Papers by Li Xiao
AdaMix: Adaptive Mixing for Short and Long Reasoning Adapters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large reasoning models have improved efficiency but still face limitations such as conflicting objectives and limited adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive reasoning framework that applies a uniform, computation-intensive deep reasoning strategy to all problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the average response length of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B by 54.9% while improving accuracy by up to 4.8% on five mathematical datasets. |
Say What You Mean! Large Language Models Speak Too Positively about Negative Commonsense Knowledge (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been studied for their ability to store and utilize positive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a constrained keywords-to-sentence generation task and a Boolean question answering task to probe large language models on negative commonsense knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks show that LLMs fail to generate valid sentences grounded in negative commonsense knowledge, yet they can correctly answer yes-or-no questions. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
HEAL: Hybrid Enhancement with LLM-based Agents for Text-attributed Hypergraph Self-supervised Representation Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance text-attributed hypergraph self-supervised learning are limited by label scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that leverages large language models to enhance hypergraph self-supervised learning by integrating hyperedges into a self-representation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates informative nodes and hyperedges through multi-round interaction with LLM-based agents. |
Can Pre-trained Language Models Interpret Similes as Smart as Human? (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Simile interpretation is a crucial task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to let PLMs infer the shared properties of similes by probing textual corpora and human-designed questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms pre-trained language models on simile interpretation tasks while still underperforming humans. |
Evolving Beyond Snapshots: Harmonizing Structure and Sequence via Entity State Tuning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) require predicting future facts by modeling structural dependencies within each snapshot and temporal evolution across snapshots. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-agnostic framework that provides persistent entity states . EST maintains a global state buffer and aligns structural evidence with sequential signals . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that EST improves diverse backbones and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
Learning Event Graph Knowledge for Abductive Reasoning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for abductive reasoning based on formal logic lack commonsense knowledge and effective reasoning mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative text-based abductive reasoning task NLI with a latent variable to capture commonsense knowledge from event graph for guiding the abductive reasoning task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods on the abductive reasoning task. |
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. |
CogBERT: Cognition-Guided Pre-trained Language Models (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods fine-tune pre-trained models on cognitive data, ignoring the semantic gap between texts and cognitive signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into pre-trained language models by adaptively adjusting the weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into BERT by adaptively adjusting weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
Lattice-Based Transformer Encoder for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) takes deterministic sequences for source representations. However, word-level or subword-level segmentation has multiple choices to split a source sequence with different word segmentors or different subword vocabulary sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose lattice-based encoders to explore effective word or subword representations in an automatic way during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoders can explore effective word or subword representation in an automatic way during training. |
DGST: a Dual-Generator Network for Text Style Transfer (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on text style transfer focus on altering sentiment words to preserve attribute-independent information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Generator network architecture for text Style Transfer using two generators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models on Yelp and IMDb datasets. |
Event Representation Learning Enhanced with External Commonsense Knowledge (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn event representations from text lack commonsense knowledge about the intents and emotions of event participants. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage external commonsense knowledge about the intent and sentiment of the event to learn distributed representations for structured events from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on hard similarity tasks and yields more precise inferences on subsequent events under given contexts. |
ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Causal chain reasoning models suffer from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses exogenous variables to represent causal pairs and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions using structural causal recurrent neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on Chinese and English CCR datasets. |
PivotAttack: Rethinking the Search Trajectory in Hard-Label Text Attacks via Pivot Words (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing hard-label text attacks rely on inefficient "outside-in" strategies that traverse vast search spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-efficient "inside-out" framework that perturbs Pivot Sets to induce label flips. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both Attack Success Rate and query efficiency. |
Beyond Single-Event Extraction: Towards Efficient Document-Level Multi-Event Argument Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Wanlong Liu, Li Zhou, DingYi Zeng, Yichen Xiao, Shaohuan Cheng, Chen Zhang, Grandee Lee, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen
| Challenge: | mainstream event argument extraction methods process each event in isolation, resulting in inefficient inference and ignoring correlations among multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-event argument argument extraction model which extracts arguments from all events simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on four public datasets while saving time. |
Revisiting Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Zero-shot Can Be Stronger than Few-shot (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is an essential emergent ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They introduce CoT to exemplars of ICL to enhance the reasoning capability . however, it remains unclear whether CoT exemplar is still beneficial for recent, stronger models in such tasks. |
| Outcome: | The enhanced exemplars fail to improve the model’s reasoning performance, despite being constructed using answers from advanced models such as Qwen2.5-Max and DeepSeek-R1. |
Lunar Twins: We Choose to Go to the Moon with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Lunar Twins is the first LLM designed specifically for lunar exploration . Lunar GenData is a multi-agent collaborative workflow for generating lunar instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines both large and small LLMs and Lunar GenData, which integrates real data from Chang'e lunar missions. |
| Outcome: | Experimental validation shows that the proposed framework enhances domain expertise and reveals indications of embodied intelligence potential. |
Rethinking LLM Uncertainty: A Multi-Agent Approach to Estimating Black-Box Model Uncertainty (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yu Feng, Phu Mon Htut, Zheng Qi, Wei Xiao, Manuel Mager, Nikolaos Pappas, Kishaloy Halder, Yang Li, Yassine Benajiba, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Existing methods to gauge model’s uncertainty through self-consistency in responses to the target query are misleading: an LLM may confidently provide an incorrect answer to a target query, yet give a confident and accurate answer to that same query when answering a knowledge-preserving perturbation of the query. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses multi-agent interaction to estimate black-box LLMs' uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing self-consistency based methods and improves hallucination detection. |
WikiDiverse: A Multimodal Entity Linking Dataset with Diversified Contextual Topics and Entity Types (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) is an essential task for many multimodal applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-annotated Wikipedia-based multimodal entity linking dataset to improve the quality of existing MEL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model uses the visual information of images more effectively than existing models. |
Weight Distillation: Transferring the Knowledge in Neural Network Parameters (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation is an effective method for model acceleration and compression. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parameters to distill knowledge from large neural networks to small ones . they propose to do this by using a parameter generator to transfer the knowledge to a small neural network . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method learns a small network 1.88 2.94x faster than the large network but with competitive BLEU points. |
WeCheck: Strong Factual Consistency Checker via Weakly Supervised Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing factual consistency metrics are often uncontrollably generating text that is factually inconsistent with inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised framework that is directly trained on actual generated samples from language models with weakly annotated labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the TRUE benchmark by 3.3% over existing methods with 435M parameters. |
Bag of Tricks for Optimizing Transformer Efficiency (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Improving Transformer efficiency has become increasingly attractive in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine pruning, quantization, new architectures and training strategies to improve Transformer efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the inference efficiency of a strong Transformer system by 3.80x on CPU and 2.52x on GPU. |
An Empirical Study of Iterative Refinements for Non-autoregressive Translation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Iterative non-autoregressive (NAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive performance in varied generation tasks, surpassing the autoregressive Transformer. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to conduct efficient refinements without performance declines by using two simple metrics to identify potential problems existing in current refinement processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the autoregressive Transformer by around one BLEU on average. |
Velocitune: A Velocity-based Dynamic Domain Reweighting Method for Continual Pre-training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimise pretraining performance have not addressed the complexities of domain-adaptive continual pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically assesses learning velocity and adjusts data proportions accordingly, favouring slower learning domains while de-emphasising faster learning ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance gains in math and code reasoning tasks and command-line generation benchmarks. |
Do LLMs Catch Their Own Mistakes? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Reflective Tool Use LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate planning and execution success, overlooking the self-reflective dimension of tool use. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs’ self-reflective reasoning in tool-augmented multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 10 domains with 88 distinct APIs and 968 annotated dialogues, systematically injecting diverse error types arising from both user and assistant behavior. |
TrInk: Ink Generation with Transformer Network (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zezhong Jin, Shubhang Desai, Xu Chen, Biyi Fang, Zhuoyi Huang, Zhe Li, Chong-Xin Gan, Xiao Tu, Man-Wai Mak, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for handwriting generation capture global dependencies and can generate high-quality handwritten samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based model for ink generation, TrInk, which captures global dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces character error rate and word error rate by 35.56% on the IAM-OnDB dataset compared to previous models. |
FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wu, Hongru Sun, Wanqing Li, Xinguo Yu, Hao Ming, Xiao Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Jiahong Zhao, Yi Guo, Jie Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states. |
Reason from Fallacy: Enhancing Large Language Models’ Logical Reasoning through Logical Fallacy Understanding (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated good performance in many reasoning tasks, but struggle with some more complex reasoning tasks including logical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose five concrete tasks from three cognitive dimensions of WHAT, WHY, and HOW to evaluate LLMs’ capability of logical fallacy understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to evaluate LLMs’ LFU capability and to fine-tune LLM models to obtain significantly enhanced performance on logical reasoning. |
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)
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Ying He, Zhouhong Gu, Zhecheng Hu, Yubo Zhou, Hao Shen, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao, Zhixu Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models. |
Chart-MRAG: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation on Chart-based Documents (2026.acl-long)
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null Ymyang, Jiang Zhong, Li Jin, Xiao Sun, Jingwang Huang, null Gaojinpeng, Qing Liu, Yang Bai, Jingyuan Zhang, Rui Jiang, Qin Lei, Kaiwen Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automatic framework for generating evaluation samples through multi-modal keypoint extraction, knowledge graph construction, and qa pair synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents. |
JiraiBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Detection of Human risky health behavior Content in Jirai Community (2026.eacl-long)
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Yunze Xiao, Tingyu He, Lionel Z. Wang, Yiming Ma, Xingyu Song, Xiaohang Xu, Mona T. Diab, Irene Li, Ka Chung Ng
| Challenge: | a cross-lingual dataset captures a transnational cultural phenomenon . risky health behaviors (RHB) are often linked to complex mental health conditions . |
| Approach: | They present the first cross-lingual dataset that captures a transnational cultural phenomenon . their dataset of more than 15,000 annotated social media posts forms the core of JiraiBench . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that cultural context can be more influential than linguistic similarity . the study also shows that the Japanese prompts better handle Chinese content . |
Joint Multi-modal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis with Auxiliary Cross-modal Relation Detection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on aspect-level sentiment analysis focus on extracting aspect terms and sentiment polarities separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal joint learning approach with auxiliary cross-modal relation detection for multi-dimensional aspect-level sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can obtain all aspect-level sentiment polarities dependent on the jointly extracted specific aspects. |
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Zhang, Xu Yang, Xiao Yang, Bowen Xian, Qizheng Li, Shikai Fang, Jingyuan Li, Jian Wang, Minrui Xu, Yuge Zhang, Weiqing Liu, Jiang Bian
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering rely on tree search to rank candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent that operationalizes gradient-based optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves a state-of-the-art 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench with a limited budget on a single GPU. |
SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wei Shi, Shuang Li, Kerun Yu, Jinglei Chen, Zujie Liang, Xinhui Wu, Yuxi Qian, Feng Wei, Bo Zheng, Jiaqing Liang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that increase context window do not guarantee robust performance across long input tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables language models to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The framework improves performance on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks. |
V-DPO: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision Language Models via Vision-Guided Direct Preference Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing large vision-language models suffer from hallucination due to over-reliance on the Large Language Model (LLM) backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve visual context learning by using a large-scale preference learning algorithm to improve hallucination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on human-annotated hallucination datasets. |
Exploring Key Point Analysis with Pairwise Generation and Graph Partitioning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for key point analysis rely on semantic similarity instead of measuring the existence of shared key points . |
| Approach: | They propose a key point analysis approach with pairwise generation and graph partitioning to summarize arguments into a concise set of key points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses existing models on ArgKP and QAM datasets. |
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
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. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
A Simple and Effective Approach to Robust Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has questioned the robustness of unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction methods on distant language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative dimension reduction method to bridge this gap . they propose a method that initializes and self-learning and inducing a dictionary . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 13.64 55.53% accuracy between English and four distant languages. |
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
Towards Generalizable and Faithful Logic Reasoning over Natural Language via Resolution Refutation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in various natural language reasoning tasks, but struggle with performing first-order logic reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which introduces the paradigm of resolution refutation to solve first-order logic reasoning problems by extending reasoning rules and employing the principle of proof by contradiction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models while maintaining performance in simple scenarios. |
On the Rigour of Scientific Writing: Criteria, Analysis, and Insights (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | despite its importance, little work exists on modelling rigour in scientific writing . despite widespread use of term, scientific literature lacks definition of rigor . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically identify and define rigour criteria and assess their relevance in scientific writing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be tailored to the evaluation of scientific rigour for different areas. |
GAPO: Learning Preferential Prompt through Generative Adversarial Policy Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Zhouhong Gu, Xingzhou Chen, Xiaoran Shi, Tao Wang, Suhang Zheng, Tianyu Li, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for achieving this require a limited understanding of constraints and can be hallucinating or brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines adversarial training dynamics with an encoder-only reward model to progressively learn and adapt to increasingly complex constraints. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that GAPO significantly outperforms existing methods like PPO, DPO, and KTO in fine-grained constraints. |
Structure Guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Factual Queries (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for RAG produce factually incorrect outputs, resulting in incorrect answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel problem that explicitly incorporates structural information into RAG for factual questions to satisfy all query conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines on ERQA while maintaining reasonable computational overhead. |
I2E: From Image Pixels to Actionable Interactive Environments for Text-Guided Image Editing (2026.acl-long)
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Jinghan Yu, Junhao Xiao, Chenyu Zhu, Jiaming Li, Jia Li, HanMing Deng, Xirui Wang, Guoli Jia, Jianjun Li, Xiang Bai, Bowen Zhou, Zhiyuan Ma
| Challenge: | Existing text-guided image editing methods rely on end-to-end pixel-level inpainting paradigm . existing models lack such intermediate representations and Reasoning-then-action process . |
| Approach: | They propose a "Decompose-then-Action" paradigm that revisits image editing as an actionable interaction process within a structured environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing methods in compositional editing tasks. |
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Pre-trained Large Language Models (2026.tacl-1)
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Yongyu Mu, Yuzhang Wu, Yuchun Fan, Chenglong Wang, Hengyu Li, Jiali Zeng, Qiaozhi He, Murun Yang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on compressing the Key-Value cache or grouping attention heads, while overlooking redundancy between layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs that uses feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces redundancy by sharing weights across layers while maintaining high response quality while reducing redundant calculations within 53% 84% of the total layers. |
MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Wang, Junting Pan, Linda Wei, Aojun Zhou, Weikang Shi, Zimu Lu, Han Xiao, Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LMMs) struggle with simple tasks such as geometry, e.g., arithmetic, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage code as supervision for cross-modal alignment . they propose to use FigCodifier and ImgCode-8.6M to synthesize novel mathematical figures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the geometry problem-solving subset of MathVista, achieving improvements of 8.9% and 9.2%. |
Training LLMs for Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning Elevates Test-Time Scalability (2026.acl-long)
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Xiao Liang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zhenghao Lin, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Yeyun Gong, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities through step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but their strictly sequential nature constrains test-time scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework to enhance LLMs' DAC-style reasoning capacity by decomposing a problem into subproblems and solving them sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses CoT by 8.6% and 6.3% on competition-level benchmarks and is available at the [github.com/MasterVito/DAC-RL]. |
Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Program induction for complex questions over knowledge bases relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB, but the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to leverage program annotations on rich KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for low-resourced KB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP. |
MMA: Cross-Domain Knowledge Integration via Mixture of Multi-Domain Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | achieving synergistic improvements between generalization and domain specialization remains a challenge in pre-training and post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time cross-domain knowledge integration method that integrates general-purpose and domain-specific models to enhance their performance on complex, domainspecific tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines the outputs of general-purpose and domain-specific models to improve their performance on complex, domainspecific tasks. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
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Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field. |
Inflated Excellence or True Performance? Rethinking Medical Diagnostic Benchmarks with Dynamic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) are limited in capturing key challenges of clinical diagnostic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic benchmark for medical diagnostics that provides a stress test of diagnostic robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides a stress test of diagnostic robustness and veracity, helpfulness and consistency. |
C2KD: Cross-layer and Cross-head Knowledge Distillation for Small Language Model-based Recommendation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise but their size and high inference costs limit deployment on resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to transfer task-relevant knowledge from two complementary dimensions to Large Language Models (LLMs) Large Language models (LLMS) have demonstrated great potential in sequential recommendation tasks . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across diverse model families show that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance compared to LLMs. |
Distantly-Supervised Joint Extraction with Noise-Robust Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying entity pairs and relations with a single model are noisy . Existing methods only consider one source of noise or make decisions using external knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns entity mentions with corresponding tags for joint extraction . they propose DENRL, which employs a lightweight transformer backbone for joint tagging . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two benchmark datasets with better interpretability. |
Uncertainty-Aware Bootstrap Learning for Joint Extraction on Distantly-Supervised Data (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract entity pairs and their relations from labeled data are noisy and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a bootstrap learning approach that is motivated by intuition that the higher the uncertainty of an instance, the more likely the model confidence is inconsistent with the ground truths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and related methods on two large datasets. |
Defending against Insertion-based Textual Backdoor Attacks via Attribution (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Textual backdoor attacks are vulnerable to backdoors and can be used to infect models trained on poisoned data. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient attribution-based pipeline to defend against two insertion-based poisoning attacks, BadNL and InSent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generalize sufficiently well in two common attack scenarios, which consistently improves previous methods. |
Data Mixing Agent: Learning to Re-weight Domains for Continual Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reweighting data mixtures rely on manual designation with certain heuristics based on intuition or empirical results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based framework that learns to re-weight domains by reinforcement learning on large quantities of data mixing trajectories with corresponding feedback from an evaluation environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in achieving balanced performance across source and target fields and domain spaces without retraining. |
Cognitive Overload: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Overloaded Logical Thinking (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated increasing power, but they also have vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack that targets the cognitive structure and processes of large language models (LLMs) they propose defending cognitive overload attacks from three perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is a black-box attack with no need for knowledge of model architecture or access to model weights. |
Multi-Path Transformer is Better: A Case Study on Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on 12 WMT tasks show that shallower multi-path models can achieve similar or even better performance than the deeper model. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a parameter-efficient multi-path structure to fuse features extracted from different paths to achieve better performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better performance with the same number of parameters than the deeper model. |
Chinese Automatic Readability Assessment Using Adaptive Pre-training and Linguistic Feature Fusion (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for classification of reading difficulty of texts are insufficiently trained and lack of linguistic features. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines adaptive pre-training with feature fusion to capture different text difficulties and an interactive attention mechanism to integrate linguistic and deep features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on Chinese textbook dataset and can be applied to other languages. |
Masked Audio Text Encoders are Effective Multi-Modal Rescorers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Masked Language Models (MLMs) have proven to be effective for second-pass rescoring in Automatic Speech Recognition systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal masked language model rescorer which integrates acoustic representations into the input space of MLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces word error rate (WER) by 4%-16% on in-domain and 3%-7% on out-of-domain datasets over the text-only baseline. |
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. |
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 . |
MccSTN: Multi-Scale Contrast and Fine-Grained Feature Fusion Networks for Subject-driven Style Transfer (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Stylistic style transfer is an important part of the image processing field . due to the low semantic similarity between the original image and the style image, many fine-grained style features are discarded. |
| Approach: | They propose a new style representation and transfer framework that can be adapted to existing image style transfers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be adapted to existing image style transfers. |
DEEPER Insight into Your User: Directed Persona Refinement for Dynamic Persona Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Aili Chen, Chengyu Du, Jiangjie Chen, Jinghan Xu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Zulong Chen, Liangyue Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating personas from static historical data fail to capture dynamic behaviors and evolving preferences in real-world interactive scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that iteratively updates personas using streaming user behavior data to continually enhance their quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach delivers 32.2% reduction in user behavior prediction error over four update rounds, outperforming the best baseline by 22.92%. |
Reaction Miner: An Integrated System for Chemical Reaction Extraction from Textual Data (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Ming Zhong, Siru Ouyang, Yizhu Jiao, Priyanka Kargupta, Leo Luo, Yanzhen Shen, Bobby Zhou, Xianrui Zhong, Xuan Liu, Hongxiang Li, Jinfeng Xiao, Minhao Jiang, Vivian Hu, Xuan Wang, Heng Ji, Martin Burke, Huimin Zhao, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Reaction Miner is a system designed to extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that extracts chemical reactions directly from raw scientific PDFs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs. |
TMFN: A Target-oriented Multi-grained Fusion Network for End-to-end Aspect-based Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis focus on fusing image regional information and textual words. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis method that integrates regional and global image information with global image data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
iMOVE : Instance-Motion-Aware Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiaze Li, Yaya Shi, Zongyang Ma, Haoran Xu, Yandong.bai Yandong.bai, Huihui Xiao, Ruiwen Kang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Di Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Video Large Language Models have led to rapid development, significantly enhancing the capture of overall video semantics and achieving remarkable performance in general video understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instance-motion-aware video instruction-tuning dataset iMOVE that utilizes Event-awful Spatiotemporal Efficient Modeling to retain informative instance spatiotemporal motion details while maintaining computational efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels in video temporal understanding and general video understanding. |
EIT: Enhanced Interactive Transformer (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-view learning models prioritize complementarity while ignoring consensus . EMHA allows for efficient modeling of global dependencies among tokens in parallel . |
| Approach: | They propose an enhanced multi-head self-attention (EMHA) that prioritizes complementarity while ignoring consensus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method favors consensus among heads by introducing two models . it is superior on a wide range of language tasks with a modest increase in model size . |
EXPLAIN: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Entity Summary (2025.acl-industry)
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Yaozhen Liang, Xiao Liu, Jiajun Yu, Zhouhua Fang, Qunsheng Zou, Linghan Zheng, Yong Li, Zhiwei Liu, Haishuai Wang
| Challenge: | Existing document question answering methods reduce inference costs and input tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that automatically extracts useful entities and generates summaries from documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context question answering (LC) methods achieve higher accuracy by processing entire documents, but at the cost of increased computational Corresponding authors. |
Do VLMs Have a Moral Backbone? A Study on the Fragile Morality of Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhining Liu, Tianyi Wang, Xiao Lin, Penghao Ouyang, Gaotang Li, Ze Yang, Hui Liu, Sumit Keswani, Vishwa Pardeshi, Huijun Zhao, Wei Fan, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal learning, driving progress in cross-modal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine moral robustness of vision-language models by analyzing their moral stances under multimodal perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic multimodal perturbations expose VLMs to a variety of moral vulnerabilities, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion. |
FinMaster: A Holistic Benchmark for Full-Pipeline Financial Management with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Junzhe Jiang, Chang Yang, Aixin Cui, Sihan Jin, Yujing Zhang, Yilin Xiao, Ruiyu Wang, Bo Li, Xiao Huang, Danny Dongning Sun, Xinrun Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack domain-specific data, realistic workflow-level task design, and standardized workflow- level evaluation. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates large language models on financial management workflows . the global financial services market is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for large language models on financial management workflows reveals critical capability gaps . accuracy drops from 90% on basic tasks to 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning . the global financial services market reached $25.8 trillion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 . |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios. |
RankPrompt: Step-by-Step Comparisons Make Language Models Better Reasoners (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to reasoning tasks require extensive human annotations or fail in scenarios with inconsistent responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method that enables LLMs to self-rank their responses without additional resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves reasoning performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 with 13% improvement over existing methods. |
Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding for Mitigating Context Faithfulness Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods, such as a n-terminal coding, do not provide accurate data for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that leverages attention distributions and uncertainty signals in a single-pass decoding. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on open-book QA datasets show that DAGCD improves faithfulness and robustness while preserving computational efficiency. |
ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Sun, Xingyu Qian, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Chenghao Xiao, Long Li, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang, Tingyang Xu, Qifeng Bai, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Existing medical reasoning datasets are limited in scale and typically rely on incomplete data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ReasonMed to train medical reasoning models using a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The largest medical reasoning dataset to date surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%. |
E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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Jiangjie Chen, Rui Xu, Ziquan Fu, Wei Shi, Zhongqiao Li, Xinbo Zhang, Changzhi Sun, Lei Li, Yanghua Xiao, Hao Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose an explanation benchmark for analogical reasoning using a Civil Service exam . they use a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is very challenging for state-of-the-art models, it is found. |
Med-SRAF: A Multi-Agent Framework for Medical Reasoning via Semantic Routing and Agentic Fusion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods suffer from a two-part problem: semantic drift and concatenation fallacy . et al.: rapid development of Large Language Models has led to a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent retrieval augmentation framework guided by medical domain knowledge to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing general RAG baselines on five widely used medical benchmarks. |
CR-LLM: A Dataset and Optimization for Concept Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Nianqi Li, Jingping Liu, Sihang Jiang, Haiyun Jiang, Yanghua Xiao, Jiaqing Liang, Zujie Liang, Feng Wei, Jinglei Chen, Zhenghong Hao, Bing Han
| Challenge: | Existing concept reasoning related datasets suffer from modeledge leakage and context leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept reasoning for large language models with modeledge leakage prevention and context leakage preventive methods to improve the models' conceptual reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the existing models and reasoning methods, achieving a 7% increase in accuracy compared to CoT and showing better granularity. |
AutoScraper: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Scraper Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenhao Huang, Zhouhong Gu, Chenghao Peng, Jiaqing Liang, Zhixu Li, Yanghua Xiao, Liqian Wen, Zulong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for web scraping suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new website. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates web scrapers with large language models and a new executability metric to measure the performance of web scraper generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can handle diverse web environments more efficiently. |
Calibrated Speculative Decoding: Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection for Efficient Inference (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a powerful and efficient way to accelerate autoregressive generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that recovers valid tokens discarded by standard verification . they use online correction memory and Semantic Consistency Gating to analyze rejections . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves peak throughput speedup of 2.33x. |
Safety Alignment in NLP Tasks: Weakly Aligned Summarization as an In-Context Attack (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent developments in balancing usefulness and safety of large language models raise a critical question . current attacks, especially adversarial ones that manipulate malicious prompts, often aim to manipulate the input . |
| Approach: | They show that LLMs can effectively summarize malicious long documents but often refuse to translate them. |
| Outcome: | The findings highlight a vulnerability in LLMs that can't translate or summarize documents . the study focuses on LLM models, Gemini and GPT-4, which can' be exploited . |
A Two-Stage Framework with Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Domain Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on cross-domain text classification relies on domain-invariant features or task-agnostic features. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework for cross-domain text classification that leverages or reuses rich labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data in the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on a public cross-domain text classification benchmark. |
DisastQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Question Answering in Disaster Management (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Chen, Kai Yin, Xiangjue Dong, Chengkai Liu, Xiangpeng Li, Bo Li, Junwei Ma, Yiming Xiao, Ali Mostafavi, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for question answering (QA) are lacking in a high-stakes environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a rigorously verified benchmark of 3,000 expert-annotated questions . they propose 'keypoint-based evaluation protocol' emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose models such as MMLU-Pro. |
RIGOURATE: Quantifying Scientific Exaggeration with Evidence-Aligned Claim Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Scientific rigour tends to be sidelined in favour of bold statements, leading authors to overstate claims beyond what their results support. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that retrieves supporting evidence from a paper and assigns each claim an overstatement score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework retrieves supporting evidence from ICLR and NeurIPS papers and assigns each claim an overstatement score. |
UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal ones . large-scale pre- training has drawn much attention in both the community of Compute Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture which can adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn more generalizable representations with rich non-paired single-modal data. |
Reward Mixology: Crafting Hybrid Signals for Reinforcement Learning Driven In-Context Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for in-context learning (ICL) performance rely on quality and ordering of demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that models iterative demonstration selection as a Markov Decision Process and craft hybrid reward signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines outcome-based accuracy signals with process-oriented signals like stepwise influence and label entropy improvement. |
Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training. |
ManagerTower: Aggregating the Insights of Uni-Modal Experts for Vision-Language Representation Learning (2023.acl-long)
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Xiao Xu, Bei Li, Chenfei Wu, Shao-Yen Tseng, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Shachar Rosenman, Vasudev Lal, Wanxiang Che, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Two-Tower Vision-Language models suffer from ineffective layer-by-layer utilization of uni-modal representations and cannot flexibly exploit different levels of unil-modal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a model architecture that gathers and combines the insights of pre-trained uni-modal experts at different levels to facilitate more comprehensive cross-modal alignment and fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines with and without Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) with 4M VLP data. |
Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show language agents lack human-level planning abilities . limitations and mechanisms to address them remain insufficiently understood . |
| Approach: | They apply a feature attribution study to identify key factors hindering agent planning . they identify the limited role of constraints and diminishing influence of questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 15.6% on a real-world planning benchmark. |
A Dashboard for Mitigating the COVID-19 Misinfodemic (2021.eacl-demos)
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Zhengyuan Zhu, Kevin Meng, Josue Caraballo, Israa Jaradat, Xiao Shi, Zeyu Zhang, Farahnaz Akrami, Haojin Liao, Fatma Arslan, Damian Jimenez, Mohanmmed Samiul Saeef, Paras Pathak, Chengkai Li
| Challenge: | a new public dashboard aims to understand the impact of the COVID-19 misinfodemic on Twitter . the dashboard uses a curated catalog of COVId-19 related facts and debunks of misinformation . |
| Approach: | They propose a public dashboard that matches tweets with COVID-19 misinformation . they also propose experiments to analyze the spread of misinformation on twitter . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dashboard uses a curated catalog of COVID-19 related facts and debunks misinformation . it shows the most prevalent information from the catalog among Twitter users in user-selected geographic regions . |
AutoMIR: Effective Zero-Shot Medical Information Retrieval without Relevance Labels (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Effective zero-shot dense retrieval in the medical domain remains difficult due to the scarcity of relevance-labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate hypothetical documents . they also propose 'CMIRB' to provide a rigorous evaluation suite . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms HyDE in retrieval accuracy and generalization . it leverages large language models to generate hypothetical documents conditioned on a query . |
Beyond Decoder-only: Large Language Models Can be Good Encoders for Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Yingfeng Luo, Tong Zheng, Yongyu Mu, Bei Li, Qinghong Zhang, Yongqi Gao, Ziqiang Xu, Peinan Feng, Xiaoqian Liu, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine translation have focused on a single pre-trained decoder . encoder-decoder architectures have received relatively little attention in NMT . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages LLMs as MT encoders and pairs them with lightweight decoders to develop universal translation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or surpasses baselines in terms of translation quality but achieves 75% reduction in memory footprint of the KV cache. |
APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance. |
SceneGenAgent: Precise Industrial Scene Generation with Coding Agent (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on scene generation focuses on generating 3D scenes from textual descriptions . however, the task of generating industrial scenes with LLMs is complex and requires precise measurements and positioning . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent for generating industrial scenes through C# code. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LLMs powered by SceneGenAgent exceed their original performance . the agent achieves 81.0% success rate in real-world industrial scene generation tasks . |
Past Meets Present: Creating Historical Analogy with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Nianqi Li, Siyu Yuan, Jiangjie Chen, Jiaqing Liang, Feng Wei, Zujie Liang, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Historical analogies are important abilities that help people make decisions and understand the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a historical analogy acquisition task that uses large language models to acquire historical analogies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates hallucinations and stereotypes when LLMs generate historical analogies. |
E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language pre-training methods use a two-step training procedure to learn visual features from image-text pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-trained model for V+L understanding and generation using a unified Transformer framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn visual representation and semantic alignments between image and text on visual-text pairs and on visual processing tasks. |
EmotionQueen: A Benchmark for Evaluating Empathy of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) focus on basic sentiment analysis tasks, such as emotion recognition, which is not enough to evaluate LLMs’ overall emotional intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluating the emotional intelligence of large language models (LLMs) that includes four distinct tasks: Key Event Recognition, Mixed Event Recognition and Implicit Emotional Recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework includes four distinct tasks: Key Event Recognition, Mixed Event Recognition and Implicit Emotional Recognition. |
Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multidisciplinary Professional Videos (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing video benchmarks do not evaluate the knowledge acquisition capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) existing video benchmark focuses on static, general visual understanding tasks, without evaluating whether models can acquire knowledge dynamically. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal, multi-discipline, multitrack benchmark that evaluates Large Multimodal Models’ ability to acquire knowledge from college-level, educational videos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals a substantial gap between human learners and current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and focuses on improving their learning efficiency. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
Does Multi-Encoder Help? A Case Study on Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | In encoder-decoder neural models, multiple encoders are used to represent contextual information in addition to the individual sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple context encoders to encode the individual sentences in document-level neural machine translation (NMT) They propose a noisy dropout setup and a single-encoder approach to encode context sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach encodes the context and the current sentence without contexts. |
Video-Language Understanding: A Survey from Model Architecture, Model Training, and Data Perspectives (2024.findings-acl)
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Thong Nguyen, Yi Bin, Junbin Xiao, Leigang Qu, Yicong Li, Jay Zhangjie Wu, Cong-Duy Nguyen, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu
| Challenge: | Existing video-language understanding systems with human-like senses can mimic both our linguistic medium and visual environment with temporal dynamics. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop video-language understanding systems with human-like senses . they summarize their methods and highlight challenges associated with them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well in a variety of tasks and domains. |
Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit translationese errors and generate unexpected unnatural translations . Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the dominant method in machine translation research . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the prevalence of translationese in LLM-generated translations and investigate its roots during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce translationese while improving translation naturalness . the proposed methods are validated by human evaluations and automatic metrics . |
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chuhao Jin, Yutao Zhu, Lingzhen Kong, Shijie Li, Xiao Zhang, Ruihua Song, Xu Chen, Huan Chen, Yuchong Sun, Yu Chen, Jun Xu
| Challenge: | Persuasive dialogue models rely on utterance semantic matching and a key aspect has been ignored . compared with utterrance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model conversation semantics and strategies to match them using a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves state-of-the-art by 5% on a small and 37% on 'large' datasets. |
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. |
From AR to Diffusion: Efficiently Adapting Large Language Models with Strictly Causal and Elastic Horizons (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) models rely on bidirectional attention, creating a structural mismatch with pre-trained Autoregression models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that efficiently adapts autoregressive (AR) models to the diffusion paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training costs by orders of magnitude while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. |
Boosting Text-to-SQL through Multi-grained Error Identification (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for error identification often overlook validation of generated results . text-to-SQL is a technology that converts natural language questions into executable SQL queries . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a multi-grained error identification method into existing methods to detect SQL errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be integrated as a plugin into various methods, providing effective error identification and correction capabilities. |
Guide the Many-to-One Assignment: Open Information Extraction via IoU-aware Optimal Transport (2023.acl-long)
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Kaiwen Wei, Yiran Yang, Li Jin, Xian Sun, Zequn Zhang, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiao Li, Linhao Zhang, Jintao Liu, Guo Zhi
| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract structured information from text without the limitations of close ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assign ground truth labels to parallelly generated tuple proposals . they leverage intersection-over-union (IoU) as assignment quality measurement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
KG-TRICK: Unifying Textual and Relational Information Completion of Knowledge for Multilingual Knowledge Graphs (2025.coling-main)
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Zelin Zhou, Simone Conia, Daniel Lee, Min Li, Shenglei Huang, Umar Farooq Minhas, Saloni Potdar, Henry Xiao, Yunyao Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that combining information from KGs in different languages aids knowledge Graph Completion and Knowledge Graph Enhancement. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence framework that unifies tasks of textual and relational information completion for multilingual knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies tasks of KGC and KGE into a single framework. |
Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yongyu Mu, Peinan Feng, Zhiquan Cao, Yuzhang Wu, Bei Li, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kai Song, Tongran Liu, Chunliang Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel multilingual input to enhance the model's comprehension of the input and to examine how multilingual processing affects prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input, but previous studies focused on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning. |
Using a Penalty-based Loss Re-estimation Method to Improve Implicit Discourse Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | inessential words are unintentionally misjudged as attention-worthy words and assigned heavier attention weights than should be. |
| Approach: | They propose a penalty-based method to regulate the attention learning process by integrating penalty coefficients into the computation of loss by means of overstability of attention weight distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the Penn Discourse TreeBank corpus and is competitive compared to the state-of-the-art methods. |
Efficient Many-Shot In-Context Learning with Dynamic Block-Sparse Attention (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Many-shot in-context learning shifts computational burden from training-time to inference-time, making deployment of many-shot ICL challenging to justify in-practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for retrieval-based many-shot in-context learning that uses blocks-sparse attention and retrieval of cached demonstrations to achieve comparable per-example latency to finetuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable per-example latency to finetuning while maintaining on average >95% of the best method’s accuracy across strong ICL and finetuned baselines. |
HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongbo Zhang, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Fei Yu, Zhihong Chen, Guiming Chen, Jianquan Li, Xiangbo Wu, Zhang Zhiyi, Qingying Xiao, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the distilled language model outperforms its teacher model (ChatGPT) in most cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM) that leverages both distilled data from **ChatGPT** and real-world data from**doctors** in the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model in most cases by using additional real-world data and RLMF to align the language model with the merits of both sources. |
Hybrid Alignment Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with instructions and preferences are conflicting . et al., 2023b) show that hybrid alignment training can outperform baselines . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid alignment training approach based on alternating alignment and modified elastic weight consolidation methods to achieve better collaboration between different alignment tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline alignment training methods on summarization and dialogue tasks. |
Privacy Risks of Intermediate Representations: Attribute Inference in Distributed LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Distributed LLMs avoid raw inputs by transmitting intermediate hidden states, a practice widely assumed to preserve privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a distributed inference framework that transmits intermediate hidden states to avoid sending raw inputs by exposing sensitive user attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves Top-1 accuracy of 0.997 on CMS, 0.980 on Skytrax, and 0.986 on ECHR. |
DyLex: Incorporating Dynamic Lexicons into BERT for Sequence Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)
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Baojun Wang, Zhao Zhang, Kun Xu, Guang-Yuan Hao, Yuyang Zhang, Lifeng Shang, Linlin Li, Xiao Chen, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate lexical knowledge into deep learning models are limited by large-scale dynamic lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA even with large scale lexicons, the authors show . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenglong Wang, Canjia Li, Xingzhao Zhu, Yifu Huo, Huiyu Wang, Weixiong Lin, Yun Yang, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate relevance judgments are limited due to dynamic nature of query distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving relevance model approach to generalize queries to practical search scenarios . they use a multi-agent sample miner and a relevance annotator to generate reliable labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve significant performance gains on a large-scale industrial platform, validated by offline multilingual evaluations and online testing. |
UNIMO-G: Unified Image Generation through Multimodal Conditional Diffusion (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-image diffusion models generate images from text prompts due to inherent brevity of textual descriptions . however, the ability to accurately synthesize images with intricate details, such as specific entities or scenes, is limited due to the inherent bribery of text descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal conditional diffusion framework that operates on multimodal prompts with interleaved textual and visual inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels in both text-to-image generation and zero-shot subject-driven synthesis. |
Discourse Structure Extraction from Pre-Trained and Fine-Tuned Language Models in Dialogues (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Discourse processing suffers from data sparsity, especially for dialogues . a variety of discourse frameworks have been proposed to extract discourse information from dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose unsupervised and semi-supervised methods to infer latent discourse structures for dialogues based on attention matrices from Pre-trained Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve encouraging results on the STAC corpus, with F1 scores of 57.2 and 59.3 for the unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, respectively. |
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Tension Between Ethical Reasoning and Safety Alignment in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) safety alignment predominantly operates on a binary assumption that requests are either safe or unsafe. |
| Approach: | They propose a methodology that embeds harmful requests within ethical framings to exploit this vulnerability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves high success rates by exploiting model's own ethical reasoning to frame harmful actions as morally necessary compromises. |
ChatSOP: An SOP-Guided MCTS Planning Framework for Controllable LLM Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang, Yong Cao, Tianhao Shen, Minghui Zhang, Linxi Su, Shang Wu, Yihang Wu, YuQian Wang, Ye Wang, Wei Hu, Jianfeng Li, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing models that use Large Language Models (LLMs) show superior performance in various tasks, but lack of controllability leads to unfocused conversations or task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a standard operating procedure (SOP) framework to regulate dialogue flow by integrating Chain of Thought reasoning and supervised fine-tuning for SOP prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 27.95% improvement in action accuracy compared to baseline models based on GPT-3.5 and also shows notable gains for open-source models. |
AnaMeta: A Table Understanding Dataset of Field Metadata Knowledge Shared by Multi-dimensional Data Analysis Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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Xinyi He, Mengyu Zhou, Mingjie Zhou, Jialiang Xu, Xiao Lv, Tianle Li, Yijia Shao, Shi Han, Zejian Yuan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Tabular data analysis is performed everyday across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 467k tables with supervision labels for four types of field metadata. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the understanding capability of tabular models by incorporating distribution and knowledge information. |
FRSUM: Towards Faithful Abstractive Summarization via Enhancing Factual Robustness (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of abstractive summarization are able to generate fluent and coherent summaries, but they still suffer from the unfaithful generation problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the faithfulness of existing models by enhancing their factual robustness by using a novel training strategy, namely FRSUM, which teaches the model to defend against both explicit adversarial samples and implicit factual adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy improves faithfulness of various models, such as T5, BART, and T5 . |
Incorporating Probing Signals into Multimodal Machine Translation via Visual Question-Answering Pairs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multimodal machine translation systems exhibit decreased sensitivity to visual information when text inputs are complete. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate parallel VQA style pairs from source text to foster more robust cross-modal interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates parallel VQA style pairs from the source text, fostering more robust cross-modal interaction. |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
RankNAS: Efficient Neural Architecture Search by Pairwise Ranking (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods require training millions of architectures to estimate the accuracy of the search results. |
| Approach: | They propose a performance ranking method (RankNAS) that uses pairwise ranking and search space pruning to enlarge the search space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly accelerates NAS through pairwise ranking and search space pruning. |
Neural-based Mixture Probabilistic Query Embedding for Answering FOL queries on Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to embed entities and first-order logical queries in a vector space are often violated in real applications and limit their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Neural-based Mixture Probabilistic Query Embedding Model that embeds entities and first-order logical queries in a vector space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
FormulaReasoning: A Dataset for Formula-Based Numerical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for numerical reasoning often lack explicit knowledge of formulas . current datasets do not provide process supervision information, resulting in incomplete reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for formula-based numerical reasoning with 5,324 questions . they provide annotations in English and Chinese and a formula database as an external knowledge source . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model includes 5,324 questions requiring calculations grounded in external physics principles. |
Towards Better Representations for Multi-Label Text Classification with Multi-granularity Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained language models generate word frequency-oriented text representations, causing texts with different labels to be closely distributed in a narrow region, which is difficult to classify. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to refine the text representation for multi-label text classification using contrastive learning and multi-task learning modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the quality of the representations and yields stable and competitive improvements. |
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages. |
Measuring Data Diversity for Instruction Tuning: A Systematic Analysis and A Reliable Metric (2025.acl-long)
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Yuming Yang, Yang Nan, Junjie Ye, Shihan Dou, Xiao Wang, Shuo Li, Huijie Lv, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored various diversity-aware data selection methods to construct high-quality datasets and enhance model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data diversity to measure instruction tuning of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed diversity metric outperforms existing methods on simulated and real-world data and shows that it captures diversity variations and achieves a 0.97 correlation with instruction tuning. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
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Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
OVEL: Online Video Entity Linking (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Multi-modal Entity Linking focus on linking textual and visual mentions or offline videos’ mentions to entities in multi-modal knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called Online Video Entity Linking to establish connections between online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can establish connections between mentions in online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
DeltaNet: Conditional Medical Report Generation for COVID-19 Diagnosis (2022.coling-1)
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Xian Wu, Shuxin Yang, Zhaopeng Qiu, Shen Ge, Yangtian Yan, Xingwang Wu, Yefeng Zheng, S. Kevin Zhou, Li Xiao
| Challenge: | X-ray and CT are the gold standard for COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment . however, due to the excessive number of patients, writing reports becomes a heavy burden for radiologists. |
| Approach: | They propose to use X-ray and CT to generate medical reports automatically . they evaluate DeltaNet on a COVID-19 dataset, where it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a COVID-19 dataset. |
SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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Yuchun Fan, Yongyu Mu, YiLin Wang, Lei Huang, Junhao Ruan, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, Shujian Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant improvements in reasoning abilities, but these improvements are primarily focused on English, leading to inferior performance in non-English scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual reasoning alignment approach that fine-tunes the layers responsible for multilingual comprehension in one stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fine-tunes 6 of the 9 layers responsible for multilingual comprehension, while reducing training time by 4.1-11.9 compared to the two-stage method. |
Improving Variational Autoencoder for Text Modelling with Timestep-Wise Regularisation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been widely used in text modelling but posterior collapse is a problem when RNN-based models are employed. |
| Approach: | They propose a timestep-wise regularisation VAE architecture which can effectively avoid posterior collapse when used in text modelling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model avoids posterior collapse and can be applied to any RNN-based VAE model. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
e-CARE: a New Dataset for Exploring Explainable Causal Reasoning (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing causal reasoning models only learn to induce empirical causal patterns that are predictive to the label, while human beings seek for deep and conceptual understanding of the causality to explain the observed causal facts. |
| Approach: | They present a human-annotated CAusal REasoning dataset with conceptual explanations of the causality. |
| Outcome: | The presented dataset shows that human-annotated explanations can be useful for promoting the accuracy and stability of causal reasoning models. |
Leveraging Bidding Graphs for Advertiser-Aware Relevance Modeling in Sponsored Search (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing relevance models rely on query-keyword pairs but keywords are usually short texts with scarce semantic information, which may not accurately reflect the underlying advertising purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidding-graph augmented triple-based relevance model with three towers to deeply fuse the bidding graphs and semantic textual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a large industry dataset and consistently outperformed existing models. |
Is There a One-Model-Fits-All Approach to Information Extraction? Revisiting Task Definition Biases (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Definition bias is a negative phenomenon that can mislead models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures definition bias, bias-aware fine-tuning and task-specific bias mitigation to mitigate definition bias in information extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates definition bias in information extraction tasks by measuring definition bias, bias-aware fine-tuning, and task-specific bias mitigation. |
TranSFormer: Slow-Fast Transformer for Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has focused on treating subwords as basic units in developing such systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a slow-fast two-stream learning model that uses a “slow” branch to deal with subword sequences and a "fast" branch to cope with longer character sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows consistent BLEU improvements (larger than 1 BLUE point) on several machine translation benchmarks. |
Sensitivity-LoRA : Low-Load Sensitivity-Based Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Zhang, Bo Huang, Zhenjia Li, Xi Xiao, Hui Yi Leong, Zumeng Zhang, Xinwei Long, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a promising approach to adapting LLMs to specialized tasks . existing rank allocation techniques remain computationally inefficient and unstable . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adapted model that approximates model weight updates using low-ranked decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is limited by its uniform rank allocation to each incremental matrix . it leverages the second-order derivatives of the loss function to capture weight sensitivity . |
Advancing Fine-Grained Visual Understanding with Multi-Scale Alignment in Multi-Modal Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Wei Wang, Zhaowei Li, Qi Xu, Linfeng Li, YiQing Cai, Botian Jiang, Hang Song, Xingcan Hu, Pengyu Wang, Li Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multi-modal large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects . they use a pipeline that provides over 300K essential training data to enhance alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects, including texts, coordinates, and images. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
PHMOSpell: Phonological and Morphological Knowledge Guided Chinese Spelling Check (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | False gram and phonological errors make Chinese spelling check difficult . a novel end-to-end trainable model outperforms existing methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a trainable Chinese spelling check model that integrates phonological and visual information into a pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
AD-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Anomaly Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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Tiankai Yang, Yi Nian, Li Li, Ruiyao Xu, Yuangang Li, Jiaqi Li, Zhuo Xiao, Xiyang Hu, Ryan A. Rossi, Kaize Ding, Xia Hu, Yue Zhao
| Challenge: | Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with many real-world uses, including fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and industrial monitoring. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates how large language models (LLMs) can help with NLP anomaly detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform zero-shot detection without tasks-specific training, data augmentation and model selection, and it can suggest unsupervised AD models. |
“Yes, My LoRD.” Guiding Language Model Extraction with Locality Reinforced Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for model extraction attacks on large language models are inadequate . existing methods neglect the inconsistency between training tasks and LLM alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a model extraction algorithm that uses a policy-gradient-style training task to guide the crafting of preference for the local model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces query complexity while mitigating watermark protection . it can extract various state-of-the-art commercial LLMs while minimizing query complexity . |
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). |
| Approach: | They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency. |
Do Large Language Models have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, but many are still English-dominated. |
| Approach: | They propose to use automatic corpus-level metrics to assess lexical and syntactic naturalness of LLMs in a multilingual context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves naturalness of LLMs in target languages without compromising performance on general-purpose benchmarks. |
Precisely the Point: Adversarial Augmentations for Faithful and Informative Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text generation are weak enough to handle perturbations in inputs, leading to degeneration in faithfulness and informativeness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for improving faithfulness and informativeness of Seq2Seq models by perturbing word representations and word swapping. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves faithfulness and informativeness of Seq2Seq models under automatic and human evaluation settings. |
Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that our model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural abstractive multi-document summarization model which captures cross-document relations and can guide the summary generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the WikiSum and MultiNews datasets and can be easily combined with pre-trained language models. |
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. |
Hallucination Mitigation in Natural Language Generation from Large-Scale Open-Domain Knowledge Graphs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Graph-to-text models trained on small-scale datasets or datasets with limited variety of graph shapes are not adequate for more realistic large-scale, open-domain settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that, given a graph-sentence pair in GraphNarrative, trims the sentence to eliminate portions that are not present in the corresponding graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained on existing datasets and is available on github. |
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos . |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss. |
T3-Vis: visual analytic for Training and fine-Tuning Transformers in NLP (2021.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual analytics tools have been shown to support the analysis and interpretation of deep learning models due to the inherent black-box nature of the models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use visual analytic framework to help researchers understand the model's intrinsic properties and behaviours through interactive visualization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights about the model’s intrinsic properties and behaviours through interactive visualization and a suite of built-in algorithms. |
AMEX: Android Multi-annotation Expo Dataset for Mobile GUI Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuxiang Chai, Siyuan Huang, Yazhe Niu, Han Xiao, Liang Liu, Guozhi Wang, Dingyu Zhang, Shuai Ren, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | a new dataset is being developed to improve the capabilities of mobile GUI-control agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset designed for generalist mobile GUI-control agents . they use screenshots from popular mobile applications to create a detailed GUI-annotated dataset . |
| Outcome: | The Android Multi-annotation EXpo (AMEX) is a large-scale dataset for generalist mobile GUI-control agents . it includes screenshots from popular mobile applications, which are annotated at multiple levels . |
Length is a Curse and a Blessing for Document-level Semantics (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In recent years, contrastive learning (CL) has been extensively utilized to recover sentence and document-level encoding capability from pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-based contrastive learning framework that is length-agnostic self-reference based on document length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the standard information retrieval benchmark. |
How to Leverage Demonstration Data in Alignment for Large Language Model? A Self-Imitation Learning Perspective (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models are not suitable for task-dependent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized self-imitation learning framework which aligns large language models with offline demonstration data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in many challenging benchmarks . it is available on github.com/tengxiao1/GSIL . |
HyperAdaLoRA: Accelerating LoRA Rank Allocation During Training via Hypernetworks without Sacrificing Performance (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Zhang, Zhenjia Li, Yifan Gao, Xi Xiao, Heng Zhang, Shuyang Zhang, null Xiaoxincc, Bo Huang, Yuhang Wu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) assumes a uniform rank r for each incremental matrix, not accounting for the varying significance of weight matrices across modules and layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for faster convergence of low-rank adaptive models . they use a hypernetwork to prune the outputs of the hypernetworks to generate parameters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates convergence of AdaLoRA by leveraging a hypernetwork. |
From Long Videos to Engaging Clips: A Human-Inspired Video Editing Framework with Multimodal Narrative Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Xiao Li, Yadong Wei, null Songxueyu, Yang Song, null Xiaxiaoqiang, Fangrui Zeng, Zaiyi Chen, null Liuliu, Gu Xu, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video editing rely on textual cues from ASR transcripts and segment selection, often neglecting rich visual context. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-inspired automatic video editing framework that leverages multimodal narrative understanding to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines across general and advertisement-oriented editing tasks. |
ARTIST: A Transformer-based Chinese Text-to-Image Synthesizer Digesting Linguistic and World Knowledge (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-Image Synthesis (TIS) is a popular task to convert natural language texts into realistic images. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based Chinese text-to-image synthesizer for high-resolution image generation that incorporates linguistic and relational knowledge facts into the model to ensure better performance without the usage of ultra-large models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in Chinese with linguistic and relational knowledge facts. |
Enhanced Reasoning for Biomedical Document-Level Relation Extraction via a Novel Cascade Language Model Framework (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are the leading paradigm in document-level relation extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a cascade framework that leverages the complementary strengths of PLMs and LLMs through a detect-then-rethink paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on BioRED and CDR datasets and improves existing models. |
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)
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Xiao Cui, Yulei Qin, Yuting Gao, Enwei Zhang, Zihan Xu, Tong Wu, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods investigate divergence measures but fail to deliver effective supervision when few distribution overlap exists between teacher and student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation method that exploits the Sinkhorn distance to ensure a nuanced assessment of the disparity between teacher and student distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all kinds of LLMs with encoder-only, encoder decoder, and decoded architectures. |
Improving Neural Abstractive Document Summarization with Explicit Information Selection Modeling (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural abstractive methods for document summarization are not effective for document summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend basic neural encoding-decoding framework with an information selection layer to explicitly model and optimize the information selection process in abstractive document summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on document summarization tasks significantly. |
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Chen, Haoze Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Lirong Gao, Qi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads. |
Pre-training Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Alignment Information (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods are not effective for machine translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train a universal multilingual neural machine translation model . they use random aligned substitution technique to bring words and phrases with similar meanings closer in the representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation quality on low, medium, rich resource languages. |
MobiLoRA: Accelerating LoRA-based LLM Inference on Mobile Devices via Context-aware KV Cache Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MobiLoRA focuses on optimizing the key-value (KV) caches due to the limited computing and memory resources of mobile devices. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize the key-value caches due to limited computing resources . they propose similarity-aware delta encoding for semantic-level contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model accelerates LoRA-based LLM inference by 57.6% on mobile devices. |
Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Levina Li, Frank Wan, Xiao Liang, Sophia Yin, Yuchen Wu, Xinfeng Li, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks rely on static or rule-based topologies that fail to adapt to task requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that generates highly task-adaptive topologies . they validated the framework on multiple benchmarks and validated it on multiple platforms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks in task-adaptive communication topologies. |
Recipe2Plan: Evaluating Planning Abilities of LLMs for Efficient and Feasible Multitasking with Time Constraints Between Actions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks focus on single task performance, ignoring multitask planning and execution efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark framework based on real-world cooking scenarios . recipe2plan challenges agents to optimize cooking time through parallel task execution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks highlight the need for improved temporal awareness and global multitasking capabilities in large language models. |
Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) encoders lack global context representation, whereas MT encoder lacks it. |
| Approach: | They propose a Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding method for speech translation . they propose an adaptor module to alleviate representation inconsistency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 18.3 and 25.2 on two ST tasks. |
PersonaTrace: Synthesizing Realistic Digital Footprints with LLM Agents (2026.eacl-industry)
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Minjia Wang, Yunfeng Wang, Xiao Ma, Dexin Lv, Qifan Guo, Lynn Zheng, Benliang Wang, Lei Wang, Jiannan Li, Yongwei Xing, Junzhe Xu, Zheng Sun
| Challenge: | Publicly available corpora cover only slivers of human activity, such as email threads, chat logs, purchase histories, sensor traces, and provide large-scale supervision for data-hungry machine-learning pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for synthesizing realistic digital footprints using large language model agents from a structured user profile. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse sequences of user events, producing corresponding digital artifacts such as emails, messages, calendar entries, reminders, etc. |
HOTVCOM: Generating Buzzworthy Comments for Videos (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on generating descriptive comments in English . hot-comments are important for video marketing and branding, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate hot-comments on a Chinese video dataset . they use a combination of visual, auditory, and textual data to generate them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it generates hot-comments on both the new and existing datasets. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
ProcWorld: Benchmarking Large Model Planning in Reachability-Constrained Environments (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for embodied spatial reasoning and long-term planning are non-trivial due to the combinatorial complexity of long-horizon abstract reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark for partially observable embodied spatial reasoning and long-term planning with large language models and vision language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in 16 task types, 5,000 rooms, and over 10 million evaluation trajectories with diverse data distribution. |
AdaReTaKe: Adaptive Redundancy Reduction to Perceive Longer for Video-language Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are limited by context length when processing long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that flexibly reduces redundancy by allocating compression ratios among time and model layers with theoretical guarantees. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on videoMME, MLVU, LongVideoBench, and LVBench show that AdaRETAKE outperforms existing methods by 2.3% and 2.8% for 7B and 72B models. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
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. |
Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods that ignore contextual knowledge fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual knowledge to update and correct LLMs' knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on a dataset that contains irrelevant questions. |
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. |
RU22Fact: Optimizing Evidence for Multilingual Explainable Fact-Checking on Russia-Ukraine Conflict (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to verify factuality of claims do not provide sufficient evidence for explainable fact-checking systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and a novel multilingual explainable fact-checking dataset on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and generate explanations in 16 languages. |
InstructEval: Instruction-Tuned Text Evaluator from Human Preference (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | InstructEval is a general text evaluator based on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to build a general multi-aspect text evaluator based on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) they use extensive open Human Preference Modeling datasets and a small set of multi-spect annotated data to overcome the shortage of annotation resources for multi-task evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable or superior to commercial LLMs like ChatGPT or GPT-4 in terms of both overall and multi-aspect evaluation tasks. |
PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints and some are only accessible via APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter that integrates large language models as generators and trains them to refine the retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% compared to existing methods. |
Unveiling the Potential of BERT-family: A New Recipe for Building Scalable, General and Competitive Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generative large language models (LLMs) have significantly influenced various aspects of society, reshaping how we access and interact with information and knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training task that helps BERT-family excel in wider applications . they also explore the integration of cutting-edge technologies into their models to further enhance their capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits performance levels comparable to current SOTA LLMs across a spectrum of tasks. |
FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yingjia Wan, Haochen Tan, Xiao Zhu, Xinyu Zhou, Zhiwei Li, Qingsong Lv, Changxuan Sun, Jiaqi Zeng, Yi Xu, Jianqiao Lu, Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo
| Challenge: | Prior evaluation pipelines fail to evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs due to inefficiency and costly human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and strong evaluation pipeline that can evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs . they propose 'faStFact' to reduce cost of web searching and inference calling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation pipeline achieves highest alignment with human evaluation and efficiency among existing baselines. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Refining Sample Embeddings with Relation Prototypes to Enhance Continual Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relationships from texts depend on memory size and replay these memorized samples in subsequent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model to extract relations between entities from texts where the samples of different relations are delivered into the model continuously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models and avoids catastrophic forgetting. |
Human Guided Exploitation of Interpretable Attention Patterns in Summarization and Topic Segmentation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have investigated the multi-head self-attention mechanism of transformers. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-in-the-loop pipeline to discover task-specific attention patterns and inject them into transformer models to improve their accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the performance of transformer models by incorporating predefined patterns into their attention matrices. |
A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English . MRC is a new field of research that aims to comprehend the context of articles and answer the questions based on them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities to existing reading comprehension datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is composed of 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. |
CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL methods focus on making full use of history context, but neglect to explicitly comprehend the schema and conversational dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a CQR-SQL that explicitly exploits schema and conversational dependency for multi-turn SQL parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits schema and contextual dependency for multi-turn SQL parsing. |
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhucong Li, Powei Chang, Jin Xiao, Zhijian Zhou, Qianyu He, Jiaqing Liang, Fenglei Cao, Xu Yinghui, Yuan Qi
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. |
Video Question Answering: Datasets, Algorithms and Challenges (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in video question answering have led to a surge in popularity . despite the popularity, VideoQA remains one of the greatest challenges . |
| Approach: | They categorize the video question-answer datasets into normal VideoQA, multi-modal VideoQA and knowledge-based VideoQA according to the modalities invoked in the question-announcement pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are mainly designed for Factoid QA and inference VideoQA . the proposed methods have been compared with other methods and are robust and interpretable. |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification with Document-level Sentiment Preference Modeling (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies consider Aspect Sentiment Classification (ASC) as an independent sentence-level classification problem aspect by aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cooperative Graph Attention Networks approach for cooperatively learning aspect-related sentence representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in document-level sentiment classification. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
AdaLoGN: Adaptive Logic Graph Network for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and limitations for machine reading comprehension are insufficient for logical reasoning over text. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic approach which passes messages over a graph representing logical relations between text units to predict an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on ReClor and LogiQA. |
A Syntactically Constrained Bidirectional-Asynchronous Approach for Emotional Conversation Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural language models generate generic responses with poor logic and no emotion. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactically constrained bidirectional-asynchronous approach for emotional conversation generation using pre-generated emotion keywords and topic keywords. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the diversity of responses and boosts logic and emotion compared with baselines. |
PsyMem: Fine-grained Psychological Alignment and Explicit Memory Control for Advanced Role-Playing LLMs (2026.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing models rely on superficial textual descriptions or simplistic metrics, inadequately modeling both intrinsic and extrinsic character dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates fine-grained psychological attributes and explicit memory control for role-playing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in human-likeness and character fidelity. |
LIONs: An Empirically Optimized Approach to Align Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on aligning large language models with pre-trained datasets. |
| Approach: | They conduct a rigorous analysis of a three-stage training pipeline using sequence packing, loss masking and increasing the preference dataset size in DPO to improve the performance of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the official instruct models tuned with closed-source data and algorithms. |
RiTeK: A Dataset for Large Language Models Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs in Medicine (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiatan Huang, Mingchen Li, Zonghai Yao, Dawei Li, Yuxin Zhang, Zhichao Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Feiyun Ouyang, Xiaohan Li, Shuo Han, Hong yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving medical textual knowledge Graphs struggle to perform well, a study finds . existing methods struggle to provide accurate answers to complex questions, he says . |
| Approach: | They synthesize user queries integrating diverse topological structures, relational information, and complex textual descriptions. |
| Outcome: | a new dataset for medical textual knowledge graphs shows that existing methods struggle to perform well . main bottlenecks lie in the scarcity of existing medical TKGs and the limited expressiveness of their topological structures . |
Curse of Knowledge: Your Guidance and Provided Knowledge are biasing LLM Judges in Complex Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has focused on simple settings, but their reliability in complex tasks remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as judges to evaluate reliability in complex tasks . they use a challenge benchmark to expose and quantify Auxiliary Information Induced Biases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exposes and quantifies Auxiliary Information Induced Biases across 12 basic and 3 advanced scenarios. |
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. |
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate character fidelity of role-playing agents with psychological scales . they propose to use psychological scale to measure personality traits of RPAs based on personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reproduces character fidelity with psychological scales and shows that it is effective in measuring personality traits. |
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Deming Ye, Chaojun Xiao, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection methods are not suitable for enhancing pre-trained language models with external knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play knowledge injection method where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a knowledge plugin. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of knowledge injection on knowledge-driven tasks while keeping model parameters frozen. |
PACE: Predictive Adaptive Context Extraction for Long-Horizon LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Lei Wei, Xiao Peng, null Tt, Guannan Zhang, Chenhao Jiang, Hongyu Li, Lanbo Lin, Yuanwu Xu, Jiayao Liu, Kesu Wang, Bin Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents struggle with ultra-long-horizon tasks requiring hundreds or thousands of interaction steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconceptualizes context management as a Next Step Prediction problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves task success rates and robust cross-lingual performance. |
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. |
GeoAgent: To Empower LLMs using Geospatial Tools for Address Standardization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to address address standardization are lacking in the current field. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates spatial knowledge into address texts and achieves efficient address standardization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates spatial knowledge into address texts and achieves efficient address standardization. |
Language-Specific Layer Matters: Efficient Multilingual Enhancement for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models exhibit an imbalance in multilingual capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a training recipe that achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by Precise Language Specific layers fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by fine-tuning language specific layers. |
Empowering Backbone Models for Visual Text Generation with Input Granularity Control and Glyph-Aware Training (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-image models struggle to generate images with legible visual texts . current models lack support for Chinese texts, misspelling, and lack of diversity . |
| Approach: | They propose to empower backbone models to generate visual texts in Chinese and English . they propose to augment conventional training objective with glyph-aware training losses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can generate visual texts in English and Chinese while maintaining image generation quality. |
Forgetting Curve: A Reliable Method for Evaluating Memorization Capability for Long-Context Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Liu, Runsong Zhao, Pengcheng Huang, Chunyang Xiao, Bei Li, Jingang Wang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods, tasks and benchmarks to measure model’s effective memory length are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called forgetting curve to measure the memorization capability of long-context models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is robust to the tested corpus and experimental settings, and can be applied to any model size. |
Joint Document-Level Event Extraction via Token-Token Bidirectional Event Completed Graph (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a joint exaction method can be used to extract document-level event records . it avoids inefficiency and error propagation issues in traditional pipeline methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint exaction method that can avoid inefficiency and error propagation issues . they propose eType-Role1-Roul2 as the edge type to reveal which tokens play argument roles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can avoid inefficiency and error propagation issues in traditional pipeline methods. |
Saber: Efficient Sampling with Adaptive Acceleration and Backtracking Enhanced Remasking for Diffusion Language Model in Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer advantages in parallel generation and bidirectional context modeling, but they face a critical trade-off between inference speed and output quality for tasks with strict structural constraints such as code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient sampling algorithm that reduces the number of tokens unmasked per step based on the model’s evolving confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves Pass@1 accuracy by 1.9% while achieving 251.4% inference speedup. |
Multi-layer Representation Fusion for Neural Machine Translation (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation systems require a number of stacked layers for deep models, but the prediction depends on the sentence representation of the top-most layer with no access to low-level representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-layer representation fusion approach to fusing stacked layers to learn a better representation from the stack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields 0.92 and 0.56 BLEU points over the strong Transformer baseline on IWSLT German-English and NIST Chinese-English MT tasks respectively. |
Detection of Propaganda Using Logistic Regression (D19-50)
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| Challenge: | Various propaganda techniques are used to manipulate peoples perspectives to foster a predetermined agenda. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logistic Regression-based tool that automatically classifies whether a sentence is propagandistic or not. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms the baseline on linguistic and semantic features. |
Emotion Recognition in Multi-Speaker Conversations through Speaker Identification, Knowledge Distillation, and Hierarchical Fusion (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in multi-speaker conversations faces significant challenges due to speaker ambiguity and severe class imbalance. |
| Approach: | They propose a speaker identification module that leverages audio-visual synchronization to accurately identify the active speaker and hierarchical attention fusion with composite loss functions to handle class imbalance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 67.75% and 72.44% weighted F1 scores on MELD and IEMOCAP datasets, with notable improvements on minority emotion classes. |
Natural Language to Code Generation in Interactive Data Science Notebooks (2023.acl-long)
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Pengcheng Yin, Wen-Ding Li, Kefan Xiao, Abhishek Rao, Yeming Wen, Kensen Shi, Joshua Howland, Paige Bailey, Michele Catasta, Henryk Michalewski, Oleksandr Polozov, Charles Sutton
| Challenge: | Data scientists use computational notebooks to perform data wrangling and analytic tasks. |
| Approach: | They build a benchmark program that synthesizes programs given NL intents from users by using a Python code language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms public code LMs in a dataset of 1078 code generation problems using the pandas data analysis framework in data science notebooks. |
SgSum:Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive multi-document summarization methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel framework for extractive multi-document summarization that selects a sub-graph as the summary instead of selecting salient sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods on multi-document datasets and human evaluations show it produces more coherent and informative summaries. |
InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Contrastive Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity . existing methods for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropic-based ranking. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that InstructDiff outperforms baseline training on reasoning tasks while using only 10% of the data. |
Dynamically Fused Graph Network for Multi-hop Reasoning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Text-based question answering (TBQA) has been studied extensively in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamically Fused Graph Network to answer questions requiring multiple scattered evidence and reasoning over them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results on a public TBQA dataset and produces interpretable reasoning chains. |
EfficientLLM: Unified Pruning-Aware Pretraining for Auto-Designed Compact Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Xingrun Xing, Zheng Liu, Shitao Xiao, Boyan Gao, Yiming Liang, Haokun Lin, Xianlin Zeng, Guoqi Li, Jiajun Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) driven by scaling laws can be developed in large model sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning-aware pretraining approach that decouples LLM pruning from direct pretraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pretraining models with 100M 1B parameters in commen sense benchmarks. |
Llama2Vec: Unsupervised Adaptation of Large Language Models for Dense Retrieval (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrieval requires discriminative embeddings to represent the semantic relationship between query and document. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach that performs unsupervised adaptation of large language models for dense retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a variety of dense retrieval benchmarks and is available on github. |
Tree Representations in Transition System for RST Parsing (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have proposed a series of actions to build a right-heavy binarized tree for RST parsing, but the nodes of the binary-nuclear relations have the same nuclear type as those of the multi-nullar relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a nuclear type for multi-nuclear relations and a new action to construct a multi-branch tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed nuclear type and action are more capable of capturing multi-nuclear relation and the joint action is more suitable than the separate one. |
Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) models can be used to generate harmful content such as sexually explicit, unfaithful, and misleading or Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images. |
| Approach: | They propose a more practical and universal attack that does not require the presence of a target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack bypasses both text and image safety checkers while preserving high semantic alignment with the target prompt. |
PartialFormer: Modeling Part Instead of Whole for Machine Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing feed-forward neural networks have significant computational and parametric overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient Transformer architecture that utilizes multiple smaller FFNs to reduce parameters and computation while maintaining essential hidden dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces computational and parameter overhead while maintaining essential hidden dimensions. |
AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evaluation benchmarks based on predefined domains and human-labeled data face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated information retrieval benchmark based on predefined domains and human-labeled data . AIR-Bench is automated and Heterogeneous with three key features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data. |
Learning Architectures from an Extended Search Space for Language Modeling (2020.acl-main)
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Yinqiao Li, Chi Hu, Yuhao Zhang, Nuo Xu, Yufan Jiang, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu, Tongran Liu, Changliang Li
| Challenge: | Neural architecture search (NAS) has advanced in recent years but most NAS systems restrict search to learning architectures of a recurrent or convolutional cell. |
| Approach: | They propose a general approach to learn both intra-cell and inter-cell architectures . they implement their approach in a differentiable architecture search system . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline on PTB and WikiText data and shows good transferability to other systems. |
Diagnosing the First-Order Logical Reasoning Ability Through LogicNLI (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on diagnosing LMs' reasoning abilities in natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic method for first-order logic reasoning with a proposed benchmark, LogicNLI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method disentangles the target FOL reasoning from commonsense inference and can be used to diagnose LMs from four perspectives: accuracy, robustness, generalization, and interpretability. |
ToW: Thoughts of Words Improve Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Zhikun Xu, Ming Shen, Jacob Dineen, Zhaonan Li, Xiao Ye, Shijie Lu, Aswin Rrv, Chitta Baral, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | Unlike other data augmentation methods, thoughts of words (TOW) views next-word prediction as a core reasoning task and injects fine-grained thoughts into pre-training texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time data-augmentation method called thoughts of words (TOW) that injects fine-grained thoughts directly into a next-word prediction task and teaches the model to understand how the observed next word is related to previous contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model hallucination by 10% and improves reasoning performance by 7% to 9% on average. |
Teaching Your Models to Understand Code via Focal Preference Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Xin Zhang, Xiao Liu, Yangyu Huang, Jianwen Luo, Yizhen Zhang, Zuchao Li, Ruihang Chu, Yujiu Yang, Scarlett Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning focus on unit test feedback to construct preference pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference alignment framework that mimics human iterative debugging to refine Code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Preference Learning improves on BigCodeBench and BigCodeBind tasks. |
Extract-Select: A Span Selection Framework for Nested Named Entity Recognition with Generative Adversarial Training (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies treat named entity recognition as a sequential labeling problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a span selection framework for nested named entity recognition . they propose nesting entities with different input categories would be separately extracted . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing models on four benchmark datasets. |
ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haiquan Zhao, Lingyu Li, Shisong Chen, Shuqi Kong, Jiaan Wang, Kexin Huang, Tianle Gu, Yixu Wang, Jian Wang, Liang Dandan, Zhixu Li, Yan Teng, Yanghua Xiao, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application for reducing stress and providing emotional guidance. |
| Approach: | They re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards to define roles of role-players . they train a specific role- playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4, and the model performs better than GPLs. |
LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset (2022.findings-acl)
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Feng Yao, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Cunchao Tu, Juanzi Li, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing legal event detection datasets only cover incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese legal event detection dataset . they use legal events as side information to promote downstream applications . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves 2.2 points precision in low-resource judgment prediction and 1.5 points precision for unsupervised case retrieval. |
UCTG: A Unified Controllable Text Generation Framework for Query Auto-Completion (2025.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to control text generation (CTG) are essentially challenging to adapt to various control objectives and constraints, which results in mixed success. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified controllable text generation framework which integrates a control module, a prompt module, and a generation module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves query accuracy and coherence in tasks with different objectives and constraints. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
MAPO: Boosting Large Language Model Performance with Model-Adaptive Prompt Optimization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yuyan Chen, Zhihao Wen, Ge Fan, Zhengyu Chen, Wei Wu, Dayiheng Liu, Zhixu Li, Bang Liu, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing research emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to specific tasks, rather than specific LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-adaptive prompt optimizer method that optimizes original prompts for each LLM in downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can optimize prompts for an LLM in downstream tasks. |
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Li, Rui Xu, Jian Yang, Junnan Liu, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Likang Xiao, Ming LI, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that modulates the contribution of each source model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model merging framework outperforms strong baselines on multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages. |
Augmenting Large Language Model Translators via Translation Memories (2023.findings-acl)
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Yongyu Mu, Abudurexiti Reheman, Zhiquan Cao, Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Yinqiao Li, Tong Xiao, Chunliang Zhang, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Using translation memories (TMs) as prompts is a promising approach to in-context learning of machine translation models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translation memories (TMs) as prompts to prompt large language models (LLMs) they find that the ability of LLMs to "understand" prompts is helpful . |
| Outcome: | The results are comparable to state-of-the-art NMT systems with bilingual data and are tuned on downstream tasks. |
Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Reading (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict characters' personalities have not been studied in the NLP field due to the lack of appropriate datasets mimicking the process of book reading. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to predict characters' personalities that uses an exhaustive vocabulary of personality traits as targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is efficient and accurate and relies on long-term context to achieve accurate predictions for both machines and humans. |
Layer-Wise Multi-View Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural machine translation are limited to the topmost encoder layer’s context representation and cannot perceive the lower encoder layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise multi-view learning approach to solve this problem by incorporating an auxiliary view into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve stable results over multiple strong baselines and is agnostic to network architectures. |
CMB: A Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)
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Xidong Wang, Guiming Chen, Song Dingjie, Zhang Zhiyi, Zhihong Chen, Qingying Xiao, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great breakthrough in medicine, says a new study . existing studies on LLMs leverage subjective evaluation, but evaluation in medicine is professional . |
| Approach: | They propose a localized medical benchmark in Chinese rooted in native Chinese . they propose to use traditional Chinese medicine to evaluate large-scale LLMs . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark is developed to evaluate large-scale LLMs in china . the proposed model is rooted in the native Chinese linguistic and cultural framework . |
A Simple and Effective Approach to Coverage-Aware Neural Machine Translation (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are used to solve translation problems using long-term models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to seek a better balance between model confidence and length preference for Neural Machine Translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks. |
Neural Natural Logic Inference for Interpretable Question Answering (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering models are based on textual entailment tasks . prior work has focused on QA on premise-based questions . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic QA approach that integrates natural logic reasoning within deep learning architectures towards developing effective question answering models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous work on multiple-choice science questions . it integrates natural logic reasoning within deep learning architectures to build proof paths . |
Do Large Language Models have Problem-Solving Capability under Incomplete Information Scenarios? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing games such as "Who is undercover" are subjective and difficult to evaluate . |
| Approach: | They propose a game called BrainKing that evaluates LLMs' problem-solving capability under incomplete information scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game requires LLMs to identify target entities with limited yes-or-no questions and potential misleading answers. |
MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-Agent Inner Dialogue (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujia Chen, Changsong Li, Yiming Wang, Tianjie Ju, Qingqing Xiao, Nan Zhang, Zifan Kong, Peng Wang, Binyu Yan
| Challenge: | Mental health issues are worsening in today’s competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent inner dialogue paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
Language Model Adaption for Reinforcement Learning with Natural Language Action Space (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Previous research has focused on reducing the size of the natural language action space due to the combinatorial nature of the language. |
| Approach: | They propose mutual-information regularized policy optimization to reduce the action space by dynamically adjusting the prior provided by the pretrained model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves monotonically on the mutual-information regularized RL objective. |
NLP-ADBench: NLP Anomaly Detection Benchmark (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task, but its effectiveness in detecting harmful content, phishing attempts, and spam reviews is limited. |
| Approach: | They introduce NLP-ADBench, the most comprehensive NLP anomaly detection benchmark to date . it includes eight curated datasets and 19 state-of-the-art algorithms . |
| Outcome: | The NLP-ADBench benchmark includes 19 state-of-the-art methods and 8 curated datasets . no single model dominates across all datasets, indicating need for automated model selection . |
Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are inherently dual-use and can be leveraged for both beneficial and harmful purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves tighter alignment on WMDP Bio and RWKU benchmarks. |
RAPO: An Adaptive Ranking Paradigm for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2022.emnlp-main)
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Zhoujin Tian, Chaozhuo Li, Shuo Ren, Zhiqiang Zuo, Zengxuan Wen, Xinyue Hu, Xiao Han, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on minimizing distances between words in aligned pairs, while suffering from low discriminative capability to distinguish the relative orders between positive and negative candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking-oriented induction model to learn personalized mapping function for each word. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn personalized mapping function for each word on public datasets including rich-resource and low-resourced languages. |
Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human States (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess basic Theory of Mind abilities but neglect temporal evolution of mental states in real-world social contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate Large Language Models' ability to understand and track the temporal progression of mental states across interconnected scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks underperform humans by 44.7% and show that they can model the dynamic nature of human mental states better than existing models. |
Finding the Sweet Spot: Preference Data Construction for Scaling Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate unintended outputs due to their unsupervised nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct preference pairs of selected and rejected LLMs by repeated random sampling to improve alignment performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance as the sample size increases. |
Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that the composition of the pretraining corpus exerts a significant impact upon the performance of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of Large Language Models and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis provides insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of Large Language Models. |
GeoSQA: A Benchmark for Scenario-based Question Answering in the Geography Domain at High School Level (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | SQA is an emerging application of NLP in the medical, geography, and legal domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in geography domain at high school level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in the geography domain at high school level. |
DREAM: Disentangling Risks to Enhance Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Jianyu Liu, Hangyu Guo, Ranjie Duan, Xingyuan Bu, Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Hui Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Yucheng Wang, Chenchen Jing, Xingwei Qu, Xiao Zhang, Pei Wang, Yanan Wu, Jihao Gu, Yangguang Li, Jianke Zhu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose unique safety challenges due to their integration of visual and textual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to disentangle risks through step-by-step reasoning within multimodal inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves safety alignment in MLLMs by fine-tuning and iterative Reinforcement Learning from AI feedback. |
FAQ: Mitigating Quantization Error via Regenerating Calibration Data with Family-Aware Quantization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | representativeness and universality of calibration data remain a bottleneck in quantization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages prior knowledge from LLMs to generate calibration samples . their framework reduces accuracy loss by up to 28.5% compared to baseline . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that family-aware quantization reduces accuracy loss by up to 28.5% compared to baseline data. |
Decomposed Prompt Tuning via Low-Rank Reparameterization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance on various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed prompt tuning approach that utilizes low-rank matrices to initialize the soft prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters while maintaining effectiveness. |
SciMMIR: Benchmarking Scientific Multi-modal Information Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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Siwei Wu, Yizhi Li, Kang Zhu, Ge Zhang, Yiming Liang, Kaijing Ma, Chenghao Xiao, Haoran Zhang, Bohao Yang, Wenhu Chen, Wenhao Huang, Noura Al Moubayed, Jie Fu, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Multi-modal information retrieval (MMIR) is a rapidly evolving field . current benchmarks for image-text pairings overlook the scientific domain . |
| Approach: | They develop a scientific domain-specific MMIR benchmark to evaluate image-text pairings using open-access research paper corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 530K image-text pairs extracted from scientific documents with detailed captions. |
Analyzing the Rapid Generalization of SFT via the Perspective of Attention Head Activation Patterns (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, LLMs learn in a data-driven schema while the instructions about complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. |
| Approach: | They employ a gradient-based method to dissect the process that the Supervised Fine-tuning Process (SFT) adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method dissects the process that the SFT process adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. |
GRASP: Replace Redundant Layers with Adaptive Singular Parameters for Efficient Model Compression (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that many layers are functionally redundant in large language models (LLMs), enabling model compression by removing these layers to reduce inference cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that removes redundant layers to reduce inference cost by preserving sensitivity-aware singular values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in 90% of the original model under a 20% compression ratio. |
UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework for joint learning . they propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves visual and visual semantic alignment on images and texts. |
Towards Stable Natural Language Understanding via Information Entropy Guided Debiasing (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to debiase Natural Language Understanding models use dataset biases instead of learning the intended task. |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing framework that detects and purifies dataset biases using information entropy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the stability of performance on out-of-distribution datasets for a set of widely adopted NLU models. |
Thermometer of Thoughts: Enhancing LLM’s Exploration via Attention Temperature Modulation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of large language models have enabled them to tackle complex tasks such as mathematics reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that modulates attention temperature dynamically to shift LLM's internal focus during reasoning, enabling a dynamic shift between exploratory and focused modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves Pass@10 by 6.78–14.20% and aggregation accuracy by 9.74% across 7 reasoning benchmarks. |
Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study (2023.emnlp-main)
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Boxin Wang, Wei Ping, Peng Xu, Lawrence McAfee, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Yi Dong, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Bo Li, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar, Bryan Catanzaro
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that retrieval-augmented LMs can improve text generation quality and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that reproduces RETRO parameters while retrieving a text corpus . they find RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with less repetition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard retrieval-augmented GPT and retrieval augmented GTP on text generation and accuracy tasks. |
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)
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Guangwei Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Cheng Qian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Rada Mihalcea, Zhaozhuo Xu, Jingrui He, Jiaqi W. Ma, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Dongwon Lee, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | **Copyright Detective** is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
On Vision Features in Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on multimodal machine translation (MMT) has focused on the way of incorporating vision features into translation but little attention is given to the quality of vision models. |
| Approach: | They develop a selective attention model to study the patch-level contribution of an image in multimodal machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to learn translation from the visual modality on probing tasks and is compared with existing models. |
Shallow-to-Deep Training for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that deep training is 1:4 faster than training from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose a shallow-to-deep training method that learns deep models by stacking shallow models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 1:4 faster than training from scratch and achieves BLEU scores of 30:33 and 43:29 on two translation tasks. |
FashionKLIP: Enhancing E-Commerce Image-Text Retrieval with Fashion Multi-Modal Conceptual Knowledge Graph (2023.acl-industry)
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Xiaodan Wang, Chengyu Wang, Lei Li, Zhixu Li, Ben Chen, Linbo Jin, Jun Huang, Yanghua Xiao, Ming Gao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in visual-language pre-trained (VLP) models have greatly improved cross-modal retrieval performance . however, the fine-grained interactions between objects from different modalities are far from well-established . e-commerce domain lacks sufficient training data and fine-granular cross-modulal knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-language pre-trained (VLP) image-text retrieval model that integrates cross-modal knowledge into the model to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on e-commerce image-text retrieval task by a large margin. |
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. |
MirageBackdoor: A Stealthy Attack that Induces Think-Well-Answer-Wrong Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing CoT backdoor attacks manipulate intermediate reasoning steps to steer the model toward incorrect answers, but these corrupted reasoning traces are readily detected by prevalent process-monitoring defenses. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack that exploits the model's post-output space to preserve clean CoTs while selectively steering the final answer toward a specific target. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MirageBD achieves over 90% success rate across four datasets and five models with a poison ratio of only 5%. |
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. |
ExCAR: Event Graph Knowledge Enhanced Explainable Causal Reasoning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work infers the causation between events based on knowledge from annotated causal event pairs, but additional evidence information is unexploited. |
| Approach: | They propose an Event graph knowledge enhanced explainable CAusal Reasoning framework that acquires additional evidence information from a large-scale causal event graph as logical rules for causal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in human evaluation and in animal models. |
Com2 : A Causal-Guided Benchmark for Exploring Complex Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Kai Xiong, Xiao Ding, Yixin Cao, Yuxiong Yan, Li Du, Yufei Zhang, Jinglong Gao, Jiaqian Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing works focus on complex tasks like math and code, while complex commonsense reasoning remains underexplored due to its uncertainty and lack of structure. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a benchmark for large language models based on complex commonsense reasoning based upon causal event graphs and causal theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines a complex commonsense reasoning benchmark with a detective story to achieve a more challenging subset. |
Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users’ interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a goal-adaptive supervised fine-tuning framework that generates proactive guidance for users to click for the next turn of the conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 86.10% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95% over baseline) and 25.28% CTR in online deployment (149.06% relative improvement). |
Automated Profile Inference with Language Model Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy protections for large language models (LLMs) are limited due to the potential for malicious applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated profile inference framework that can extract personal information from public online activities by an adversary with the help of large language model (LLM) based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly effective and efficient and the inferred attributes are both identifiable and sensitive, posing significant privacy risks. |
Prior Relational Schema Assists Effective Contrastive Learning for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs lack robustness and incompleteness to provide link prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture prior schema-level interactions related to relations by leveraging entity type information and introduce schema-guided negatives to bolster the efficiency of normal contrastive representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple established metrics across multiple datasets for link prediction. |
BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for Seq2Seq as it does not analyze long-distance relations in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure. |
Noise Robust Named Entity Understanding for Voice Assistants (2021.naacl-industry)
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Deepak Muralidharan, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Sida Gao, Xiao Yang, Justine Kao, Stephen Pulman, Atish Kothari, Ray Shen, Yinying Pan, Vivek Kaul, Mubarak Seyed Ibrahim, Gang Xiang, Nan Dun, Yidan Zhou, Andy O, Yuan Zhang, Pooja Chitkara, Xuan Wang, Alkesh Patel, Kushal Tayal, Roger Zheng, Peter Grasch, Jason D Williams, Lin Li
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition and Entity Linking are challenging for voice assistants . utterances are relatively short, so there is not much context to help disambiguate . |
| Approach: | They propose a Named Entity Understanding system that combines NER and EL in a joint reranking module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves NER accuracy by up to 3.13% and EL accuracy by 3.6% in F1 score . it also leads to better accuracies in other natural language understanding tasks . |
PIGuard: Prompt Injection Guardrail via Mitigating Overdefense for Free (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prompt injection attacks pose a critical threat to large language models, enabling goal hijacking and data leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt guard model that incorporates a new training strategy to mitigate over-defense for free . PIGuard significantly reduces the bias on trigger words, enabling fine-grained evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing model on diverse benchmarks by 30.4%. |
Data Augmentation with Hierarchical SQL-to-Question Generation for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Parsing (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to parse text-to-SQL data are lacking labeled data for unseen evaluation databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing SQL queries by automatically producing large numbers of SQL queries based on an abstract syntax tree grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can produce high-quality natural language questions over strong baselines. |
Logits Reranking via Semantic Labels for Hard Samples in Text Classification (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on text classification models ignores the semantic information inherent in labels, treating them as one-hot vectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic method that leverages label semantics and auto detection of hard samples to improve classification accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows significant improvements across different PLMs. |
A General Framework for Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation to Simultaneous Translation (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of neural machine translation, simultaneous neural machine translators are challenging due to syntactic structure difference and simultaneity requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adapting neural machine translation to translate simultaneously . they propose 'prefix translation' that utilizes a consecutive NMT model to translate source prefixes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework balancing quality and latency on three translation corpora and two language pairs shows that it performs well. |
Capturing Conversational Interaction for Question Answering via Global History Reasoning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have studied history-dependent reasoning for question answering . utilizing global conversation history for enhancement is gaining interest . |
| Approach: | They propose to establish long-distance dependency among global utterances in multi-turn conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on QuAC by 1%, yielding the F1 score of 73.7%. |
Dynamic Low-rank Estimation for Transformer-based Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | RankDyna is a matrix decomposition method that can be used to compress Transformer-based language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a matrix decomposition method that enables dynamic rank resource allocation . they say it can outperform current SOTA methods under various parameter budget levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current SOTA methods under various budget levels . the proposed method is more efficient with higher compression rates . |
MultiLingPoT: Boosting Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs through Multilingual Program Integration (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Program-of-Thought is an important way for LLMs to solve mathematical problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual programme reasoning method that uses program instead of natural language in reasoning and proposes to integrate multilingual integration into the training and inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves individual language’s reasoning accuracy by 2.5% and improves performance by 8%. |
TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive and difficult to efficiently execute on resource-restricted devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer distillation method that performs Transformer distillations at pre-training and task-specific learning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method accelerates inference and reduces model size while maintaining accuracy. |
Lifelong Pretraining: Continually Adapting Language Models to Emerging Corpora (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are typically learned over a large, static corpus and fine-tuned for various downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to continuously update a pretrained language model to adapt to emerging data and to keep track of the model's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can adapt to new corpora while retaining knowledge in earlier domains. |
Can LLMs Estimate Student Struggles? Human-AI Difficulty Alignment with Proficiency Simulation for Item Difficulty Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Accurate estimation of item (question or task) difficulty suffers from the cold start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale empirical analysis to examine human-AI Difficulty Alignment . they find that models struggle to simulate the capability limitations of students . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model size is not reliably helpful for human-AI alignment . high performance often impedes accurate difficulty estimation, the authors say . |
Beyond Superficial Tests: Adversarial Refinement for Reliable Property-Based Testing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in code generation, yet their application to Property-Based Testing (PBT) remains fraught with a superficiality gap. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic framework that hardens software properties through Adversarial Refinement. |
| Outcome: | a new framework hardens software properties through Adversarial Refinement that detects and fixes bugs in top-tier libraries. |
Adaptive Ordered Information Extraction with Deep Reinforcement Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction follow a fixed extraction order for complex tasks with multiple elements to be extracted in one instance. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive ordered IE paradigm to find optimal element extraction order for different instances and a reinforcement learning framework to generate optimal order dynamically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats existing methods and improves on several public datasets. |
Modeling Event Background for If-Then Commonsense Reasoning Using Context-aware Variational Autoencoder (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Understanding event and event-centered commonsense reasoning is crucial for natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a If-Then commonsense reasoning dataset Atomic and an RNN-based Seq2Seq model to facilitate this. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the accuracy and diversity of inferences compared with baseline methods. |
NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yingfeng Luo, Ziqiang Xu, Yuxuan Ouyang, MuRun Yang, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Tong Zheng, Bei Li, Peinan Feng, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) yet scaling to many languages while maintaining robust performance across directions remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to reduce the number of translations in one direction . they propose auxiliary parallel sentences to promote cross-lingual transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with or better than substantially larger baselines. |
The GaoYao Benchmark: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Multilingual and Multicultural Abilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yilun Liu, Chunguang Zhao, Mengyao Piao, Lingqi Miao, Shimin Tao, Minggui HE, Chenxin Liu, Zhang Li, null Mahongxia, Jiaxin Guo, Chen Liu, Liqun Deng, Jiansheng Wei, Xiaojun Meng, Fanyi Du, Daimeng Wei, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual evaluation benchmarks neglect cultural nuances and lack language coverage in subjective tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that categorizes evaluation tasks into three cultural layers and nine cognitive sub-layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses prior coverage by up to 111% on 20+ LLMs. |
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. |
Pairwise Supervised Contrastive Learning of Sentence Representations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to improve sentence representation learning have a common weakness . siamese or triplet loss only learns from individual sentence pairs or tripletes . |
| Approach: | They propose a discrimination-based approach to bridge entailment and contradiction understanding with categorical concept encoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method on downstream tasks . it improves 10%–13% on clustering tasks and 5%–6% on STS tasks compared with the previous method . |
Generative Entity Typing with Curriculum Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity typing fails to assign an entity to the types beyond the predefined type set. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative entity typing paradigm that assigns types to entities . traditional classification-based approaches fail to assign entities to the types beyond the predefined set . they employ curriculum learning to train the model on heterogeneous data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on heterogeneous training data. |
FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the efficacy of workflow-guided agent planning by formalizing different formats of workflow knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to improve the planning reliability of LLM-based agents by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. |
MetaPro Online: A Computational Metaphor Processing Online System (2023.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Metaphors do not take literal meanings in contexts, which may cause difficulties for language learners and machines to understand them. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational metaphor processing online system that queries metaphoricity labels, paraphrases and concept mappings for non-domain-specific text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can query metaphoricity labels, paraphrases, and concept mappings for non-domain-specific text without coding background. |
Align-smatch: A Novel Evaluation Method for Chinese Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing based on Alignment of Concept and Relation (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation abstracts the meaning of sentences into a single-rooted, acyclic and directed graph. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a metric to evaluate concept alignment and relation alignment to improve Chinese AMR parsing evaluation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust and compatible with concept alignment and relation alignment and more robust in evaluating arcs. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
Improving Neural Abstractive Document Summarization with Structural Regularization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in document summarization fail to capture long-term structure of documents and multi-sentence summaries, resulting in information loss and repetitions. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage structural information of documents and multi-sentence summaries to improve document summarization performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on document summarization tasks. |
QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jacob Dineen, Aswin Rrv, Qin Liu, Zhikun Xu, Xiao Ye, Ming Shen, Zhaonan Li, Shijie Lu, Chitta Baral, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | QA-LIGN decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . scalar rewards obscure which objectives drive the training signal . |
| Approach: | a new method decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . |
| Outcome: | QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . the results outperform DPO and GRPO with state-of-the-art reward models given equivalent training . |
Multi-Task Neural Model for Agglutinative Language Translation (2020.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) has been gaining popularity in high-resource translation tasks, but struggles in low-ressource and morphologically-rich scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task neural model that jointly learns to perform bi-directional translation and agglutinative language stemming. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly improve translation performance on agglutinative languages by using a small amount of monolingual data. |
Outcome-Grounded Advantage Reshaping for Fine-Grained Credit Assignment in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Ziheng Li, Liu Kang, Feng Xiao, Luxi Xing, Qingyi Si, Zhuoran Li, Weikang Gong, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao, Hongcheng Guo
| Challenge: | Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) uses a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level rewards uniformly to to every token in a sequence, neglecting the varying contribution of individual reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They introduce Outcome-grounded Advantage Reshaping (OAR) which redistributes advantages based on how much each token influences the model’s final answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that OAR-G outperforms GRPO on a high-fidelity attribution signal and suppresses low-impact tokens while preserving the advantage mass. |
Large Language Models Are Still Misled by Simple Bias Ensembles (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models are constrained to datasets where each sample is manually injected with only one type of bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-bias benchmark where each sample contains multiple types of biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing LLMs and debiasing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the challenge of eliminating compounded biases. |
GuiLoMo: Allocating Experts and Ranks for LoRA-MoE via Bilevel Optimization with GuidedSelection Vectors (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xinrong Chen, Hengyuan Zhang, Yingmin Qiu, Xiao Liang, Ziyue Li, Guanyu Wang, Weiping Li, Tong Mo, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) methods are efficient for a large language model with reduced computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise expert numbers and ranks allocation strategy with GuidedSelection Vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior or comparable performance to all baselines on three backbone models. |
PsychePass: Calibrating LLM Therapeutic Competence via Trajectory-Anchored Tournaments (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | evaluating therapeutic competence of large language models remains challenging due to unstructured and longitudinal nature of counseling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that calibrates the therapeutic competence of LLMs via trajectory-anchored tournaments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework calibrates the therapeutic competence of LLMs via trajectory-anchored tournaments. |
Isotropy-Enhanced Conditional Masked Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive models with auto-regressing decoding paradigms have been used for various text generation tasks to accelerate inference but at the cost of generation quality to some extent. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Look Neighbors strategy to enhance learning of target token representations during training to achieve a good balance between inference speedup and generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform current models on 4 WMT datasets and outperformed the current SoTA results. |
FaithfulRAG: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling for Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing faithful RAG approaches enforce strict context adherence, but they forcibly suppress the model’s parametric knowledge, which undermines the model's internal knowledge structure and increases the risk of misinterpreting the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that resolves knowledge conflicts by explicitly modeling discrepancies between the model’s parametric knowledge and retrieved context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in knowledge conflict cases and identifies conflicting knowledge at the fact level and designs a self-thinking process. |
ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model coarse-grained linguistic information do not integrate coarse-gram information into pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance integration of coarse-grained linguistic information into pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tunes on 19 downstream tasks. |
RouteLMT: Learned Sample Routing for Hybrid LLM Translation Deployment (2026.acl-industry)
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Yingfeng Luo, Hongyu Liu, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Chenglong Wang, Bei Li, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing routing strategies rely on heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation to capture whether the large model provides a worthwhile improvement over the small one. |
| Approach: | They propose a budget allocation problem for routing large model to large model . they propose heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation to determine the optimal signal for budgeted decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms heuristics, quality/difficulty estimation baselines and achieves a superior quality–budget Pareto frontier. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Keyu Li, Junhao Shi, Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Yunze Wu, Dayuan Fu, Shijie Xia, Xiaojie Cai, Tianze Xu, Weiye Si, Wenjie Li, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates 6 agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that closed-source models outperform open-source model (48.4% vs 32.1%) integrating models with advanced scaffolds to form autonomous agents is a paradigm shift. |
Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models have advanced the previous state-of-the-art by learning mappings between sequences via neural networks and attention mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use layer normalization to pass the combination of previous layers to the next layer to improve the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the shallow Transformer-Big/Base baseline model on English-German and Chinese-English tasks by 0.4-2.4 BLEU points. |
RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shengyu Mao, Yong Jiang, Boli Chen, Xiao Li, Peng Wang, Xinyu Wang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved to enhance document retrieval by reformulating queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training query rewriting models that leverages a reranker framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides ranking feedback aligned well with the rewriting objectives without needing signals from annotations and supports both online and offline training models. |
CONSTRUCTURE: Benchmarking CONcept STRUCTUre REasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiwei Zha, Xiangru Zhu, Yuanyi Xu, Chenghua Huang, Jingping Liu, Zhixu Li, Xuwu Wang, Yanghua Xiao, Bei Yang, Xiaoxiao Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to perceive the visual world with a deep concept structure cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-level benchmark to assess MLLMs’ hierarchical concept understanding and reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in concept structure reasoning evaluation. |
Rethinking and Improving Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | auxiliary tasks are highly consistent with end-to-end speech translation (ST) but their effectiveness has not been thoroughly studied. |
| Approach: | They propose an improved multi-task learning approach for the ST task that bridges the modal gap by mitigating the difference in length and representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the MuST-C dataset with 20.8% of training time required by the current SOTA method. |
Topic-DPR: Topic-based Prompts for Dense Passage Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior research focused on optimizing a single prompt as a continuous prompt, but this approach leads to a semantic space collapse, preventing differentiation between relevant and irrelevant passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a dense passage retrieval model that uses topic-based prompts and propose 'positive and negative sampling strategies' to boost dense retrieval efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art retrieval techniques and improves space uniformity. |
ChatGPT as an Attack Tool: Stealthy Textual Backdoor Attack via Blackbox Generative Model Trigger (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Textual backdoor attacks are increasingly challenging to detect due to the use of advanced generative models such as GPT-4. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harnesses advanced generative models to execute stealthier backdoor attacks on text classifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art attack success rate of 97.35% over four sentiment classification tasks and four human cognition stealthiness tests. |
Generating Reasonable and Diversified Story Ending Using Sequence to Sequence Model with Adversarial Training (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Story generation is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence (AI) . previous work focused on learning statistical models of event sequences from large-scale text corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial training to generate reasonable story endings . their model includes a generator that defines the policy of generating a story ending . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance on the task of Story Cloze Test with an accuracy of 62.6% compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods. |
Defenses Against Prompt Attacks Learn Surface Heuristics (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in security-sensitive applications . recent defenses rely on supervised fine-tuning with benign and malicious labels . position bias arises when benign content placed later in a prompt is rejected at much higher rates . |
| Approach: | They analyze three recurring shortcut behaviors induced by supervised fine-tuning . position bias arises when benign content placed later in a prompt is rejected . token trigger bias occurs when strings common in attack data raise rejection probability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overrides intended logic when adversarial instructions appear . the proposed model has low rejection rates but narrow correlations in defense data . |
QueryAttack: Jailbreaking Aligned Large Language Models Using Structured Non-natural Query Language (2025.findings-acl)
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Qingsong Zou, Jingyu Xiao, Qing Li, Zhi Yan, Yuhang Wang, Li Xu, Wenxuan Wang, Kuofeng Gao, Ruoyu Li, Yong Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to bypass security defenses of large language models (LLMs) are not effective, but QueryAttack can be jailbroken. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to examine generalizability of safety alignment by translating malicious queries into structured non-natural query languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve high attack success rates and jailbreak various defense methods on mainstream LLMs. |
A Graph Enhanced BERT Model for Event Prediction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict subsequent events use sparsity of event graph to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically build event graph using a BERT model by adding a structured variable to the model to learn to predict event connections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two event prediction tasks. |
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiangyang Li, Zhonghua Li, Zhao Cao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios. |
Contrastive Learning for Many-to-many Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual machine translation approaches focus on English-centric directions, while non-English directions lag behind. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual machine translation system with an emphasis on non-English directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on English-centric and non-English directions on multilingual translation benchmarks. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns (2026.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Jian Yang, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xie, Jen-tse Huang, Jun Gao, Shuai Huang, Yueping Kang, Yuanli Guo, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that treats psychological patterns as interacting causal forces and synthesizes 113 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4 fewer parameters. |
Exploring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning for Generative Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have incredible instruction-following capabilities while maintaining strong task completion ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to encourage LLMs to Forget Spurious correlations and Learn from In-context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can mitigate shortcut learning by forging spurious correlations and learning from in-context information. |
Dialogue-RAG: Enhancing Retrieval for LLMs via Node-Linking Utterance Rewriting (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have demonstrated significant potential on tasks across multiple domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight IUR model for query rewriting to complete key information in dialogue to enhance retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves retrieval and generation ability of RAG system in multi-round dialogue scenarios. |
IDEAW: Robust Neural Audio Watermarking with Invertible Dual-Embedding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Traditional methods for embedding watermarks into audio have low capacity and unsatisfactory imperceptibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-embedding wa- termarking model for efficient locating and a model that can withstand attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can withstand attacks with higher capacity and more efficient locating ability compared to existing methods. |
StoryLLaVA: Enhancing Visual Storytelling with Multi-Modal Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to maintain temporal, spatial, and narrative coherence across image sequences . existing models lack depth and engagement of human-authored stories . |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-driven narrative optimizer that integrates image descriptions, topic generation, and GPT-4-based refinements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in visual relevance, coherence, and fluency. |
QCRD: Quality-guided Contrastive Rationale Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on smaller, task-specific models enhanced by distilling knowledge from LLMs, but the diversity and quality of negative knowledge remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-guided contrastive rationale distillation framework that aims to enhance reasoning capabilities through contrastive knowledge learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently outperforms existing distillation techniques yielding higher-quality rationales. |
Ensuring Readability and Data-fidelity using Head-modifier Templates in Deep Type Description Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative methods overlook grammatical structure or make factual mistakes in generated texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based method to ensure the readability of generated type descriptions . they also propose measurable metrics to measure the readibility of the generated type description . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves substantially compared with baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. |
UniCreative: Unifying Long-form Logic and Short-form Sparkle via Reference-Free Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaolong Wei, Zerun Zhu, Simin Niu, Xingyu Zhang, Peiying Yu, Changxuan Xiao, Yuchen Li, Jicheng Yang, Zhejun Zhao, Chong Meng, Long Xia, Daiting Shi
| Challenge: | Existing alignment paradigms for creative writing use static reward signals and supervised data. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reward model that synthesizes query-specific criteria to provide fine-grained preference judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aligns models with human preferences across content quality and structural paradigms without supervised fine-tuning and ground-truth references. |
Contrastive Learning with Adversarial Examples for Alleviating Pathology of Language Model (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing interpretation methods fail to obtain faithful attributions on these models, thereby failing to reveal potential flaws and biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive learning regularization method which calibrates the sentence representation of out-of-distribution examples and utilizes adversarial examples to introduce direction information in regularization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the model pathology while impacting generalization ability on in-distribution examples and thus helps interpretation methods obtain more faithful results. |
DEBUG: A Dense Bottom-Up Grounding Approach for Natural Language Video Localization (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language video localization are top-down and bottom-up . however, both approaches suffer several limitations, leading to performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a top-down approach for localizing a natural language description in a video sequence . they propose 'DEnse Bottom-Up Grounding' which uses the temporal boundaries of each video frame . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches the speed of top-down models while surpassing the state-of-the-art models. |
Can Multiple-choice Questions Really Be Useful in Detecting the Abilities of LLMs? (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in the evaluation of large language models (LLMs) however, there are concerns about whether MCQ can truly measure LLM’s capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple choice questions to evaluate large language models (LLMs) to assess their capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that MCQs are less reliable than LFGQs in terms of expected calibration error. |
Combating Security and Privacy Issues in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | a tutorial aims to provide a summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . a number of studies have focused on security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Approach: | This tutorial seeks to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . authors will discuss security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . it will also outline emerging challenges in security, privacy and reliability of LLMs . |
LogitSpec: Accelerating Retrieval-based Speculative Decoding via Next Next Token Speculation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate draft tokens in a retrieval-based manner to reduce drafting overhead and improve inference speed. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests show that *LogitSpec* can achieve 2.61 speedup and 3.28 mean accepted tokens per decoding step. |
Generation Meets Verification: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Smart Parallel Auto-Correct Decoding (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing autoregressive models generate tokens sequentially and are memory-bound, resulting in a memory-based inference stage that is memory-limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to accelerate the inference speed of large language models with billions of parameters by integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has demonstrated inference speedups of 2.7x-4.0x on humanEval-X while maintaining output quality. |
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Jian Yang, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
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Ke Xu, Siyang Xiao, Ming Liang, Yichen Yu, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing parallel code localization agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate . specialized localization agent that operate as dedicated search components is needed to achieve high localization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel code localization system that reframes parallel code execution as a quality–efficiency co-optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches SOTA performance while being 93.6% faster. |