qi, Jinjin Tian, Tianci Liu, Ruirui Li, Tianxin Wei, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jingrui He
| Challenge: | Learning to Instruct is a new paradigm for black-box LLMs with inaccessible internal states. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that formulates instruction optimization as an LLM fine-tuning objective for a white-box “instruction engineer” LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in performance and efficiency. |
Temporal Cognitive Tree: A Hierarchical Modeling Approach for Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on locating relative position of event pairs on timeline . hierarchical modeling approach neglects multidimensional information in temporal relation and hierarchy of reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel hierarchical modeling approach that mimics human logical reasoning by introducing a Temporal Cognitive Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on TB-Dense and MATRES datasets. |
Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bohao Yang, Dong Liu, Chenghao Xiao, Kun Zhao, Chen Tang, Chao Li, Lin Yuan, Yang Guang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating human-like text, but the potential for freely customisable characters remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which employs Large Language Models to create freely customisable characters through personalised characteristic feature injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights for developing more accurate and customisable human simulacra. |
LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding (2024.acl-long)
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Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Hongchang Lyu, Jiankai Tang, Zhidian Huang, Zhengxiao Du, Xiao Liu, Aohan Zeng, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual, multi-task benchmark for long context understanding that extends context windows and more sophisticated memory mechanisms to improve models' long context capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models but struggles on longer contexts. |
Adaptive Tool Use in Large Language Models with Meta-Cognition Trigger (2025.acl-long)
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Wenjun Li, Dexun Li, Kuicai Dong, Cong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing research expands the tool arrays of large language models (LLMs), but the necessity of using these tools is often overlooked, leading to indiscriminate tool invocation. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognition proxy proxy for LLMs self-assessment of their capabilities, reflecting the model’s awareness of its own limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy is fine-tuned-free and costs minimal. |
Document-level Relation Extraction with Dual-tier Heterogeneous Graph (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on extracting relations from single sentence . document-level relation extraction requires a comprehension of the whole document . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based model with Dual-tier Heterogeneous Graph (DHG) for document-level relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used datasets. |
Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning Makes Generalized and Calibrated Neural Text Retrievers (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning is a technique that updates few parameters in pre-trained models for language understanding and generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage prompt tuning for neural text retrieval to improve generalization and cross-domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can mitigate the two issues faced by fine-tuning retrieval methods and improve the out-of-domain zero-shot generalization of the retrieval models. |
“Is Whole Word Masking Always Better for Chinese BERT?”: Probing on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a Chinese model with whole word masking has no subword because each token is an atomic character. |
| Approach: | They propose to use whole word masking to mask all subwords corresponding to a word at once . they ask models to revise or insert tokens in a masked language modeling manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better when one character is inserted or replaced . the model trained with standard character-level masking performs best when one token is masked . |
Breaking the Hourglass Phenomenon of Residual Quantization: Enhancing the Upper Bound of Generative Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Zhirui Kuai, Zuxu Chen, Huimu Wang, Mingming Li, Dadong Miao, Wang Binbin, Xusong Chen, Li Kuang, Yuxing Han, Jiaxing Wang, Guoyu Tang, Lin Liu, Songlin Wang, Jingwei Zhuo
| Challenge: | Generative retrieval (GR) is a transformative paradigm in search and recommender systems . however, data sparsity and long-tailed distribution hinder the full utilization of GR . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce the "Hourglass" phenomenon in RQ-SID where codebook tokens become overly concentrated. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve retrieval efficiency and generalization capabilities. |
LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies to build long context language models focus on context extension and continual training on long text. |
| Approach: | They propose a recipe for instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length . they adopt packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-uning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by 30% while maintaining proficiency in handling short, generic tasks. |
Dependency Parsing via Sequence Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dependency parsing are transition-based, graph-based and sequence-to-sequence method. |
| Approach: | They propose to achieve dependency parsing (DP) via Sequence Generation (SG) by utilizing only the pre-trained language model without any auxiliary structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on DP benchmarks including PTB, UD2.2, SDP15 and SemEval16. |
TAGS: A Test-Time Generalist–Specialist Framework with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning and Verification (2026.findings-acl)
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Jianghao Wu, Feilong Tang, Yulong Li, Ming Hu, Haochen Xue, Shoaib Jameel, Zongyuan Ge, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to improve medical question answering performance follow two directions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines a generalist with a domain-specific specialist without any model fine-tuning or parameter updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts GPT-4o accuracy by 13.8%, deepseek-R1 by 16.8%, and improves a vanilla 7B model from 14.1% to 23.9%. |
FaithBench: A Diverse Hallucination Benchmark for Summarization by Modern LLMs (2025.naacl-short)
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Forrest Sheng Bao, Miaoran Li, Renyi Qu, Ge Luo, Erana Wan, Yujia Tang, Weisi Fan, Manveer Singh Tamber, Suleman Kazi, Vivek Sourabh, Mike Qi, Ruixuan Tu, Chenyu Xu, Matthew Gonzales, Ofer Mendelevitch, Amin Ahmad
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of hallucinations in large language models suffer from a lack of diversity and recency in the LLM and LLM families considered. |
| Approach: | They propose a summarization hallucination benchmark that challenges models to disagree on hallucines . they use models to generate answers or summaries from textual input . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model combines the best of 10 modern LLMs with ground truth annotations. |
LEASH: Adaptive Length Penalty and Reward Shaping for Efficient Large Reasoning Model (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to long reasoning traces are hard to tune and fail to adapt to evolving LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes the length of reasoning traces by a Lagrangian primal–dual method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the average reasoning length by 60% across diverse tasks while maintaining competitive performance. |
TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Junyi Li, Zhipeng Chen, Yiwen Hu, Zhuohao Yu, Wenxun Dai, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jian-yun Nie, Ji-rong Wen
| Challenge: | TextBox 2.0 focuses on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generate text. |
| Approach: | They propose a library that integrates pre-trained language models into 13 common text generation tasks and 83 datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed library covers 13 common text generation tasks and their corresponding datasets and incorporates 45 PLMs covering general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight PLM. |
NewsBench: A Systematic Evaluation Framework for Assessing Editorial Capabilities of Large Language Models in Chinese Journalism (2024.acl-long)
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Miao Li, Ming-Bin Chen, Bo Tang, ShengbinHou ShengbinHou, Pengyu Wang, Haiying Deng, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Keming Mao, Cheng Peng, Yi Luo
| Challenge: | a novel evaluation framework assesses the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for editorial capabilities in Chinese journalism. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark dataset to assess the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for editorial capabilities in Chinese journalism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is based on a dataset of 1,267 test samples in 24 news domains. |
ChatMatch: Evaluating Chatbots by Autonomous Chat Tournaments (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated evaluation systems of chatbots rely on static chat scripts as ground truth, which is hard to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive chatbot evaluation framework that allows chatbots to compete with each other like in a sports tournament. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can rank chatbots independently from their model architectures and domains . existing evaluation systems rely on static chat scripts as ground truth . |
L-CiteEval: A Suite for Evaluating Fidelity of Long-context Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-context models (LCMs) have seen remarkable advancements in recent years, facilitating tasks like long-document QA. |
| Approach: | They propose an out-of-the-box suite that can assess both generation quality and fidelity in long-context understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed suite can assess both generation quality and fidelity in long-context understanding tasks. |
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. |
What Tokens Truly Matter? The Logit Conflation Problem in LLM Sampling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models filter tokens based on logit magnitudes or derived statistics, under the implicit assumption that high-logit tokens are desirable. |
| Approach: | They propose to isolate the Logit Conflation Problem by using attention-weighted attribution to extract prompt-relevance from token logits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on LLaMA-3 and is training-free and low latency. |
LoRAExit: Empowering Dynamic Modulation of LLMs in Resource-limited Settings using Low-rank Adapters (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks, but deployment on resource-limited settings remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic inference architecture that leverages low-rank adaptors for efficient deployment of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture significantly improves performance when deployed on resource-limited settings. |
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. |
MessToClean: Evidence-Grounded Structure-Preserving Reconstruction for Real-World Degraded Exam Paper Images (2026.acl-long)
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Jiayi Tuo, Cheng Tang, Zihan Wang, Chenyue Zhou, Yao Li, Yanbiao Ma, Chao Wang, Wei Dai, Mingxuan Wang, Shitong Qin, Ziwei Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) fail under RDEI, leading to disrupted structure and evidence-unsupported hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a backbone-agnostic, evidence-driven pipeline that treats off-the-shelf MLLMs as interchangeable components to improve stem consistency and figure consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves stem consistency by 1.01-3.18%, figure consistency by 0.50-49.16%, and refusal F1 by 1.06-10.88% across question types. |
Entropy Ratio Clipping as a Soft Global Constraint for Stable Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenpeng Su, Leiyu Pan, Minxuan Lv, Tiehua Mei, Zijia Lin, Yuntao Li, Wenping Hu, Ruiming Tang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language model post-training often adopts an off-policy training paradigm . however, the off-poliicy training model introduces distribution shifts that push the policy beyond the trust region. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the entropy ratio as a global metric to measure the relative change in policy exploration throughout updates. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed metric improves performance across multiple benchmarks. |
Unleashing the Native Recommendation Potential: LLM-Based Generative Recommendation via Structured Term Identifiers (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhiyang Zhang, Junda She, Kuo Cai, Bo Chen, Shiyao Wang, Xinchen Luo, Qiang Luo, Ruiming Tang, Han Li, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods for constructing item identifiers face bottlenecks due to their large output space and expensive vocabulary expansion and alignment training. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to develop general-purpose, semantically-aware recommender systems that can be generalized and reusable. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on real-world datasets show that GRAM outperforms baselines and significantly outperformed baselines. |
Mitigating Language Confusion through Inference-time Intervention (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to address the problem of language confusion are incontext learning and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) however, they consume context window space and require extensive data collection. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-sensitive intervention that detects and assesses language confusion without additional complex mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects language confusion and assesses content quality without additional complex mechanisms. |
Towards Scalable Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-role Orchestration (2026.findings-acl)
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Ziwei Wang, Junjie Zheng, Leyang Yang, Sheng Zhou, Xiaoxuan Tang, Fang Zhouhua, Zhiwei Liu, Dajun Chen, Yong Li, Jiajun Bu
| Challenge: | Advanced GUI agents suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight GUI agent with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability . LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration. |
Divide and Conquer: Text Semantic Matching with Disentangled Keywords and Intents (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text semantic matching models do not provide granularity for text comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective training strategy for text semantic matching by disentangling keywords from intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves stable performance improvements against a wide range of models on three benchmarks. |
SlideCoder: Layout-aware RAG-enhanced Hierarchical Slide Generation from Design (2025.emnlp-main)
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Wenxin Tang, Jingyu Xiao, Wenxuan Jiang, Xi Xiao, Yuhang Wang, Xuxin Tang, Qing Li, Yuehe Ma, Junliang Liu, Shisong Tang, Michael R. Lyu
| Challenge: | Existing natural language-based LLM generation methods struggle to capture visual and structural nuances of slide designs. |
| Approach: | They propose a layout-aware framework for generating editable slides from reference images . they propose python code that translates NL instructions into Python code to construct each slide . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 40.5 points . it also outperformed open-source models with improved reverse-engineered data. |
GuessArena: Guess Who I Am? A Self-Adaptive Framework for Evaluating LLMs in Domain-Specific Knowledge and Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models rely on static benchmarks and standardized evaluation protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive evaluation framework that integrates dynamic domain knowledge modeling with progressive reasoning assessment to improve evaluation fidelity. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the framework distinguishes LLMs in terms of domain knowledge coverage and reasoning chain completeness. |
The Web Can Be Your Oyster for Improving Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models encode a large amount of knowledge, but knowledge is frozen at the time of training, and the models become static and limited by training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive search engine assisted learning method that can self-evaluate the confidence level of PLM’s predictions and adaptively determine when to refer to the web for more data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms retrieval-augmented methods on 16 knowledge-intensive tasks on a wide range of knowledge-related tasks. |
PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding. |
Trigger Word Detection and Thematic Role Identification via BERT and Multitask Learning (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | Using natural language processing to discover and mine drug-related knowledge from text has been a hot topic in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained biomedical language representation model to extract mutation-disease knowledge from PubMed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches achieve 0.60 (ranks 1) and 0.25 (rank 2) on task 1 and task 2 respectively in terms of F1 metric. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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He Zhu, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Heyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jinxiang Xia, Hanhao Li, Yi Yao, Ningning Wang, Pai Liu, Tianhao Peng, Xin Gui, Li Xiaowan, Yuhui Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. |
Knowledge Fusion By Evolving Weights of Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results on mainstream language models show that Evolver outperforms previous state-of-the-art models by large margins due to the high training costs of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate multiple models from diverse training scenarios into a unified model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on mainstream language models by large margins. |
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Deep Encoder and Multiple Shallow Decoders (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in multilingual translation has improved translation quality surpassing bilingual baselines using deep transformer models with increased capacity. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep encoder with multiple shallow decoders to reduce inference latency while maintaining translation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 1.8x speedup on average compared to a standard transformer model with no drop in translation quality. |
MMSciBench: Benchmarking Language Models on Chinese Multimodal Scientific Problems (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing scientific benchmarks lack human-annotated difficulty levels and structured taxonomies of scientific concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating mathematical and physical reasoning through text-only and text-image formats with human-annotated difficulty levels and detailed explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 63.77% accuracy and struggles with visual reasoning tasks. |
Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs with External Knowledge and Interactive Game (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand course concepts in MOOCs suffer from semantic drifts and lack of knowledge guidance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a boundary search method to search for new concepts via external knowledge base and then use heterogeneous features to verify the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the datasets from Coursera and XuetangX. |
Lost in Embeddings: Information Loss in Vision–Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experiments reveal connectors substantially distort the local geometry of visual representations, with k-nearest neighbors diverging by 40–60% post-projection, correlating with degradation in retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose two approaches to examine and quantify information loss by analyzing latent representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves retrieval performance by analyzing changes in k-nearest neighbor relationships between image representations before and after projection. |
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. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
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Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
Reasoning with Graphs: Structuring Implicit Knowledge to Enhance LLMs Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Haoyu Han, Yaochen Xie, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Sreyashi Nag, William Headden, Yang Li, Chen Luo, Shuiwang Ji, Qi He, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, however, they still face challenges in reasoning tasks that require understanding and inferring relationships between distinct pieces of information within text sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct explicit graphs from context and leverage them to enhance LLM reasoning performance on reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves both logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks. |
HyGenar: An LLM-Driven Hybrid Genetic Algorithm for Few-Shot Grammar Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing grammar generation models perform sub-optimally, resulting in inconsistent syntactic and semantic accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-driven hybrid genetic algorithm to optimize grammar generation by inferring grammars from a set of examples and generated in Backus-Naur Form. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves syntactic and semantic accuracy of generated grammars across LLMs. |
Improving Context Fidelity via Native Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Suyuchen Wang, Jinlin Wang, Xinyu Wang, Shiqi Li, Xiangru Tang, Sirui Hong, Xiao-Wen Chang, Chenglin Wu, Bang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fidelity to contexts rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate evidence post-answer or train models to perform web searches without improving utilization of the given context. |
| Approach: | They propose a native retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that integrates in-context evidence with the model’s own retrieval capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation methods, and external retrieval solutions on multiple real-world and counterfactual QA benchmarks. |
Neural-DINF: A Neural Network based Framework for Measuring Document Influence (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure scholarly impact of documents without citations only consider word frequency change. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network framework that measures document influence without citations by using word frequency changes and word semantic shifts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on document influence evaluation without citations. |
OneRec-Think: In-Text Reasoning for Generative Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
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Zhanyu Liu, Shiyao Wang, Xingmei Wang, Rongzhou Zhang, Jiaxin Deng, Honghui Bao, Jinghao Zhang, Wuchao Li, PengFei Zheng, Xiangyu Wu, Yifei Hu, Qigen Hu, Xinchen Luo, Lejian Ren, Zhang Zixing, Qianqian Wang, Kuo Cai, Yunfan Wu, Hongtao Cheng, Zexuan Cheng, Lu Ren, Huanjie Wang, Yi Su, Ruiming Tang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing generative models lack the capacity for explicit and controllable reasoning, a key advantage of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates dialogue, reasoning, and personalized recommendation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across public benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance. |
Efficient Sparse Attention needs Adaptive Token Release (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks, however, their ‘large’ scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in managing the key-value states of the transformer, which limits their wider applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose to release resources from caches and rebuild key-value states by a lightweight controller module to approximate an ideal top-K sparse attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a significant throughput improvement of 221.8% over full attention and a model with 7 billion tokens. |
CARE-STaR: Constraint-aware Self-taught Reasoner (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhiliang Li, Bo Tang, Yijun Niu, Beihong Jin, Qiwen Shi, Yuchen Feng, Zhiyu Li, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang, Feiyu Xiong
| Challenge: | Recent research on instruction following has demonstrated that LLMs can handle complex instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose to assign constraints to different levels of constraints in instructions . they use chain-of-thought and self-taught reasoner methods to identify constraints . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on three instruction-following benchmarks. |
Answering Complex Geographic Questions by Adaptive Reasoning with Visual Context and External Commonsense Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image is proposed . the task requires identifying the objects in the image and understanding the background context . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of answering geographic reasoning questions based on the given image . they analyze the image and describe its fine-grained content by text and keywords . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to answer geographic reasoning questions based on an image . it can be applied to a large-scale dataset with 41,329 samples . |
DPWriter: Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Planning Branching for Creative Writing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing large language models (LLMs) lack explicit mechanisms for guiding diverse exploration and instead prioritize efficiency and performance over diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning-based framework that decomposes the generation process into explicitly planned intermediate steps and introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing baselines on creative writing benchmarks on a semi-structured long chain-of-thought (CoT) it introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation, alongside a group-aware diversity reward to encourage distinct trajectories. |
RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter (2024.findings-acl)
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Meng Cao, Haoran Tang, Jinfa Huang, Peng Jin, Can Zhang, Ruyang Liu, Long Chen, Xiaodan Liang, Li Yuan, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) aims to align relevant video content with natural language queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct efficient text-video Retrieval with a salient-and-correlated AdaPter . they propose a low-rank modulation module to refine per-image features from frozen CLIP backbone . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four TVR datasets show that the proposed method performs better than other methods. |
Voice Query Auto Completion (2021.emnlp-main)
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Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Kendra Chalkley, Ji Xin, Liming Zhang, Wenyan Li, Gefei Yang, Yajie Mao, Junho Shin, Geoffrey Craig Murray, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing methods fail to complete voice queries from incomplete prefixes because they use orthographic prefix and substrings instead of the true phonetic prefix. |
| Approach: | They propose to condition QAC approaches on intermediate transcriptions to complete voice queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method obtains an 18% relative improvement over previous methods on a speech-enabled smart television with real-life voice search traffic. |
Few-shot Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for KG-to-text generation are based on pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically generate a text that describes the facts in knowledge graph (KG) they leverage the excellent capacities of pretrained language models (PLMs) in language understanding and generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all comparison methods on fully-supervised and fewshot settings. |
RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Qingsong Lv, Yangning Li, Zihua Lan, Zishan Xu, Jiwei Tang, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing selection methods rely on static, heuristic quality scores and are executed only once before training. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic selection framework that integrates selection into every training step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates selection into every training step. |
SafeRAG: Benchmarking Security in Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Model (2025.acl-long)
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Xun Liang, Simin Niu, Zhiyu Li, Sensen Zhang, Hanyu Wang, Feiyu Xiong, Zhaoxin Fan, Bo Tang, Jihao Zhao, Jiawei Yang, Shichao Song, Mengwei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) however, the incorporation of external knowledge increases the vulnerability of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the RAG security using a dataset . they classify attack tasks into silver noise, inter-context conflict, soft ad, and white Denial-of-Service . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the security of RAG against 14 representative RAG components. |
Know the Unknown: An Uncertainty-Sensitive Method for LLM Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but face significant challenges from hallucinations, which arise from insufficient knowledge or context. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel two-stage approach for contextual question answering that enhances LLMs’ ability to recognise their knowledge boundaries while the second reinforces instruction adherence through carefully designed causal prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces incorrect answers in contextual QA and improves models’ faithfulness to parametric knowledge, mitigating hallucinations in general QA tasks. |
ORAL: Prompting Your Large-Scale LoRAs via Conditional Recurrent Diffusion (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) are limited in scalability and controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional recurrent diffusion framework that generates LoRA parameters directly . they integrate model architecture and textual task specifications to generate task-specific parameters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework scales to billions-of-parameter LLMs and maintains controllability. |
Unified Speech-Text Pre-training for Speech Translation and Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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Yun Tang, Hongyu Gong, Ning Dong, Changhan Wang, Wei-Ning Hsu, Jiatao Gu, Alexei Baevski, Xian Li, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Michael Auli, Juan Pino
| Challenge: | Existing methods to pre-train speech and text use unlabeled data to learn universal feature representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to jointly pre-train speech and text in an encoder-decoder modeling framework for speech translation and recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves between 1.7 and 2.3 BLEU improvement above the state of the art on the MuST-C speech translation dataset and comparable WERs to wav2vec 2.0 on the Librispeech speech recognition task. |
TextBox: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Framework for Text Generation (2021.acl-demo)
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Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Gaole He, Jinhao Jiang, Xiaoxuan Hu, Puzhao Xie, Zhipeng Chen, Zhuohao Yu, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | TextBox is an open-source text generation framework that is modularized and extensible. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible text generation framework that implements 21 text generation models on 9 benchmark datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework implements 21 models on 9 benchmark datasets and is available under the Apache License 2.0 license. |
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. |
ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
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Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Zheng Gong, Lixin Yang, Zhuohao Yu, Zhipeng Chen, Jingyuan Wang, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent years have featured a trend towards Transformer based pretrained language models (PLMs) in natural language processing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use four evaluation dimensions to evaluate ten widely-used PLMs . they find that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests . |
| Outcome: | The results show that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests and have excellent transferability between tasks. |
Dependency Graph Enhanced Dual-transformer Structure for Aspect-based Sentiment Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment classification is a popular task aimed at identifying the corresponding emotion of a given aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency graph enhanced dual-transformer network to support mutual reinforcement between the flat representation learning and graph-based representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on five datasets with a large margin. |
CoViPAL: Layer-wise Contextualized Visual Token Pruning for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to prune redundant vision tokens struggle in shallow layers due to the lack of contextual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise contextualized visual token pruning method that uses a plug-and-play Pruning Module to prune redundant vision tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms training-free pruning methods under equal token budgets and surpasses training based methods with comparable supervision. |
Locate-and-Focus: Enhancing Terminology Translation in Speech Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Suhang Wu, Jialong Tang, Chengyi Yang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Junhui Li, Junfeng Yao, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods for terminology translation struggle with interference from irrelevant noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a Locate-and-Focus method that locates terminologies within utterances to construct translation knowledge by minimizing irrelevant information for ST models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method locates terminologies within utterances and enhances the success rate of terminology translation while maintaining robust general translation performance. |
Surfer100: Generating Surveys From Web Resources, Wikipedia-style (2022.lrec-1)
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Irene Li, Alex Fabbri, Rina Kawamura, Yixin Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jaesung Tae, Chang Shen, Sally Ma, Tomoe Mizutani, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Recent work on Wikipedia page generation focuses on generating the initial leading paragraph of a page, while recent pretrained language models improve upon both extractive and abstractive steps of previous models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained language model that can be combined to generate Wikipedia-style summaries with sections using 100 reference human-collected surveys. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is compared with existing methods with 100 human-collected surveys. |
FlipDA: Effective and Robust Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Learning (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text data augmentation are limited to simple tasks and weak baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method FlipDA that uses a generative model and a classifier to generate label-flipped data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves many tasks while not negatively affecting the others. |
Open-ended Long Text Generation via Masked Language Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained autoregressive language models have dominated OPen-ended Long Text Generation (Open-LTG) however, the low inference efficiency of AR impedes their usability. |
| Approach: | They propose a representative iterative non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding strategy to improve inference efficiency for Open-LTG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate short text and collapse for long text modeling. |
ELMER: A Non-Autoregressive Pre-trained Language Model for Efficient and Effective Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation use auto-regressive (AR) methods, but inefficient inference is a problem. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and effective PLM to explicitly model the token dependency during NAR text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three text generation tasks while achieving 10 times faster inference speedup. |
Recommending Missed Citations Identified by Reviewers: A New Task, Dataset and Baselines (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing citation recommendation systems aim to recommend a list of scientific papers for a given text context or a draft paper. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Recommending Missed Citations Identified by Reviewers to help improve citations of full papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in all metrics and will motivate future research on this challenging task. |
Anchoring the Affective Manifold: Learning Canonical and Disentangled Representations via Generative Cross-Modal Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dominant multimodal emotion recognition paradigms neglect the intrinsic geometric structure of affect, resulting in representations heavily entangled with non-affective factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Canonical Disentangled Multimodal Generative Framework that decomposes the latent space into a canonical Shared Affective Subspace and a private Modality Subspace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model disentangles affect from private attributes while enabling controllable emotion generation. |