Papers by Li Xu
Feature Extraction and Steering for Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve reasoning and mathematical problems using the Chain-of-Thought technique, but require costly and long CoT data and fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses Sparse Autoencoders to extract interpretable features from vanilla CoT and use them to steer the LLM's internal states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method uses Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to extract interpretable features from vanilla CoT and steer the LLM's internal states during generation. |
Reasoning Like a Doctor: Improving Medical Dialogue Systems via Diagnostic Reasoning Process Alignment (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems have attracted significant attention for their potential to act as medical assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that emulates clinicians' diagnostic reasoning processes and aligns with clinician preferences through thought process modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates appropriate responses that relies on abductive and deductive diagnostic reasoning analyses and aligns with clinician preferences through thought process modeling. |
MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Haowei Liu, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Yaya Shi, Chaoya Jiang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
TeleMelody: Lyric-to-Melody Generation with a Template-Based Two-Stage Method (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zeqian Ju, Peiling Lu, Xu Tan, Rui Wang, Chen Zhang, Songruoyao Wu, Kejun Zhang, Xiang-Yang Li, Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu
| Challenge: | a new lyric-to-melody generation system bridges the gap between lyrics and melodies . previous generation systems lack paired data and lack of control on generated melodie. |
| Approach: | They develop a lyric-to-melody generation system with music template to bridge the gap between lyrics and melodies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system bridges the gap between lyrics and melodies by using music template. |
UniCM: A Unified Consistency Model For Efficient Multimodal Generation and Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Consistency models (CMs) have shown promise in the efficient generation of both image and text. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a discrete token for both image and text generation to achieve a unified denoising perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms SD3 on GenEval and Image Reward while being 1.5 faster at long-sequence generating speed. |
CharacterBox: Evaluating the Role-Playing Capabilities of LLMs in Text-Based Virtual Worlds (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Evaluating role-playing capabilities in large language models is challenging due to complex dynamics involved in role-playering. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulation sandbox that generates situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories to enhance LLM performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories to enhance performance. |
Probing Structured Pruning on Multilingual Pre-trained Models: Settings, Algorithms, and Efficiency (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Structured pruning has been extensively studied on monolingual pre-trained models . but little attention has been paid to evaluating the effectiveness of structured pruning on multilingual models. |
| Approach: | They investigate settings, algorithms, and efficiency of structured pruning on multilingual models . authors propose a simple approach that allows training the model once and adapting to different model sizes at inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach allows training the model once and adapting to different model sizes at inference. |
When to Trust Tools? Adaptive Tool Trust Calibration For Tool-Integrated Math Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models have performance enhancements but still suffer from shortcomings due to limitations of the underlying language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows the model to choose when to trust or ignore the tool results based on the confidence score of generated code blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the "Tool Ignored" issue by 4.1% to 7.5%. |
Searching for an Effective Defender: Benchmarking Defense against Adversarial Word Substitution (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zongyi Li, Jianhan Xu, Jiehang Zeng, Linyang Li, Xiaoqing Zheng, Qi Zhang, Kai-Wei Chang, Cho-Jui Hsieh
| Challenge: | Existing methods to defend against adversarial word-substitution attacks have not been evaluated or compared in a systematic manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare different defense methods under representative adversarial attacks . they propose a method that improves the robustness of neural text classifiers against such attacks a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves robustness of neural text classifiers against such attacks by a significant margin. |
Dictionary Guided Sparse Logit Editing for Reliable Jailbreak Attacks (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize large language models suffer from high computational costs and produce uninterpretable, high-perplexity inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse index-based intervention that bypasses guardrails via sparser logit editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bypasses guardrails by modifying pre-softmax logits without gradients or auxiliary models. |
Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation, but Text-to-SQL datasets often include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. |
| Approach: | They found that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is crucial for unlocking DPO's potential by augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent and significant performance improvements on Text-to-SQL datasets. |
Harvesting and Refining Question-Answer Pairs for Unsupervised QA (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research attempts to extend unsupervised question answering to settings with few or no labeled data available. |
| Approach: | They propose two approaches to improve unsupervised question answering . first, they harvest lexically and syntactically divergent Wikipedia questions to automatically construct a corpus of question-answer pairs . second, they take advantage of the QA model to extract more appropriate answers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous unsupervised approaches by a large margin and is competitive with early supervised models. |
CLEME2.0: Towards Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jingheng Ye, Zishan Xu, Yinghui Li, Linlin Song, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Ruitong Liu, Xin Su, Zifei Shan
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the interpretability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation metrics, but the interpretabilty of these metrics has been neglected. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-based metric that describes four aspects of GEC systems: hit-correction, wrong-corrections, under-correcties, and over-corrects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric reveals critical qualities and locates drawbacks of GEC systems. |
Towards Self-Evolving Agents: Enabling Autonomy through Interactive Experience Refinement (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Yang, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen, Daocheng Fu, Jianbiao Mei, Rong Wu, Pinlong Cai, Yufan Shen, Nianchen Deng, Jia Xu, Botian Shi, Yu Qiao, Haifeng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models struggle with complex, multi-step operational tasks because they remain static during inference and cannot learn from past experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes cross-domain insights to facilitate orchestration of long-horizon workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the TAC productivity benchmark and shows strong cross-task transferability. |
Full-Step-DPO: Self-Supervised Preference Optimization with Step-wise Rewards for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve long-chain mathematical reasoning focus on the first erroneous step, but ignore all other steps and rely heavily on external signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a DPO framework that leverages step-wise rewards from the entire reasoning chain instead of optimizing only the first erroneous step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
Towards Modern Topic Models: A Survey of Taxonomies and Paradigm Shifts from Algorithm-Centric to LLM-Centered Topic Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Topic modeling (TM) is a classic unsupervised learning task in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a new taxonomy that emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows. |
Penetrating Linguistic Disguises: A Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework for Fine-Grained Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Flexible word boundaries and linguistic obfuscation, particularly slang, challenge precise span-level hate speech detection in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework that maps slang to explicit hate semantics and uses task-specific branches to mitigate feature interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces ambiguity by mapping obscure slang to explicit hate semantics. |
Understanding Social Media Cross-Modality Discourse in Linguistic Space (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on how images are structured with texts to form coherent meanings in human cognition have not addressed the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept of cross-modality discourse which defines how human readers couple image and text understandings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that trendy encoders based on multi-head attention are unable to understand cross-modality discourse and modeling texts at the output layer helps yield the-state-of-the-art results. |
Too Long, Do Re-weighting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Compression (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
SMARTAVE: Structured Multimodal Transformer for Product Attribute Value Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Qifan Wang, Li Yang, Jingang Wang, Jitin Krishnan, Bo Dai, Sinong Wang, Zenglin Xu, Madian Khabsa, Hao Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value extraction are noisy and incomplete with missing values for most retailers. |
| Approach: | They propose a Structure Mltimodal trAnsformeR for producT Attribute Value Extraction which jointly encodes the structured product information from multiple modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two multimodal product datasets. |
Hallucination Diversity-Aware Active Learning for Text Summarization (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for alleviating hallucinations require costly human annotations . Existing approaches focus on a specific type of hallucinism, which limits their effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect hallucinations from errors in semantic frame, discourse and content verifiability in LLM summarization using HAllucination Diversity-Aware Sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the need for costly human annotations to correct hallucinations in LLM outputs. |
Event Ontology Completion with Hierarchical Structure Evolution Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection require predefined schemas, but manual defining is expensive and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to achieve event clustering, hierarchy expansion and type naming . they propose 'neighbor Contrastive Clustering' module and a Hierarchy-Aware Linking module . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets. |
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ping Gong, Jiawei Yi, Shengnan Wang, Juncheng Zhang, Zewen Jin, Ouxiang Zhou, Ruibo Liu, Guanbin Xu, Youhui Bai, Bowen Ye, Kun Yuan, Tong Yang, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Feng Wu, Cheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
Small Models Struggle to Learn from Strong Reasoners (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuetai Li, Xiang Yue, Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Luyao Niu, Bill Yuchen Lin, Bhaskar Ramasubramanian, Radha Poovendran
| Challenge: | a small learning gap exists between large and small language models . long CoT data and large model responses are not beneficial for small models - a problem that may be due to the small student model's ability to handle distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a mix distillation strategy that balances reasoning complexity by combining long and short CoT examples or reasoning from both larger and smaller models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms training on large and small models on short CoT and small model CoT. |
JointCL: A Joint Contrastive Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Stance Detection (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods achieve promising performance in in-target stance detection when trained and tested on the same datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint contrastive learning framework to generalize stance features for unseen targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
UnifiedMLLM: Enabling Unified Representation for Multi-modal Multi-tasks With Large Language Model (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaowei Li, Wei Wang, YiQing Cai, Qi Xu, Pengyu Wang, Dong Zhang, Hang Song, Botian Jiang, Zhida Huang, Tao Wang
| Challenge: | Representative models like LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 have great capabilities in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model to represent various multi-modal tasks using a single representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in a variety of tasks while maintaining generality and scalability. |
Text AutoAugment: Learning Compositional Augmentation Policy for Text Classification (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Data augmentation aims to alleviate the overfitting issue in low-resource or class-imbalanced situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework called Text AutoAugment to enhance training samples . they use a Bayesian optimization algorithm to search for the best policy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on six benchmark datasets. |
Lil: Less is Less When Applying Post-Training Sparse-Attention Algorithms in Long-Decode Stage (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Junhao Hu, Fangze Li, Mingtao Xu, Feifan Meng, Shiju Zhao, Tiancheng Hu, Ting Peng, Anmin Liu, Wenrui Huang, Chenxu Liu, Ziyue Hua, Tao Xie
| Challenge: | Prior work typically decomposes inference into prefill and decode stages, with the decode stage dominating total latency. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that detects threshold where information loss exceeds information gain during sparse decoding to reduce token consumption by up to 90% and a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces token consumption by 90% with a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2% across reasoning-intensive benchmarks. |
Beyond Demographics: Enhancing Cultural Value Survey Simulation with Multi-Stage Personality-Driven Cognitive Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Introducing **MARK**, a framework for cultural value survey simulation . based on type dynamics theory, it improves accuracy and interpretation of models . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates psychological theory into cultural value survey simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the World Values Survey by 10% accuracy and reduces divergence between model predictions and human preferences. |
Learning from Mistakes: Negative Reasoning Samples Enhance Out-of-Domain Generalization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tian Xueyun, MingHua Ma, Bingbing Xu, Nuoyan Lyu, Wei Li, Heng Dong, Zheng Chu, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common approach for reasoning in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on chain-of-thought trajectories demonstrations . they find that incorporating negative traxories yields substantial OOD generalization gains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme yields 5.51% OOD gain over positive-only training. |
VideoEraser: Concept Erasure in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that VideoEraser outperforms prior methods regarding efficacy, integrity, fidelity, robustness, and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that prevents T2V diffusion models from generating videos with undesirable concepts even when explicitly prompted with those concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in erasure, celebrity erasion, and explicit content erasing tasks. |
Joint Representation Learning of Cross-lingual Words and Entities via Attentive Distant Supervision (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning word and entity representations in monolingual settings are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for joint representation learning of cross-lingual words and entities that captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-linguistic inferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures mutually complementary knowledge and enables cross-lingual inferences among knowledge bases and texts. |
Latent-Optimized Adversarial Neural Transfer for Sarcasm Detection (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for sarcasm detection are limited due to the difficulty in acquiring ground-truth annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized latent optimization strategy that allows different losses to accommodate each other and improves training dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms transfer learning and meta-learning baselines and achieves 10.02% performance gain on the iSarcasm dataset. |
Penetrative AI: Making LLMs Comprehend the Physical World (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They explore how LLMs can be extended to interact with and reason about the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, a concept that they call "Penetrative AI". |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extends LLMs' capabilities to interact with and reason about the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators. |
ATLANTIS: Weak-to-Strong Learning via Importance Sampling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | ATLANTIS is a new technique to improve the performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new technique to bridge the gap between the distribution of current datasets and the real-world data distribution by using importance sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can bring consistent and significant improvements to models’ performance and can be flexibly transferred among models with different structures. |
Coherent Comments Generation for Chinese Articles with a Graph-to-Sequence Model (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for article comment generation are too long and often result in general and irrelevant comments. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate comments with a graph-to-sequence model that models the input news as a topic interaction graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate coherent and informative comments compared with several strong baseline models. |
FineLAP: Taming Heterogeneous Supervision for Fine-grained Language-Audio Pretraining (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing audio-language models excel at clip-level understanding but struggle with frame-level tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training paradigm that advances both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm improves both clip- and frame-level alignment in CLAP with heterogeneous data. |
Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yinghui Li, Zishan Xu, Shaoshen Chen, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shirong Ma, Yong Jiang, Zhongli Li, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on misspelled characters, ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult to correct. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese character checking to identify and correct wrong characters in texts by human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. |
Improving Event Detection via Open-domain Trigger Knowledge (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detecting are prone to overfitting densely labeled trigger words due to the small scale of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Enrichment Knowledge Distillation model to leverage external open-domain trigger knowledge to reduce in-built biases to frequent trigger words in annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms nine strong baselines and is especially effective for unseen/sparsely labeled trigger words. |
Unified Semantic Typing with Meaningful Label Inference (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Semantic typing aims at classifying tokens into semantic categories such as relations, entity types, and event types. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for semantic typing that captures label semantics by projecting both inputs and labels into a joint semantic embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves strong performance across three semantic typing tasks. |
How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid malicious user inputs. |
| Approach: | They employ weak classifiers to explain LLM safety through the intermediate hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can identify malicious and normal inputs and detect malicious ones without jailbreak. |
Improving Event Coreference Resolution Using Document-level and Topic-level Information (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model outperforms the SOTA baselines due to the encoding length limitation. |
| Approach: | They propose a longformer-based encoder and an encoder with a trigger-mask mechanism to learn sentence-level embeddings based on local context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baselines on the KBP 2017 dataset. |
Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenyu Liu, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunxin li, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Mingjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | despite significant progress, full-duplex SLMs are constrained by severe modality interference, authors say . modality interferes with acoustic and semantic modeling, making them unintelligent and unnatural . authors propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances the state of the art on full-duplex benchmarks . it decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence . |
Tab-Cleaner: Weakly Supervised Tabular Data Cleaning via Pre-training for E-commerce Catalog (2023.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Kewei Cheng, Xian Li, Zhengyang Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Binxuan Huang, Yifan Ethan Xu, Xin Luna Dong, Yizhou Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for analyzing textual attributes in product catalogs are not effective on structured tabular data since they are trained on free-form natural language texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to handle error detection over tabular data following a pre-training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a real-world Amazon Product Catalog table by 16% over state-of-the-art methods and by 11% on PR AUC over attribute value validation task. |
Enhancing Talent Search Ranking with Role-Aware Expert Mixtures and LLM-based Fine-Grained Job Descriptions (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing talent search approaches fail to capture nuanced job-specific preferences and mitigate noise from subjective human judgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts fine-grained recruitment signals from job descriptions and historical hiring data and employs a role-aware multi-gate MoE network to capture behavioral differences across recruiter roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves talent search effectiveness and delivers substantial business value. |
ReFreeKV: Towards Threshold-Free KV Cache Compression (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Towards the KV cache efficiency, we propose a new objective that lifts the threshold constraints for robust KV compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adjusts KV cache budgets while preserving full-cache performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reduce memory consumption while preserving full-cache performance. |
On Efficient Retrieval of Top Similarity Vectors (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing representation learning methods such as Word2vec represent word embeddings in the semantic space. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient method for searching vectors via a non-metric matching function: inner product. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on data representations learned for different machine learning tasks show the proposed method outperforms existing methods. |
CorefPrompt: Prompt-based Event Coreference Resolution by Measuring Event Type and Argument Compatibilities (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event coreference resolution (ECR) do not leverage human-summarized rules to guide the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform ECR into a cloze-style MLM task using a prompt-based approach . they introduce two auxiliary prompt tasks, event-type compatibility and argument compatibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well in a state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmark. |
TrInk: Ink Generation with Transformer Network (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Enabling Stroke-Level Structural Analysis of Hieroglyphic Scripts without Language-Specific Priors (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Fuwen Luo, Zihao Wan, Ziyue Wang, Yaluo Liu, Pau Tong Lin Xu, Xuanjia Qiao, Xiaolong Wang, Peng Li, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing structural analysis methods for hieroglyphic scripts are script-specific and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a hieroglyphic Stroke Analyzer framework that captures character-internal structures and semantics without handcrafted data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures character-internal structures and semantics without priors . it can be used to generalize hieroglyphic scripts across languages . |
Multi-modal Stance Detection: New Datasets and Model (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection for pure texts have limited results to multi-modal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal stance detection framework that leverages target information to learn multi-modal stance features from textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal stance detection on five datasets based on Twitter . |
CLHA: A Simple Yet Effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Feiteng Fang, Liang Zhu, Xi Feng, Jinchang Hou, Qixuan Zhao, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention from academic and industrial communities due to their outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment to evaluate the noise within the data and dynamically adjust the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses other algorithms in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used dataset "Helpful and Harmless" |
P-INT: A Path-based Interaction Model for Few-shot Knowledge Graph Completion (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to encode and match entity pairs have only a few observed reference entity pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that infers and leverages paths that can expressively encode the relation of two entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models by 11.2– 14.2% in terms of Hits@1. |
NAP2: A Benchmark for Naturalness and Privacy-Preserving Text Rewriting by Learning from Human (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shuo Huang, William Maclean, Xiaoxi Kang, Qiongkai Xu, Zhuang Li, Xingliang Yuan, Gholamreza Haffari, Lizhen Qu
| Challenge: | a large number of large language models are being used to protect user privacy . sanitizing sensitive text using two common strategies is the answer . |
| Approach: | They propose sanitizing sensitive text using deleting expressions and abstracting them . they propose a tool for text rewriting that uses crowdsourcing and large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach protects privacy before sending sensitive data to large language models . it combines crowdsourcing and large language modeling to create a text rewrite tool . |
STARS: A Unified Framework for Singing Transcription, Alignment, and Refined Style Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenxiang Guo, Yu Zhang, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, ZheTao Chen, Wenhao Xu, Fei Wu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing automated singing annotation (ASA) methods tackle isolated aspects of the annotation pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that addresses transcription, alignment, and refined style annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers comprehensive multi-level annotations encompassing: (1) precise phoneme-audio alignment, (2) robust note transcription and temporal localization, (3) expressive vocal technique identification, and (4) global stylistic characterization including emotion and pace. |
RAGEval: Scenario Specific RAG Evaluation Dataset Generation Framework (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kunlun Zhu, Yifan Luo, Dingling Xu, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Shi Yu, Ruobing Wang, Shuo Wang, Yishan Li, Nan Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for RAG systems are lacking due to high costs of data construction and lack of factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate RAG systems in specialized scenarios . they propose three new metrics to evaluate LLM-generated responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms zero-shot and one-shot methods in terms of clarity, safety, conformity, and richness of generated samples. |
ActiView: Evaluating Active Perception Ability for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Fuwen Luo, Yurui Dong, Yuanchi Zhang, Yuzhuang Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Peng Li, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs have not addressed active perception . a novel benchmark is proposed to evaluate active perception in ML models . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate active perception in Multimodal Large Language Models . they restrict the perceptual field of a model and require it to actively zoom or shift it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark focuses on a specialized form of Visual Question Answering (VQA) that eases and quantifies the evaluation yet challenging for existing MLLMs. |
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li, Xin Miao, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Jianhao Chen, Birong Pan, Hankun Kang, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | Existing studies on vision-language models aligned with general human objectives have not been successful because people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set and then evaluate their actions to see whether personalized alignment is achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment. |
Automated CAD Modeling Sequence Generation from Text Descriptions via Transformer-Based Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
JianXing Liao, Junyan Xu, Yatao Sun, Maowen Tang, Sicheng He, Jingxian Liao, Shui Yu, Yun Li, Xiaohong Guan
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional methods in both accuracy and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-guided framework that integrates large language models with computer-automated design to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods in accuracy and efficiency, providing a powerful tool for automating industrial workflows and generating complex CAD models from textual prompts. |
LIFTED: Multimodal Clinical Trial Outcome Prediction via Large Language Models and Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Clinical trials are costly and pivotal processes that require substantial expenses . a new approach to integrate multimodal data for clinical outcome prediction is needed . |
| Approach: | a proposed framework transforms modality-specific data into natural language descriptions . a sparse Mixture-of-Experts mechanism then identifies shared patterns across modalities . |
| Outcome: | a proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in predicting clinical trial outcomes . it transforms modality-specific data into natural language descriptions, encoded via unified encoders . |
Legal Mathematical Reasoning with LLMs: Procedural Alignment through Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing legal mathematical reasoning models lack structured numerical reasoning . existing models perform poorly on LexNum, while LexPam improves both mathematical accuracy and legal coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a legal mathematical reasoning benchmark LexNum and LexPam to address this problem . LexPam is a two-stage reinforcement learning framework for efficient legal reasoning training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves mathematical accuracy and legal coherence . it also improves legal cohesion and generalizes effectively across tasks and domains. |
Condensing Multilingual Knowledge with Lightweight Language-Specific Modules (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to boost performance in multilingual models but scalability is difficult to manage. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates language-specific (LS) modules to boost model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods while outperforming existing methods. |
Visual-Language Navigation Pretraining via Prompt-based Environmental Self-exploration (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods of fine-tuning vision-language navigation models require extra human-labeled data and lack self-exploration capabilities in environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can self-explore environments without human labeling . they use a large-scale cross-modal pretrained model to build an in-domain dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can self-explore environments without human labeling without human supervision and generates structured instructions without human intervention. |
JiraiBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Detection of Human risky health behavior Content in Jirai Community (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xueyang Feng, Jingsen Zhang, Jiakai Tang, Wei Li, Guohao Cai, Xu Chen, Quanyu Dai, Yue Zhu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
OCR-Memory: Optical Context Retrieval for Long-Horizon Agent Memory (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are limited by text-context budgets, resulting in token-expensive storage of raw trajectories . Optical Context Retrieval Memory (OCR-Memory) renders historical tra-jectorios into images annotated with unique visual identifiers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the visual modality as a high-density representation of agent experience. |
| Outcome: | Optical Context Retrieval Memory (OCRM) renders historical trajectories into images annotated with unique visual identifiers. |
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Adaptive Hyper-parameter Learning for Deep Semantic Retrieval (2023.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for deep semantic retrieval are highly sensitive to hyper-parameters . a novel adaptive metric learning method is proposed to overcome this limitation . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adaptively obtains hyper-parameters without fixed or extra-trainable hyper-parmeters . they adopt a symmetric metric learning method to mitigate model collapse issues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on a real-world dataset and brings economic benefits. |
Toward Robust In-Context Learning: Leveraging Out-of-distribution Proxies for Target Inaccessible Demonstration Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) perform well on Out-of-Distribution tasks, but performance degrades as distribution shift becomes more severe. |
| Approach: | They propose a demonstration search framework that incorporates an OOD proxy to approximate the inaccessible target domain and guide the retrieval process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances robustness in out-of-distribution tasks by incorporating an OOD proxy to approximate the inaccessible target domain and guide the retrieval process. |
Adapting Meta Knowledge Graph Information for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Few-Shot Relations (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-hop reasoning assume that every relation has enough triples for training . however, performance drops significantly on few-shot relations . |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-based multi-hop reasoning method that learns meta parameters from high-frequency relations that could quickly adapt to few-shot scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in few-shot scenarios on two public datasets from Freebase and NELL. |
Cross-Modal Commentator: Automatic Machine Commenting Based on Cross-Modal Information (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on commenting based on textual content is focused on other modalities, such as graphics and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to integrate multiple modalities into automatic commenting . they construct a large-scale dataset and propose 'co-attention' model to capture dependency between textual and visual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better performance than baselines. |
Contrastive Preference Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing discrepancies between token-level objective and overall sequence-level quality of a model are causing exposure bias and other issues in NMT. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive preference model that integrates an indicator function to fine-tune a pre-trained model in Neural Machine Translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the traditional Plackett-Luce model on three language pairs and also outperFORMs token-level and sequence-level baseline models. |
V-DPO: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision Language Models via Vision-Guided Direct Preference Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Calibrating LLMs with Preference Optimization on Thought Trees for Generating Rationale in Science Question Scoring (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating rationales that justify scoring decisions are not accurate and often contain hallucinated information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework capable of generating more faithful rationales and matching performance with classifier-based scoring systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 38% improvement in QWK score compared to prior work . it can be used to match performance with classifier-based scoring systems . |
Training Dynamics for Text Summarization Models (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have shown impressive results when fine-tuned on large summarization datasets. |
| Approach: | They analyze the training dynamics for generation models, focusing on summarization . they find that a propensity to copy the input is learned early in the training process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns at different stages of fine-tuning, the authors show . they show that factual errors are learnt in later stages, but not at high-loss tokens . |
Retrieval and Reasoning on KGs: Integrate Knowledge Graphs into Large Language Models for Complex Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed impressively in various NLP tasks, but their inherent hallucination phenomena severely challenge their credibility in complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate explainable Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with LLMs to alleviate hallucinations . they construct subgraphs to enhance the retrieval capabilities of KGs via CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two KGQA datasets show that the proposed model achieves convincing performance compared to strong baselines. |
Instruction Fusion: Advancing Prompt Evolution through Hybridization (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter performance limitations, impeding further enhancements in code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine two distinct prompts through a hybridization process to enhance the evolution of training prompts for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of Code LLMs across five code generation benchmarks, namely HumanEval, HumanEva+, MBPP, mbap+ and MultiPL-E. |
Tug-of-War between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge conflicts in RALMs can ensnare them in a tug-of-war between knowledge and evidence, limiting their practical applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model’s confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can resolve knowledge conflicts in large language models with the help of conflict-disentangle contrast decoding (CD2) . |
TritonBench: Benchmarking Large Language Model Capabilities for Generating Triton Operators (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jianling Li, ShangZhan Li, Zhenye Gao, Qi Shi, Yuxuan Li, Zefan Wang, Jiacheng Huang, WangHaojie WangHaojie, Jianrong Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Triton is a high-level Python-like programming language for building efficient GPU kernels. |
| Approach: | They propose a TritonBench benchmark that provides a comprehensive evaluation of Tritonic operators on widely deployed GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that current LLMs struggle to generate efficient Triton operators on widely deployed GPUs aligned with industry applications. |
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yujie Feng, Hao Wang, Jian Li, Xu Chu, Zhaolu Kang, Yiran Liu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. |
MAKAR: a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xinkui Lin, Yuhui Zhang, Yongxiu Xu, Kun Huang, Hongzhang Mu, Yubin Wang, Gaopeng Gou, Li Qian, Li Peng, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Hongbo Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for GMNER fail to address semantic ambiguity caused by polysemy and long-tail distribution of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition that leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model to address semantic ambiguity. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two benchmark datasets. |
CrossGuard: Safeguarding MLLMs against Joint-Modal Implicit Malicious Attacks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for MLLMs are weak on explicit attacks, but weak on implicit ones. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated red-teaming pipeline that leverages reinforcement learning with tailored reward modules to generate diverse implicit samples across 14 domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in implicit and explicit attacks while maintaining high utility. |
One QuantLLM for ALL: Fine-tuning Quantized LLMs Once for Efficient Deployments (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Quantization has shown promise for Large Language Models, but current methods require lengthy training to alleviate quantization loss. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple weights and incorporate Low-Rank adapters to reduce weight sharing . they validate the approach on LLaMA2 families and Mistral on downstream evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows high performance while reducing deployment time faced with multiple scenarios. |
Gentopia.AI: A Collaborative Platform for Tool-Augmented LLMs (2023.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Binfeng Xu, Xukun Liu, Hua Shen, Zeyu Han, Yuhan Li, Murong Yue, Zhiyuan Peng, Yuchen Liu, Ziyu Yao, Dongkuan Xu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Augmented Language Models lack flexibility, democratization, and holistic evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and extensible framework for Augmented Language Models called Gentopia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates language models, task formats, prompting modules, and plugins into a unified paradigm. |
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hongzhan Chen, Hehong Chen, Ming Yan, Wenshen Xu, Gao Xing, Weizhou Shen, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on role-playing agents have focused on enhancing their conversational capability, role-specific knowledge and style, but there has been a gap in assessing their social intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the sociality of role-playing agents using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from various sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. |
Detecting Subtle Differences between Human and Model Languages Using Spectrum of Relative Likelihood (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting modelgenerated texts from human texts are limited by the fact that absolute likelihood values of texts are bound to certain linguistic and cognitive constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose to use relative likelihood values instead of absolute ones to extract useful features from the spectrum-view of likelihood for the human-model text detection task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reveal subtle differences between human and model languages, which find theoretical roots in psycholinguistics studies. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
Enhancing Auto-regressive Chain-of-Thought through Loop-Aligned Reasoning (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting is a powerful technique for enhancing language model’s reasoning capabilities, but generating long and correct CoT trajectories is challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose to align the steps of Chain-of-Thought reasoning with loop iterations and apply intermediate supervision during the training of Looped Transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates accurate reasoning chains for complex problems exceeding training length, and improves performance of the auto-regressive model. |
AlphaFin: Benchmarking Financial Analysis with Retrieval-Augmented Stock-Chain Framework (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, ML&DL methods fail to provide reasons for stock trend predictions, lacking interpretability and reasoning processes. large language models (LLMs) suffer from hallucinations and are unable to keep up with the latest information. |
| Approach: | They develop a method to train large language models to handle financial analysis tasks . they use AlphaFin datasets to compare performance with traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves stock trend prediction and financial question answering tasks. |
MalURLBench: A Benchmark Evaluating Agents’ Vulnerabilities When Processing Web URLs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dezhang Kong, Zhuxi Wu, Shiqi Liu, ZhiCheng Tan, Kuichen Lu, Minghao Li, Qichen Liu, Shengyu Chu, Zhenhua Xu, Xuan Liu, Meng Han
| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to detect elaborately disguised malicious URLs, despite their ability to process malicious URL's. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ vulnerabilities to malicious URLs and a lightweight defense module to mitigate the vulnerability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes 61,845 attack instances spanning 10 real-world scenarios and 7 categories of real malicious websites. |
BERT-EMD: Many-to-Many Layer Mapping for BERT Compression with Earth Mover’s Distance (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been proposed and applied to many NLP tasks, yielding state-of-the-art performance, but high storage and computational costs obstruct them to be effectively deployed on resource-constrained devices and real-time applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a BERT distillation method which allows each intermediate student layer to learn from any intermediate teacher layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn from different teacher layers adaptively for different NLP tasks. |
Not All Errors are Equal: Learning Text Generation Metrics using Stratified Error Synthesis (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing learning metrics are limited to tasks where large human ratings are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based natural language generation (NLG) evaluation metric that is highly correlated with human judgements without requiring human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms all prior unsupervised metrics on multiple NLG tasks including translation, image captioning, and WebNLG text generation. |
Subtle Errors in Reasoning: Preference Learning via Error-injected Self-editing (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Chak Tou Leong, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies to improve mathematical ability typically involve applying preference learning to step-wise solution pairs, but they overlook critical subtle errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference learning framework that injects predefined subtle errors into pivotal tokens to construct hard pairs for error mitigation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework improves on Qwen2-7B-Instruct and MATH with 4.5K training samples. |
LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Changliang Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for Named Entity Recognition (NER) use extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in low-resource scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting . they construct a learnable verbalizer of entity categories without any label-specific classifiers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and class transfer models in low-resource scenarios. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Know Your Place: Diagnosing Implicit Social Adaptation Failures in Chinese Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest that failures of large language models in social contexts are not due to limited linguistic competence, but to inappropriate recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes social adaptation into three orthogonal dimensions and conduct controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes social adaptation into three orthogonal dimensions and conducts controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. |
Beyond Linguistic Cues: Fine-grained Conversational Emotion Recognition via Belief-Desire Modelling (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is essential for dialogue systems to identify the emotions expressed by speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates both belief and desire to accurately identify emotions by extracting emotion-eliciting events from utterances and construct graphs that represent beliefs and desires in conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on four popular ERC datasets and validates its performance with multiple state-of-the-art models. |
A Joint Model for Dropped Pronoun Recovery and Conversational Discourse Parsing in Chinese Conversational Speech (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work regards dropped pronoun recovery and conversational discourse parsing as two separate tasks and tackles them separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model for dropped pronoun recovery and conversational discourse parsing in Chinese conversational speech. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a new dataset . the proposed model is based on linguistic and semantic information from Chinese conversational speech . |
Evaluating Text Generation Quality Using Spectral Distances of Surprisal (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing metric fails to capture text surprisal, but FACE-2 produces stronger agreement with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a new automatic evaluation metric for open-ended text generation . they propose metric that extracts the dynamic patterns (spectrum) of text surprisal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms existing methods in revealing the model scaling effect . it produces stronger agreement with human preferences from a large human-annotated dataset . |
TaCIE: Enhancing Instruction Comprehension in Large Language Models through Task-Centred Instruction Evolution (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter performance limitations, impeding further enhancements in code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine two distinct prompts through a hybridization process to enhance the evolution of training prompts for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of Code LLMs across five code generation benchmarks. |
Benchmarking LLM Faithfulness in RAG with Evolving Leaderboards (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Manveer Singh Tamber, Forrest Sheng Bao, Chenyu Xu, Ge Luo, Suleman Kazi, Minseok Bae, Miaoran Li, Ofer Mendelevitch, Renyi Qu, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel in various tasks, but often produce hallucinations . retrieved contexts, misrepresent information, or generate outright contradictions . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures hallucination faithfulness of large language models . they introduce a leaderboard that leverages diverse human-annotated hallucinian examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves hallucination evaluations by leveraging human-annotated examples. |
Ask-Before-Detection: Identifying and Mitigating Conformity Bias in LLM-Powered Error Detector for Math Word Problem Solutions (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of large language models (LLMs) for automatic error detection in math word problems (MWPs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates adaptive reference solutions using LLMs to enhance error detection by reducing conformity bias in MWPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates the performance gap between conventional and alternative solutions in MWPs, especially when combined with reasoning-enhancing techniques like chain-of-thought prompting. |
Multiple Knowledge-Enhanced Interactive Graph Network for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations models struggle due to lack of Common Sense Knowledge (CSK). |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach to integrate multiple knowledge into the edge representations by integrating textual and visual CSK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular datasets. |
On the Consistency of Commonsense in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of commonsense for large language models focus on downstream knowledge tasks, failing to probe whether LLMs truly understand and utilize knowledge or merely memorize it. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically construct a large benchmark named CoCo which measures LLMs’ knowledge memorization, comprehension, and application and examines the consistency between these tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically assesses LLMs’ knowledge memorization, comprehension, and application and examines the consistency between these tasks. |
AdaTooler-V: Adaptive Tool-Use for Images and Videos (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Chaoyang Wang, Kaituo Feng, Dongyang Chen, Zhongyu Wang, Zhixun Li, Sicheng Gao, Meng Meng, Xu Zhou, Manyuan Zhang, Yuzhang Shang, Xiangyu Yue
| Challenge: | Existing models exhibit blind tool-use reasoning patterns, which significantly increases inference overhead and degrades model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an MLLM that performs adaptive tool-use by determining whether a visual problem truly requires tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in visual reasoning tasks. |
Sentence Embedding Leaks More Information than You Expect: Generative Embedding Inversion Attack to Recover the Whole Sentence (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sentence-level representations are beneficial for various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative embedding inversion attack that reconstructs input sequences based only on their sentence embeddeds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous embedding inversion attacks in classification metrics and generates coherent and contextually similar sentences as original inputs. |
Knowledge Inheritance for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Jing Yi, Jiajie Zhang, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Yusheng Su, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale pre-trained language models are mainly trained from scratch individually, ignoring that many well-taught PLMs are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training framework called knowledge inheritance and propose auxiliary supervision to efficiently learn larger PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to train large-scale language models with huge parameters and a large dataset can be adapted to domain adaptation and knowledge transfer. |
Acquisition and Application of Novel Knowledge in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for constructing new datasets rely on timestamps or simple templates that do not accurately reflect the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge dataset construction approach that simulates biological evolution using knowledge graphs to generate synthetic entities with diverse attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms knowledge augmentation methods by 3.3%-38%. |
Exploiting the Index Gradients for Optimization-Based Jailbreaking on Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite advances in training Large Language Models, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak, an adversarial attack method. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial jailbreak algorithm that exploits the gradient information of the suffix tokens to accelerate the optimization process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 1.5x speedup while maintaining high attack success rates. |
MAVEN: A Massive General Domain Event Detection Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaozhi Wang, Ziqi Wang, Xu Han, Wangyi Jiang, Rong Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Peng Li, Yankai Lin, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing datasets exhibit data scarcity and limited coverage of general-domain events. |
| Approach: | They present a MAssive eVENt detection dataset which contains 4,480 Wikipedia documents and 168 event types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing methods cannot achieve promising results on the small datasets. |
Unifying Continuous and Discrete Text Diffusion with Non-simultaneous Diffusion Processes (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate NeoDiff’s superior performance compared to baselines of non-autoregressive continuous and discrete diffusion models, iterative-based methods and autoregressive diffusion-based approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a discrete and continuous diffusion model that integrates the strengths of discrete, continuous and continuous approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model unifies the theories of discrete and continuous diffusion models, offering a more principled and effective framework for text generation. |
PLATO-Ad: A Unified Advertisement Text Generation Framework with Multi-Task Prompt Learning (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Zeyang Lei, Chao Zhang, Xinchao Xu, Wenquan Wu, Zheng-yu Niu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Yi Yang, Shuanglong Li
| Challenge: | Online advertisement text generation models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality text ads, but some challenges remain, such as low-resource scenarios and training efficiency for multiple ad tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified text ad generation framework with multi-task prompt learning to tackle low-resource ade generation problem and a multi-step prompt learning mechanism to efficiently solve multiple aed generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on offline and online metrics. |
Exploring Schema Generalizability of Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models are limited in their generalizability, despite their performance being over-estimated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
HELPD: Mitigating Hallucination of LVLMs by Hierarchical Feedback Learning with Vision-enhanced Penalty Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work detects hallucination by directly judging whether an object exists in an image, overlooking the association between the object and semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates hallucination feedback at both object and sentence semantic levels to alleviate over 15% of hallucinism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can alleviate over 15% of hallucination even with a marginal degree of training. |
Solve-Detect-Verify: Inference-Time Scaling with Flexible Generative Verifier (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced capabilities in complex reasoning through step-by-step trace generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative verifier that dynamically allocates compute between rapid fast thinking and deliberative slow thinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution outperforms GenPRM-32B on ProcessBench while requiring 2.3x fewer TFLOPS and 15x less training data. |
Query2Triple: Unified Query Encoding for Answering Diverse Complex Queries over Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Complex Query Answering (CQA) is a challenge task of Knowledge Graphs due to incompleteness of KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose a query embedding approach that decouples the training for simple and complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach decouples training for simple and complex queries and achieves state-of-the-art performance over three public benchmarks. |
MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Jianhui Chen, Lei Hou, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for event understanding have limited coverage due to complexity of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations . they propose 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction, and event relation extraction. |
ExplainCPE: A Free-text Explanation Benchmark of Chinese Pharmacist Examination (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing explanation datasets for large language models are limited to the English language and general domain, leading to a scarcity of linguistic diversity and a lack of resources in specialized domains, such as medical. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a medical dataset to assess the interpretability of Large Language Models (LLMs) . they propose to analyze medical text and generate rationales for their decisions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model passes the pharmacist examination with a 75.7% accuracy, while other models like ChatGPT fail. |
ORGAN: Observation-Guided Radiology Report Generation via Tree Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate radiology reports only rely on high-level plans, but they lack important information. |
| Approach: | They propose an Observation-guided radiology Report Generation framework which generates free-text descriptions for a set of radiographs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods regarding text quality and clinical efficacy. |
It is AI’s Turn to Ask Humans a Question: Question-Answer Pair Generation for Children’s Story Books (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing question answering (QA) techniques are created mainly to answer questions asked by humans, but in educational applications, teachers often need to decide what questions to ask . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fairytale-themed storybook as input to generate QA pairs that can test a student's comprehension skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art QAG baseline systems and builds an interactive story-telling application for the future real-world deployment. |
ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Honglin Lin, Siyu Li, Guoshun Nan, Chaoyue Tang, Xueting Wang, Jingxin Xu, Rong Yankai, Zhouzhili Zhouzhili, Yutong Gao, Qimei Cui, Xiaofeng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to image retrieval from contextual descriptions (IRCD) lag behind human performance in IRCD. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that relies on a doubly contextual alignment scheme for challenging IRCD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can yield comparable results with GPT-4V, despite fewer parameters. |
Knowledge-augmented Self-training of A Question Rewriter for Conversational Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent rise of conversational applications has promoted the development of conversation KBQA (ConvKBQA). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to produce a full-fledged rewritten question based on conversation history and then reason the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces a full-fledged rewritten question based on the conversation history and reasoned the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models. |
#HowYouTagTweets: Learning User Hashtagging Preferences via Personalized Topic Attention (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods based on latent topics cannot capture user interests and thus can't be used to predict how likely a user will post with a hashtag. |
| Approach: | They propose a personalized topic attention model that captures salient contents to personalize hashtag contexts by predicting how likely a user will post with a hashtag. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation approach without exploiting latent topics. |
Extrapolating Multilingual Understanding Models as Multilingual Generators (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual understanding models are not capable of generating high-quality text compared with decoder-based causal language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adapt a multilingual encoder to a language generator with a small number of additional parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms initialization-based methods with 9.4 BLEU on machine translation, 8.1 Rouge-L on question generation, and 5.5 METEOR on story generation. |
Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion from Hierarchical Perspective (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models require only a few associative triples to complete a relationship. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform data augmentation from two perspectives to solve the FKGC problem by inferring new triple facts from existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a number of existing models. |
Double Graph Based Reasoning for Document-level Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level relation extraction fail to recognize relations between entities across sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to recognize relations for long paragraphs by a Graph Aggregation-and-Inference Network (GAIN) they propose to use a heterogeneous mention-level graph and an entity-level EG graph to analyze the relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a significant performance improvement (2.85 on F1) over the previous state-of-the-art. |
Breaking Language Barriers: Cross-Lingual Continual Pre-Training at Scale (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides towards Artificial General Intelligence, but training them from scratch is prohibitively expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose to continuously pre-train LLMs from existing pre-trained LLM models by using a set of parameters instead of randomly initializing them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach saves significant resources and accelerates convergence and performance. |
Perspective Transition of Large Language Models for Solving Subjective Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing . performance of LLMs on subjective tasks is limited, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows LLMs to select between direct, role, and third-person perspectives for best way to solve corresponding subjective problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms widely used single fixed perspective based methods on 12 subjective tasks. |
FastMem: Fast Memorization of Prompt Improves Context Awareness of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with context awareness, leading to inaccuracies in tasks requiring faithful adherence to provided information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance LLMs' context awareness by updating only the last Feed-Forward Network module to maximize the likelihood of the prompt before inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of Llama 3-8B-Inst on the NQ-SWAP dataset from 59.1% to 71.6% and reduces the output structure failure rate of Qwen 1.5-4B-Chat from 34.9% to 25.5%. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
Towards Fine-grained Text Sentiment Transfer (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained text sentiment transfer only reverse the sentiment polarity of text, but they lack a robust and parallel learning algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-grained text sentiment transfer task that revises a sequence to satisfy a given sentiment intensity while preserving the original semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in automatic evaluation and human evaluation. |
UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interaction (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chaoyun Zhang, Liqun Li, Shilin He, Xu Zhang, Bo Qiao, Si Qin, Minghua Ma, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | UFO is a UI-Fcused agent designed to fulfill user requests tailored to Windows OS applications . it decomposes user requests using divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a UI-Fcused Windows OS agent that decomposes user requests using a divide-and-conquer approach and incorporates a control interaction module tailored for Windows OS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent decomposes user requests using divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
Demystifying Small Language Models for Edge Deployment (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenyan Lu, Xiang Li, Dongqi Cai, Rongjie Yi, Fangming Liu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Xiwen Zhang, Nicholas D. Lane, Mengwei Xu
| Challenge: | Small language models (SLMs) are a promising solution for resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and the Web of Things. |
| Approach: | They propose to use SLMs to build and optimize a set of small language models that are publicly accessible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform 7B models in general tasks, while their in-context learning capabilities remain limited and their efficiency has significant optimization potential. |
Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shehzaad Dhuliawala, Mojtaba Komeili, Jing Xu, Roberta Raileanu, Xian Li, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Weston
| Challenge: | Large language models can generate plausible but incorrect factual information, termed hallucinations, but they can still fail on lesser known facts. |
| Approach: | They develop a method that allows language models to deliberate on the responses they give in order to correct their errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method decreases hallucinations across a variety of tasks, including list-based questions, closed book MultiSpanQA and longform text generation. |
Auto-Dialabel: Labeling Dialogue Data with Unsupervised Learning (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialog datasets rely on human labeling, which is expensive, limited in size, and in low coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically cluster dialogue intents and slots . they collect context features, leverage an autoencoder for feature assembly, and adapt a dynamic hierarchical clustering method for intent and slot labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can promote human labeling cost to a great extent and achieve good intent clustering accuracy (84.1%) it also provides reasonable and instructive slot labeling results. |
Revealing and Enhancing Core Visual Regions: Harnessing Internal Attention Dynamics for Hallucination Mitigation in LVLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing training-free methods are vulnerable to the attention sink phenomenon . Existing methods include contrastive decoding and auxiliary expert models . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free attention intervention that constructs a PAD map to identify semantically core visual regions and applies per-head Median Absolute Deviation Scaling to adaptively control the intervention strength. |
| Outcome: | The proposed intervention improves visual grounding and reduces hallucinations on multiple LVLMs and benchmarks. |
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters. |
Enhancing Topic-to-Essay Generation with External Commonsense Knowledge (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for topic-to-essay generation are insufficient for generating novel, diverse, and topic-consistent paragraph-level text with a set of topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate commonsense from external knowledge base into the generator through dynamic memory mechanism and adversarial training to further improve topic-consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is more novel, diverse, and topic-consistent than existing methods in terms of both automatic and human evaluation. |
Bridging Relevance and Reasoning: Rationale Distillation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Xiaopeng Li, Zhaocheng Du, Xiangyang Li, Yichao Wang, Yuhao Wang, Qidong Liu, Maolin Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rerank and align documents based on reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) . prior work shows that LLMs have exceptional reasoning and text generation capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale extraction method that leverages reasoning capabilities of large language models to extract the rationales necessary for answering a query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compared with baseline methods on two tasks across three datasets. |
InfoLossQA: Characterizing and Recovering Information Loss in Text Simplification (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jan Trienes, Sebastian Joseph, Jörg Schlötterer, Christin Seifert, Kyle Lo, Wei Xu, Byron Wallace, Junyi Jessy Li
| Challenge: | Text simplification aims to make technical texts more accessible to laypeople but often results in deletion of information and vagueness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to characterize and recover simplification-induced information loss in form of question-and-answer (QA) pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes and recovers simplification-induced information loss in form of question-and-answer (QA) pairs. |
Granular Entity Mapper: Advancing Fine-grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained content extraction are limited by long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and performance of object detectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity entity recognition module and a reranking module to integrate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the fine-grained content extraction task. |
Interpretable Composition Attribution Enhancement for Visio-linguistic Compositional Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite promising progress, vision-language models still exhibit significant challenges in understanding visio-linguistic concepts beyond object terms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encourages the model to pay greater attention to composition words denoting relationships and attributes within the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the ability to discern intricate details and construct more sophisticated interpretations of combined visual and linguistic elements. |
MRN: A Locally and Globally Mention-Based Reasoning Network for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on document-level relation extraction focus on sentencelevel RE, but recent studies reveal that a large number of relations can actually be expressed through multiple sentences, which necessitates document- level RE. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that captures local and global contextual information as well as close and distant mention interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three widely used datasets, namely DocRED, CDR, and GDA. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
ReTRE: Benchmarking LLM Transfer Robustness with Structure-Preserving Variants (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Learning transfer theory emphasizes that applying acquired knowledge to novel manifestations is a key signal of deep understanding |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that probes transfer robustness along two rewrite levels: Near Transfer and Far Transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that large language models are robust when faced with novel manifestations of the same problem. |
On the Role of Entity and Event Level Conceptualization in Generalizable Reasoning: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Haochen Shi, Baixuan Xu, Wenxuan Ding, Liyu Zhang, Wei Fan, Jiaxin Bai, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Conceptualization is a fundamental element of human cognition and plays a pivotal role in generalizable reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized. |
| Outcome: | The proposed categorization of different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized . |
MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Binxu Li, Tiankai Yan, Yuanting Pan, Jie Luo, Ruiyang Ji, Jiayuan Ding, Zhe Xu, Shilong Liu, Haoyu Dong, Zihao Lin, Yixin Wang
| Challenge: | Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit limited generality and often fall short when compared to specialized models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal medical agent that picks the most suitable medical tools based on user inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs better than open-source models and the closed-source model, GPT-4o. |
Preserving Knowledge Invariance: Rethinking Robustness Evaluation of Open Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks focus on pairwise matching, ignoring robustness . current models exhibit frustrating degradation, with a maximum drop of 23.43 F1 score . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates the evaluation of open information extraction models in the real world . they perform experiments on typical models published in the last decade and a representative large language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is rated robust on a knowledge-invariant clique with different syntactic and expressive forms. |
MatRank: Text Re-ranking by Latent Preference Matrix (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text ranking have improved performance, but there are still challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns to re-rank the text retrieved for a given query by learning to predict the most relevant passage based on a latent preference matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all prior methods on datasets with extensive results. |
Multilingual Simplification of Medical Texts (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Sebastian Joseph, Kathryn Kazanas, Keziah Reina, Vishnesh Ramanathan, Wei Xu, Byron Wallace, Junyi Jessy Li
| Challenge: | Existing work on medical text simplification has focused on monolingual settings . important findings in medicine are typically presented in technical, jargon-laden language . text simulating models can generate viable simplified texts, but there are outstanding challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for medical text simplification in four languages . they evaluate fine-tuned and zero-shot models across these languages based on human assessments and analyses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates models in English, Spanish, French, and Farsi . it shows that the models can generate viable simplified texts, but there are challenges . |
Anchoring-Guidance Fine-Tuning (AnGFT): Elevating Professional Response Quality in Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in various fields, notably in Role-Playing Conversational Agents (RPCAs). |
| Approach: | They propose an Anchoring-Guidance Fine-Tuning Framework to integrate relevant expert knowledge into RPCAs' training process to mitigate this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the RPCAs’ performance in handling role-specific professional queries while preserving their robust role-playing abilities. |
SKRAG: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Guided by Reasoning Skeletons over Knowledge Graphs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing KG-based question answering frameworks face inefficient subgraph retrieval, limited reasoning capabilities, and high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Skeleton-guided RAG framework for knowledge graph question answering . SKRAG leverages a lightweight language model enhanced with the Finite State Machine constraint . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and general-domain benchmarks on a KGQA dataset in the space science and utilization domain. |
ProCut: LLM Prompt Compression via Attribution Estimation (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | ProCut compresses prompts using attribution analysis to reduce prompt size and latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses prompts through attribution analysis using a heuristic and attribution-based attribution model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces prompt size by 78% while maintaining or improving task performance by 62%. |
Can We Edit Factual Knowledge by In-Context Learning? (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context knowledge editing (IKE) is a new paradigm for NLP research that can be applied to large language models with tens or hundreds of parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use in-context knowledge editing (IKE) without gradient updating to edit factual knowledge without a gradient update. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a competitive success rate compared to gradient-based methods on GPT-J but with fewer side effects. |
Depth Aware Hierarchical Replay Continual Learning for Knowledge Based Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Continual learning models adapt well to the latest data but lose ability to remember past data due to changes in the data source. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical replay framework that allows models to keep a small memory of previous learned data that uses replay. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous continual learning methods in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. |
CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Space (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yong Zhao, Kai Xu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yue Hu, Zhiheng Zheng, Yingfeng Chen, Yatai Ji, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Jincai Huang
| Challenge: | Embodied Question Answering (EQA) tasks are primarily focused on indoor environments, leaving the complexities of urban settings unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where an embodied agent answers open-vocabulary questions in dynamic city spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 60.7% of human-level answering accuracy compared to baselines . the proposed agent outperforms existing agents in open-ended city spaces . |
From Noise to Clarity: Filtering Real and LLM-Generated Samples for Enhanced Intent Detection (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using large language models for generating synthetic samples for data augmentation can cause problems with the generalization ability of classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable Sample Filter by Topic Modeling framework that allows for filtering by topic and a 'sampler by topic' framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the quantity of real and synthetic samples while improving the performance of the classification models. |
Cognitive Overload: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Overloaded Logical Thinking (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Context Reasoner: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability for Contextualized Privacy and Safety Compliance via Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Wenbin Hu, Haoran Li, Huihao Jing, Qi Hu, Ziqian Zeng, Sirui Han, Xu Heli, Tianshu Chu, Peizhao Hu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Current mitigation strategies fail to preserve contextual reasoning capabilities in risky scenarios, leading to systemic risks for legal compliance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use reinforcement learning with a rule-based reward to incentivize contextual reasoning capabilities while enhancing compliance with safety and privacy norms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct model in safety and privacy benchmarks and achieves +8.58% accuracy improvement. |
LLaMA-E: Empowering E-commerce Authoring with Object-Interleaved Instruction Following (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | E-commerce authoring requires engaging, diverse, and targeted content . Large language models lack memorization of domain-specific features in e-commerce applications . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified e-commerce authoring models that address contextual preferences of customers, sellers, and platforms . they propose to integrate interleaved features presented by participating objects into the models to empower authoring applications with comprehensive scenario understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve state-of-the-art evaluation performance and exhibit the advantage in zero-shot practical applications. |
LLM-Driven Knowledge Injection Advances Zero-Shot and Cross-Target Stance Detection (2024.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection focus on background information and not on the accompanying input texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to prompt Large Language Models to explicitly extract the relationship between paired text and unseen target as contextual knowledge and inject it into a generation model BART to exploit the rich contexts and semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to detect stance labels in zero-shot and cross-target scenarios. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
Self-Error-Instruct: Generalizing from Errors for LLMs Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao, Qi Zhu, Boyang Xue, Minghui Xu, Baojun Wang, Lanqing Hong, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from errors synthesize training data by extrapolating from isolated bad cases, thereby failing to generalize the extensive patterns inherent within these cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes more generalized training data from isolated bad cases by extrapolating from isolated cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes more generalized training data to address these model weaknesses. |
PairCoder: Pair Programming-Inspired Two-Agent Collaboration for Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi agent frameworks for large language models are brittle on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that brings pair programming to autonomous LLM collaboration. |
| Outcome: | Using PairCoder, large language models achieve better results on code generation tasks and reduce token usage by 40% to 70% on eight representative backbones. |
SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents interact with the environment through extracted structured data, which can be notably lengthy (e.g., HTML) and occasionally inaccessible (e-book). |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance SeeClick with GUI grounding pre-training and devise a method to automate curation of GUI ground data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ScreenSpot, the first realistic GUI grounding benchmark that encompasses mobile, desktop, and web environments. |
Locomo-Plus: Beyond-Factual Cognitive Memory Evaluation Framework for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and evaluation protocols focus on surface-level factual recall. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for assessing cognitive memory under cue–trigger semantic disconnect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals failures not captured by existing benchmarks. |
HILL: Hierarchy-aware Information Lossless Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing self-supervised methods in natural language processing rely on augmentation rules to generate contrastive samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware information lossless contrastive learning scheme that uses syntactic information reserved in the input sample and fused during the learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning scheme is superior to existing methods in hierarchical text classification . the proposed learning system is based on a structure encoder and a text encoder . |
CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tianqi Xu, Linyao Chen, Dai-Jie Wu, Yanjun Chen, Zecheng Zhang, Xiang Yao, Zhiqiang Xie, Yongchao Chen, Shilong Liu, Bochen Qian, Anjie Yang, Zhaoxuan Jin, Jianbo Deng, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Guohao Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexity of constructing tasks and evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-environment agent benchmark framework that integrates graph-based evaluation and task generation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. |
Enhancing Tool Retrieval with Iterative Feedback from Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods have shown that large language models can handle a certain amount of tools through in-context learning or fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance tool retrieval with iterative feedback from the large language model by prompting the tool usage model to provide feedback for the tool retriever model in multi-round. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves advanced performance in both in-domain evaluation and out-of-domain assessment. |
DEEPER Insight into Your User: Directed Persona Refinement for Dynamic Persona Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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%. |
Adversarial Training for Weakly Supervised Event Detection (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Detecting and identifying events is an important subtask of event extraction. |
| Approach: | They build a large event-related candidate set with good coverage and apply an adversarial training mechanism to iteratively identify informative instances from the candidate set and filter out those noisy ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two real-world datasets. |
KACC: A Multi-task Benchmark for Knowledge Abstraction, Concretization and Completion (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on partial aspects of knowledge abstraction, concretization, and completion (KACC). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified knowledge graph benchmark to improve existing benchmarks . they collect new datasets that contain larger concept graphs and cross-view links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves existing benchmarks in terms of dataset scale, task coverage, and difficulty. |
Bayesian Optimization for Controlled Image Editing via LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Chengkun Cai, Haoliang Liu, Xu Zhao, Zhongyu Jiang, Tianfang Zhang, Zongkai Wu, John Lee, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | achieving precise control over generated content and maintaining semantic consistency remain significant limitations, particularly concerning grounding techniques and the necessity for model fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an off-the-shelf approach that integrates Large Language Models with Bayesian Optimization to facilitate precise and user-friendly image editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in editing accuracy and semantic preservation, as validated using different LLMs including Claude3 and GPT-4. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Just Like a Human Would, Direct Access to Sarcasm Augmented with Potential Result and Reaction (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | sarcasm is a form of irony conveying mockery and contempt . social media has become increasingly popular for identifying sarcasm . |
| Approach: | They develop a method to detect sarcasm from social media using augmented potentials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on benchmark datasets. |
Visual Evidence Prompting Mitigates Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | LVLMs have shown impressive progress by integrating visual perception with linguistic understanding to produce contextually grounded outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual evidence prompting method to mitigate hallucinations in large vision-language models by using small visual models to complement them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations by reducing false activation and enhancing correct ones. |
How is BERT surprised? Layerwise detection of linguistic anomalies (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a number of studies have shown that transformer-based language models detect when a word is anomalous in context, but likelihood scores do not tell the cause of the anomaly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Gaussian models for density estimation at intermediate layers of three language models to evaluate grammaticality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method on BLiMP shows that language models employ different mechanisms to detect different types of linguistic anomalies. |
Can Large Language Models Be Good Language Teachers? (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their potential as effective language teachers remains inadequately assessed. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate Chinese language teachers' pedagogical competence against international standards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates 13 latest multilingual and Chinese LLMs against international standards for Chinese language teachers. |
From Pseudo-Balancing to True Specialization: Memory-Aware Routing for Mixture-of-Experts (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize expert-centered load balancing fail to account for pseudo-balance phenomenon . severe knowledge overlap among experts leads to redundant representations and inefficient parameter utilization . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prioritizes expert utilization over semantic alignment . they use memory-aware routing to ensure expert load balancing is consistent . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that MAR improves expert specialization by 35% and accuracy by 2%-25% . MAR matches baseline performance with only half the experts . |
Bridge to Target Domain by Prototypical Contrastive Learning and Label Confusion: Re-explore Zero-Shot Learning for Slot Filling (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot cross-domain slot filling do not achieve effective knowledge transfer to the target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach based on prototypical contrastive learning and a dynamic label confusion strategy for zero-shot slot filling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on unseen slots while setting new state-of-the-arts on slot filling task. |
Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Runxin Xu, Jun Cao, Mingxuan Wang, Jiaze Chen, Hao Zhou, Ying Zeng, Yuping Wang, Li Chen, Xiang Yin, Xijin Zhang, Songcheng Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Xiaomingbot is a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four inte- gal capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates Chinese news, then reads it in multiple languages and generates an animated avatar reading it. |
M2PA: A Multi-Memory Planning Agent for Open Worlds Inspired by Cognitive Theory (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
YanfangZhou YanfangZhou, Xiaodong Li, Yuntao Liu, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Zhenyu Li, Jinlong Tian, Xinhai Xu
| Challenge: | Open-world planning poses a challenge due to complex environments and task diversity . recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) lack the ability to connect to agents' experiences . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-world multi-memory planning agent that combines large language models with human-like multi-mesh systems to leverage their strengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms state-of-the-art agents on 50 Minecraft tasks in zero-shot learning. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
SCVQ: Sparse-Compensated Vector Quantization for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing vector quantization methods incur inference overhead due to massive codebook storage and intensive index lookups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for vector quantization that incorporates a salience-aware weighted K-means clustering scheme with symmetry constraints to reduce codebook size and indexing costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a perplexity of 5.78 on WikiText-2 for LLaMA-2-7B at 2-bit quantization while delivering a 1.4 speedup over existing baselines. |
ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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%. |
Amalgamating Knowledge from Two Teachers for Task-oriented Dialogue System with Adversarial Training (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to task-oriented dialogue systems require a large number of handcrafted features and labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a "Two-Teacher One-Student" learning framework for task-oriented dialogue . the framework amalgamates knowledge from two teacher networks and provides guidance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on two benchmark datasets . it can retrieve accurate KB entities and generate human-like responses simultaneously . |
MuSe: Multi-Stage Graph Reasoning via Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and graph transformers are inadequate for tasks with limited generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage graph reasoning framework based on vision-language models that incrementally samples and visualizes task-relevant subgraphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks in Graph-related tasks. |
OpenPI2.0: An Improved Dataset for Entity Tracking in Texts (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work shows that explicit modeling entity states benefits LMs in procedural tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset where entities and attributes are fully canonicalized and additional entity salience annotations are added. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models on question answering and classical planning tasks. |
Temporal Precision Matters: Brain-Tuning Speech Language Models with Millisecond-Resolution Neural Signals (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language models have emerged as powerful tools for predicting human brain activity during language comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that leverages electrocorticography’s millisecond precision to train speech language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves brain alignment over pretrained and distillation models and produces higher gains in higher-order language regions. |
E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Vision-Language Models Can Self-Improve Reasoning via Reflection (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) has been shown to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which iteratively enhances the model’s Vision-language Reasoning by Reflecting on CoT Rationales. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multimodal reasoning on vision-language tasks by 23% to 60% over baselines. |
Towards Order Fairness: Mitigating LLMs Order Sensitivity through Dual Group Advantage Optimization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies attempt to obtain optimal or suboptimal arrangements based on statistical results or using dataset-based search, but these methods increase inference overhead while leaving the model’s inherent order bias unresolved. |
| Approach: | They propose Dual Group Advantage Optimization (DGAO) which aims to improve model accuracy and order stability simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model accuracy and order stability while penalizing order-sensitive or incorrect responses. |
MemeQA: Holistic Evaluation for Meme Understanding (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Khoi P. N. Nguyen, Terrence Li, Derek Lou Zhou, Gabriel Xiong, Pranav Balu, Nandhan Alahari, Alan Huang, Tanush Chauhan, Harshavardhan Bala, Emre Guzelordu, Affan Kashfi, Aaron Xu, Suyesh Shrestha, Megan Vu, Jerry Wang, Vincent Ng
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for meme understanding only concern narrow aspects of meme semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple-choice questions to evaluate meme comprehension . they use a dataset of over 9,000 multiple-question questions to assess meme comprehension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on meme comprehension . the model makes many errors on memes where proper understanding requires going beyond sentiment . |
Guiding Generation for Abstractive Text Summarization Based on Key Information Guide Network (N18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive text summarization models are hard to be controlled in the process of generation, which leads to a lack of key information. |
| Approach: | They propose a guiding generation model that combines extractive and abstractive methods to generate text summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset. |
Unsupervised Pivot Translation for Distant Languages (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) is a popular method for transferring information between languages. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised pivot translation method which translates a language to a distant language through multiple hops. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation on 20 languages and 294 distant languages on 20 different languages and language pairs. |
Employing Text Matching Network to Recognise Nuclearity in Chinese Discourse (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that nuclearity recognition is a challenging task in Chinese discourse parsing due to the need for more deep semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a text matching network that encodes discourse units and paragraphs by combining Bi-LSTM and CNN to capture global dependency information and local n-gram information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the Chinese Discourse TreeBank . the proposed model is based on a novel text matching network . |
A Two-Stage Framework with Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Domain Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
SQL-ASTRA: Alleviating Sparse Feedback in Agentic SQL via Column-Set Matching and Trajectory Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Agentic SQL is a framework for multiturn agent learning, but it is limited to single-turn paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a universal two-tiered reward mechanism for credit assignment . they propose 'Aggregated Trajectory Reward' to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
From Schema to State: Zero-Shot Scheme-Only Dialogue State Tracking via Diverse Synthetic Dialogue and Step-by-Step Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research classifies zero-shot, scheme-only DST into two main types: the cross-domain scenario and the zero-schemaonly setting. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot, scheme-only approach that generates synthetic dialogues that balance diversity with schema alignment and distills knowledge from a large language model into a smaller model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance under zero-shot, scheme-only situation and generalizes effectively to few-shot scenarios. |
Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for narrative understanding fail to represent complexity and uncertainty of relationships in real-life social scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for extracting and analysing intricate character relation graphs from detective narratives using large-scale large-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset extracts and analyses character relation graphs from detective narratives using advanced Large Language Models like GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama2 . |
The Role of Deductive and Inductive Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Haoliang Liu, Zhongyu Jiang, Tianfang Zhang, Zongkai Wu, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet their reliability in problem-solving remains debatable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates both deductive and inductive reasoning approaches to enhance LLM reasoning by progressively adapting its reasoning pathways based on problem complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 70.3% accuracy on AIW, compared to 62.2% for Tree of Thought, while maintaining lower computational costs. |
Table-as-Search: Agentic Information Seeking is Table Completion (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tian Lan, Felix Henry, Bin Zhu, Qianghuai Jia, Junyang Ren, Qihang PU, Haijun Li, Longyue Wang, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | Current Information Seeking (InfoSeeking) agents struggle to maintain focus and coherence during long-horizon exploration, as tracking search states within one plain-text context is inherently fragile. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured planning framework that reformulates the InfoSeeking task as a Table Completion task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks across three kinds of benchmarks, including multi-agent framework and commercial systems. |
DeepSeekMoE: Towards Ultimate Expert Specialization in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Damai Dai, Chengqi Deng, Chenggang Zhao, R.x. Xu, Huazuo Gao, Deli Chen, Jiashi Li, Wangding Zeng, Xingkai Yu, Y. Wu, Zhenda Xie, Y.k. Li, Panpan Huang, Fuli Luo, Chong Ruan, Zhifang Sui, Wenfeng Liang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures face challenges in ensuring expert specialization . despite the promising performance, scaling language models to an extremely large scale is associated with exceedingly high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture that allows for ultimate expert specialization by segmenting experts into mN ones and activating mK from them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves comparable performance with GShard with 2B parameters and computation. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| Challenge: | Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. |
Parameter Efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning by Learning to Transfer Token-wise Prompts (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Jianhan Xu, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Tianlong Li, Longtao Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has been proven to be successful on various tasks by incorporating a small number of trainable parameters while freezing large pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-wise prompt tuning method that uses a bank of finer-grained soft prompt tokens to generate an instance-dependent prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs far better than full parameter fine-tuned models and achieves state-of-the-art by tuning only 0.035% parameters on 14 datasets. |
RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on producing concise observations while neglecting the precise attributes that determine the severity of diseases. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generates precise radiology reports via dynamic disease progression reasoning by combining historical and spatiotemporal information. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two publicly available datasets show the proposed model can generate precise and accurate radiology reports with dynamic disease progression reasoning. |
Relation Embedding with Dihedral Group in Knowledge Graph (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for link prediction fail to capture relation compositions, resulting in lack of interpretability for reasoning on incomplete knowledge graph (KG). |
| Approach: | They propose a new model that learns knowledge graph embeddings that can capture relation compositions by nature and reduces the solution space drastically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and is comparable to or better than deep learning models such as ConvE. |
ImageNetVC: Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Commonsense Evaluation on 1000 ImageNet Categories (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming general-purpose APIs, requiring visual knowledge to be understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the visual capability of large-scale large-language models through visual commonsense evaluation using a human-annotated dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset compares the visual commonsense knowledge of large-scale models with those of unimodal LLMs and visually augmented models. |
Memorizing is Not Enough: Deep Knowledge Injection Through Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruoxi Xu, Yunjie Ji, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Yingfei Sun, Xiangang Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection frameworks focus on knowledge memorization and retrieval, but static nature of large language models leads to outdated information as the real world evolves or when adapting to domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a four-tier knowledge injection framework that defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association. |
Automated Creativity Evaluation for Large Language Models: A Reference-Based Approach (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating creativity of machine-generated texts rely on costly manual annotations or fail to align closely with human assessments. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated method based on the Torrance Test of Creative Writing (TTCW) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the alignment between LLM evaluations and human assessments. |
FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuohan Xie, Daniil Orel, Rushil Thareja, Dhruv Sahnan, Hachem Madmoun, Fan Zhang, Debopriyo Banerjee, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Jimin Huang, Jinyan Su, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Rui Xing, Rania Elbadry, Chen Xu, Haonan Li, Fajri Koto, Ivan Koychev, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Veselin Stoyanov, Sophia Ananiadou, Preslav Nakov
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks emphasize final numerical answers while neglecting intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic benchmark for verifiable Chain-of-Thought evaluation in finance . FINCHAIN spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains and three difficulty levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to bridge symbolic reasoning and factual verification. |
Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various NLP tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to accelerate training by disregarding computations for unimportant neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. |
AdaMARP: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Interaction Framework for General Immersive Role-Playing (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack immersion and adaptability, resulting in limited character orchestration and on-the-fly character introduction. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based framework that allows actors to interact with users in an ongoing narrative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms commercial LLMs in character consistency, environment grounding, and narrative coherence. |
CAVGAN: Unifying Jailbreak and Defense of LLMs via Generative Adversarial Attacks on their Internal Representations (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have isolated LLM jailbreak attacks and defenses . a new framework combines attack and defense to protect against malicious queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines attack and defense to protect the Large Language Model (LLM) by embedding harmful problems into the safe area. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average jailbreak success rate of 88.85% across three popular LLMs while the defense success rate reaches an average of 84.17%. |
ManagerTower: Aggregating the Insights of Uni-Modal Experts for Vision-Language Representation Learning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Human-in-the-loop Schema Induction (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Tianyi Zhang, Isaac Tham, Zhaoyi Hou, Jiaxuan Ren, Leon Zhou, Hainiu Xu, Li Zhang, Lara Martin, Rotem Dror, Sha Li, Heng Ji, Martha Palmer, Susan Windisch Brown, Reece Suchocki, Chris Callison-Burch
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to event-centric natural language understanding (NLU) have been limited to linear and temporal ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop schema induction system powered by GPT-3 . they show that it transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches and reduces human curation. |
Can Public Large Language Models Help Private Cross-device Federated Learning? (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that public data can be used to improve privacy-utility trade-offs for large and small language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale public data to help differentially private FL training . they propose a distribution matching algorithm with theoretical grounding to sample public data close to private data distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is efficient and effective for training private models by taking advantage of public data. |
Beyond Decoder-only: Large Language Models Can be Good Encoders for Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance. |
Beyond Human Labels: A Multi-Linguistic Auto-Generated Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Resume Parsing (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Efficient resume parsing is critical for global hiring, yet the lack of dedicated benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on multilingual, structure-rich resumes hinders progress. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-in-the-loop pipeline to generate 2,500 synthetic resumes spanning 50 templates, 30 career fields, and 5 languages to evaluate large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform poorly on multilingual resumes and lack of standardized templates. |
Adversarial Yet Cooperative: Multi-Perspective Reasoning in Retrieved-Augmented Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Can Xu, Lingyong Yan, Jiayi Wu, Haosen Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yuchen Li, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms rely on outcome-oriented rewards, which provide insufficient signal for shaping the complex, multi-step reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large reasoning models with retrieval-augmented generation to improve reasoning fidelity and verification rigor. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |
Taming LLMs with Gradient Grouping (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new study presents scaling with gradient grouping (SGG) the adaptive learning rate scaling approach is based on per-parameter statistics, which incurs memory overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimizer wrapper that improves adaptive learning rate estimation by dynamic grouping and group-specific scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves learning rate estimation on diverse models with different model sizes and batch sizes. |
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Hang Li, Boyan Li, Jiamin Su, Xiong Gao, YiFan Zhang, Tianlong Xu, Zhendong Chu, Aoxiao Zhong, Kun Wang, Hui Xiong, Philip S. Yu, Xuming Hu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models. |
AC-EVAL: Evaluating Ancient Chinese Language Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | AC-EVAL is a benchmark designed to assess the advanced knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs within the context of ancient Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the advanced knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs in ancient Chinese. |
| Outcome: | AC-EVAL aims to assess the comprehension of ancient Chinese texts . the benchmark covers 13 tasks covering historical facts, geography, social customs, art, philosophy, classical poetry and prose. |
E2E-VLP: End-to-End Vision-Language Pre-training Enhanced by Visual Learning (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Evaluating Readability and Faithfulness of Concept-based Explanations (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating concepts from different perspectives lack a unified formalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal definition of concepts generalizing to diverse concept-based explanations’ settings and apply it to other types of explanations or tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experimental analysis was carried out to determine the evaluation measures for explanation evaluation measures. |
InfiGUIAgent: A Multimodal Generalist GUI Agent with Native Reasoning and Reflection (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuhang Liu, Pengxiang Li, Zishu Wei, Congkai Xie, Xueyu Hu, Xinchen Xu, Shengyu Zhang, Xiaotian Han, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing GUI Agents face challenges in multi-step reasoning and reliance on textual annotations, limiting their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose an MLLM-based GUI Agent with a two-stage supervised fine-tuning pipeline that enhances GUI understanding and grounding. |
| Outcome: | InfiGUIAgent achieves competitive performance on several GUI benchmarks, highlighting the impact of native reasoning skills in enhancing GUI interaction for automation tasks. |
GEAR: Graph-based Evidence Aggregating and Reasoning for Fact Verification (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract information from evidence are unable to grasp relational and logical information among the evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based evidence aggregating and reasoning framework to integrate evidence from multiple pieces of evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements on a large-scale benchmark dataset. |
To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Li, Xu Chen, Chaozhuo Li, Yanming Shen, Jianan Zhao, Yujing Wang, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier. |
Accelerating Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling via Targeted Knowledge Distillation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive Spoken Language Understanding models suffer from multi-modality problem . current methods have little prior knowledge about the reference during inference . |
| Approach: | They propose a Targeted Knowledge Distillation Framework (TKDF) for multi-intent SLU that utilizes the knowledge distillation method to improve the performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two public multi-intent datasets while speeding up by over 4.5 times. |
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Modularized Interaction Network for Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) models focus on word-level information, while segment-based models focus only on word level information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Modularized Interaction Network (MIN) model which utilizes both word-level information and segment-level dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on three NER benchmark datasets. |
Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems (MDS) aim to provide patients with medical services, such as diagnosis and prescription. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Flow enhanced Medical (DFMed) dialogue generation framework that extracts the medical entities and doctor's dialogue acts used in the dialogue history and models their transitions with an entity-centric graph flow and a sequential act flow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exceeds baselines in both automatic and manual evaluations on two datasets. |
PunchBench: Benchmarking MLLMs in Multimodal Punchline Comprehension (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on punchline comprehension suffer from language shortcuts that allow models to rely on text, lack of question diversity, and narrow focus on a specific domain of multimodal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal punchline comprehension benchmark to assess models' ability to comprehend punchlines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses in-context learning and chain-of-thought in punchline comprehension. |
GPT-D: Inducing Dementia-related Linguistic Anomalies by Deliberate Degradation of Artificial Neural Language Models (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large numbers of model parameters have shown impressive performance on the task of discriminating between language produced by cognitively healthy individuals and those with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Transformer DL model pre-trained on general English text to combine an artificially degraded version of itself with a model that generalizes well to spontaneous conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generalizes well to spontaneous conversations and generates text with characteristics associated with AD, demonstrating the induction of dementia-related linguistic anomalies. |
Read, Listen, and See: Leveraging Multimodal Information Helps Chinese Spell Checking (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct erroneous characters for usergenerated text in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese spell checker that leverages multimodal Chinese characters' information to predict the correct output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on the SIGHAN benchmarks by a large margin. |
Context-aware Embedding for Targeted Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods do not specifically pre-train reasonable embeddings for targets and aspects in TABSA. |
| Approach: | They propose to refine the embeddings of targets and aspects using a sparse coefficient vector . this allows the embeds to be refined from highly correlative words instead of context-independent vectors . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves on two benchmark datasets. |
Tree of Agents: Improving Long-Context Capabilities of Large Language Models through Multi-Perspective Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models face persistent challenges when handling long-context tasks . existing methods that reduce input have the risk of discarding key information . |
| Approach: | To address this issue, we propose a multi-agent reasoning framework called Tree of Agents . the framework segments input into chunks processed by independent agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on long-context tasks. |
Noise Stability Regularization for Improving BERT Fine-tuning (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that fine-tuning pre-trained language models is unstable when there are only a small number of training samples available. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a method to regularize noise in deep nets to improve fine-tuning on NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves fine-tuning on natural language processing tasks by incorporating noise to the input and demonstrating generalizability and stability. |
EGSS: Entropy-guided Stepwise Scaling for Reliable Software Engineering (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chenhui Mao, Yuanting Lei, Zhixiang Wei, Ming Liang, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Entropy-Guided Stepwise Scaling (EGSS) is a novel TTS framework for software engineering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-guided stepwise scaling framework that balances efficiency and effectiveness through entropic-guide encoding and robust test-suite augmentation. |
| Outcome: | EGSS boosts performance by 5–10% across all evaluated models, and reduces inference-time token usage by over 28% . compared to existing methods, EGS reduces token usage and reduce inference time by over 20% . |
Audio Jailbreak: An Open Comprehensive Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Audio-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zirui Song, Qian Jiang, Mingxuan Cui, Mingzhe Li, Lang Gao, Zeyu Zhang, Zixiang Xu, Yanbo Wang, Guangxian Ouyang, Zhenhao Chen, Xiuying Chen
| Challenge: | a recent study evaluated large audio-language models against jailbreak attacks . a new benchmark is being developed to evaluate LAM safety against jailbreaking attacks based on temporal and semantic nature of speech . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LAM jailbreak vulnerabilities in adversarial audio prompts . they use a dataset of 1,495 adversarials to evaluate their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates state-of-the-art LAMs against jailbreak attacks . it demonstrates that even small, semantically preserved perturbations can reduce safety . |
PopALM: Popularity-Aligned Language Models for Social Media Trendy Response Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work focuses on generic human responses without considering popularity factors in the social contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose Popularity-Aligned Language Models to distinguish responses liked by a larger audience through reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distinguish responses liked by a larger audience through reinforcement learning. |
MMAC: A Multilingual, Multimodal Alignment Framework for Cultural Grounding Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Weiwen Xu, Xiaoxue Gao, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Bowei Zou, Chang Liu, Yujia Hu, Xing Xie, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Chaojun Wang, Long Li, Rui Liu, Huiyao Liu, Koji Inoue, Ryuichi Sumida, Tatsuya Kawahara, Fan Xu, Lingyu Ye, Wei Tian, Dongjun Kim, Jimin Jung, Jaehyung Seo, Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Pham Minh Duc, Ojasva Saxena, Palash Nandi, Xiyan Tao, Wiwik Karlina, Tuan Luong, Keertana Arun Vasan, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | Existing models lack cultural alignment across modalities and languages . a new framework to assess cultural awareness across linguistics and languages is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates tri-modally aligned cultural benchmarks and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses cultural awareness disparities across modalities and languages . it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech . |
GAVEL: Evidence-Contract Debate with Mechanized Scrutiny for Provenance-Grounded Fact-Checking (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Evidence-grounded fact-checking requires predicting claim veracity while returning faithful evidence at fine granularity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework that enforces evidence grounding throughout inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves provenance-aware metrics over existing frameworks. |
Boosting Text-to-SQL through Multi-grained Error Identification (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Sing it, Narrate it: Quality Musical Lyrics Translation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing song translation approaches prioritize singability constraints at the expense of translation quality, which is crucial for musicals. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically translate musical lyrics from English to Chinese to ensure high translation quality while adhering to singability requirements such as length and rhyme. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both singability and translation quality over baseline methods and validates its effectiveness. |
Variational Autoencoder with Disentanglement Priors for Low-Resource Task-Specific Natural Language Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for task-specific natural language generation do not contain any labeled examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational autoencoder with disentanglement priors for task-specific natural language generation with none or a handful of task-related labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in terms of data augmentation and text style transfer in the few-shot setting. |
Neural Gibbs Sampling for Joint Event Argument Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event argument extraction cannot adequately model the correlation between event arguments and their roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian model to jointly extract event arguments using Gibbs sampling . they train two neural networks to model prior distribution and conditional distribution over event arguments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve comparable results to existing methods on two widely-used datasets. |
Instance-Guided Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Text Matching (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Few-shot text matching is a more practical technique to determine whether two texts are semantically identical. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable prompt learning method for few-shot text matching . they use the semantics of instances to regulate the effects of the gate on the prompt tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on MRPC and QQP. |
NOVA: An Iterative Planning Framework for Enhancing Scientific Innovation with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiang Hu, Hongyu Fu, Jinge Wang, Yifeng Wang, Zhikun Li, Renjun Xu, Yu Lu, Yaochu Jin, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate research ideas rely on retrieval or prompt engineering to generate ideas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses iterative planning and search to boost creative potential of LLMs by integrating external knowledge with broader and deeper insights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in generating 2.5 times more top-rated ideas based on 170 seed papers in a Swiss Tournament evaluation. |
LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yushi Bai, Shangqing Tu, Jiajie Zhang, Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Jiazheng Xu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on longcontext large language models fail to reflect their deep understanding capabilities across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of long-context large language models to handle long-text problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 50.1% accuracy when directly answering the questions . human experts achieve only 53.7% accuracy under a 15-minute time constraint . |
Leveraging Only the Category Name for Aspect Detection through Prompt-based Constrained Clustering (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Aspect category detection (ACD) aims to automatically identify user-concerned aspects from online reviews. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that relies on the category name of each aspect and a pretrained language model to generate constraints for clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better than existing weakly supervised methods on nine benchmark datasets. |
UP5: Unbiased Foundation Model for Fairness-aware Recommendation (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining a foothold in Recommender Systems (RS) but there is growing concern that LLMs perpetuate stereotypes and may result in unfair recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactually-fair-prompt method for LLM-based recommendation that is based on unbiased foundation mOdels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better recommendation performance with a high level of fairness on two real-world datasets. |
McBE: A Multi-task Chinese Bias Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets on bias evaluation for large language models focus on English and North American culture and are limited to one task. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate Chinese language models' biases from multiple perspectives using a multi-task Chinese Bias Evaluation Benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers 12, 82 subcategories and 5 evaluation tasks covering a wide range of categories and content diversity. |
Mobile-Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-based Mobile Agents (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Deng, Weikai Xu, Hongda Sun, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Liujianfeng Liujianfeng, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Rui Yan, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for LLM-based mobile agents are insufficient to evaluate their capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based mobile agents' planning capabilities . they expand UI operations by incorporating 103 APIs to accelerate task completion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 103 collected APIs and real user queries . the data is categorized into three distinct groups: SAST, SAMT, and MAMT . |
TrendSim: Simulating Trending Topics in Social Media Under Poisoning Attacks with LLM-based Multi-agent System (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Zeyu Zhang, Jianxun Lian, Chen Ma, Yaning Qu, Ye Luo, Lei Wang, Rui Li, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Le Wu, Xing Xie, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Trending topics bring in a new channel for poisoning attacks, resulting in negative impacts on society. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based multi-agent system to simulate trending topics in social media . they propose a time-aware interaction mechanism, centralized message dissemination, and an interactive system . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system simulates trending topics under poisoning attacks on social media platforms. |
Reinforcement Learning with Token-level Feedback for Controllable Text Generation (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for controllable text generation are guided by coarse-grained feedback, which may lead to suboptimal performance owing to semantic twists or progressions within sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning algorithm which formulates TOken-LEvel rewards for controllable text generation and employs a "first-quantize-then-noise" paradigm to enhance the robustness of the RL algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve superior performance on single-attribute and multi-attract control tasks. |
DCP: Dual-Cue Pruning for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods for large vision language models use visual tokens to prune . existing methods fail to balance efficiency and semantic alignment due to large number of visual token. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal pruning framework that considers textual semantics and visual self-attention to combine them to achieve efficient inference acceleration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework can retain only 25% of the visual tokens, with a minimal performance degradation of only 0.063% on LLaVA-1.5-13B. |
Layer-wise Regularized Dropout for Neural Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to regularize dropout are consistency training and dropout is a problem in many pre-trained neural language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise regularized dropout technique which regularizes dropout at the output layer using consistency training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be regarded as a "self-distillation" framework, in which each sub-model generated by dropout is the other's "teacher" model and "student" model. |
FactVerse: A Benchmark for Factual Consistency in Interleaved Image–Text Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yubo Shan, Kun Zhang, Qiming Xu, Liping Cao, Yingying Cao, Jian Zhang, Yu Wang, Jingyuan Li, Yuanzhuo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack effective mechanisms to evaluate factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dedicated to evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing evaluation methods in evaluating factual consistency in interleaved image-text generation. |
MTG: A Benchmark Suite for Multilingual Text Generation (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using MTG, we train and evaluate multilingual text generation models using human-annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual multiway text generation dataset with 400k human-annotated data that includes four generation tasks across five languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes four generation tasks across five languages (English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese) it provides comprehensive evaluations with diverse generation scenarios. |
Read, Attend and Comment: A Deep Architecture for Automatic News Comment Generation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for news comment generation have not been well studied. |
| Approach: | They propose a “read-attend-comment” procedure for automatic news comment generation and formalize it with a reading network and a generation network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure outperforms existing methods in terms of automatic evaluation and human judgment on two public datasets. |
RAAMove: A Corpus for Analyzing Moves in Research Article Abstracts (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Hongzheng Li, Ruojin Wang, Ge Shi, Xing Lv, Lei Lei, Chong Feng, Fang Liu, Jinkun Lin, Yangguang Mei, Linnan Xu
| Challenge: | RAAMove is a comprehensive multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in Research Article (RA) abstracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in RA abstracts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a human-annotated dataset and a BERT-based model to verify its effectiveness. |
NPRF: A Neural Pseudo Relevance Feedback Framework for Ad-hoc Information Retrieval (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing neural IR models do not have a mechanism for treating expansion terms differently from the original query terms, making it difficult to combine them with existing PRF approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models by embedding different neural models as building blocks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two standard test collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in improving the performance of two state-of-the-art neural IR models. |
K-PLUG: Knowledge-injected Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding and Generation in E-Commerce (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are not explicitly aware of domain-specific knowledge, which is essential for downstream tasks in many domains, such as tasks in e-commerce scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-injected pre-trained language model that can be transferred to both natural language understanding and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms baselines across the board in e-commerce scenarios. |
Generating Temporally-ordered Event Sequences via Event Optimal Transport (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal event ordering and event infilling ignore the global semantics of events, and the model adopts a word-level objective to model events in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event ordering and event infilling task using a model that uses maximum likelihood estimation to model events in texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on all evaluation datasets. |
LINKED: Eliciting, Filtering and Integrating Knowledge in Large Language Model for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiachun Li, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, such as commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to elicit, filter and integrate knowledge in large language models (LINKED) they propose 'reward model' to filter out noisy knowledge and 'take marginal consistent reasoning module' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SOTA baselines on two commonsense reasoning tasks. |
MMDEND: Dendrite-Inspired Multi-Branch Multi-Compartment Parallel Spiking Neuron for Sequence Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kexin Wang, Yuhong Chou, Di Shang, Shijie Mei, Jiahong Zhang, Yanbin Huang, Man Yao, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
| Challenge: | Vanilla spiking neurons are simplified from complex biological neurons with dendrites, soma, and synapses into single somatic compartments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch, multi-compartment parallel spiking dendritic neuron with a proportion-adjustable multi-branched structure that enables long-term temporal dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better long-sequence modeling capability with fewer parameters and lower energy consumption. |
Editing the Moving World: Model Editing for Video LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qian Zhang, Xinye Li, Xiaokai Wu, Junhao Xu, Zhanyue Qin, Qingbin Liu, Junxian Cai, Xi Chen, Bolin Zhang, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Xiaoyan Yu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing models for knowledge editing focus on knowledge-level or static visual domains, overlooking dynamic semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for modeling large language models using six representative models . they analyze the strengths and limitations of existing models and identify new directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark extends existing models from static modalities to dynamic video scenarios. |
Topic-Guided Self-Introduction Generation for Social Media Users (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on social media use tags to profile users, but we have found that sentence-level self-introductions are more natural and engaging. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel topic-guided encoder-decoder framework that uses a user's tweeting history to generate a short sentence outlining their personal interests. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing encoder-decoder models on a large-scale Twitter dataset and shows that it is more natural and engaging than previous approaches. |
RBPtool: A Deep Language Model Framework for Multi-Resolution RBP-RNA Binding Prediction and RNA Molecule Design (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiyue Jiang, Yitao Xu, Zikang Wang, Yihan Ye, Yanruisheng Shao, Yuheng Shan, Jiuming Wang, Xiaodan Fan, Jiao Yuan, Yu Li
| Challenge: | RNA-binding proteins play key roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation . existing methods focus on shallow sequence features or coarse structural representations . large language models allow for precise modeling and biologically informed de novo RNA design . |
| Approach: | They extend RPI15223 into a multi-resolution, structure-level RBP-RNA dataset and introduce RBPtool, a framework that fuses sequence and structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks and the RPI15223 dataset while supporting fine-grained level predictions. |
RADO: Reasoning Audit-Driven Optimization for Rigorous Reasoning in High-Stakes Domains (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current reinforcement learning paradigms rely on outcome-based rewards, overlooking latent logical fallacies in intermediate steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized audit model augmented with external tools to identify local logical ruptures and calibrate reward signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and logical rigor in high-stakes domains. |
SCOPE: Compress Mathematical Reasoning Steps for Efficient Automated Process Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing process annotation approaches are computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a compression-based approach that transforms reasoning steps into code and normalizes them through Abstract Syntax Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on Best-of-N strategy and ProcessBench. |
TCPO: Thought-Centric Preference Optimization for Effective Embodied Decision-making (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Kechen Jiao, Zhirui Fang, Jiahao Liu, Bei Li, Qifan Wang, Xinyu Liu, Junhao Ruan, Zhongjian Qiao, Yifan Zhu, Yaxin Xu, Jingang Wang, Xiu Li
| Challenge: | Existing post-SFT methods for embodied AI are constrained by sparse rewards and action-only optimization, resulting in low sample efficiency, poor consistency, and model degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Thought-Centric Preference Optimization (TCPO) into embodied decision-making by transforming sparse reward signals into richer step sample pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an average success rate of 26.67% in the ALFWorld environment, and a 6% improvement over RL4VLM. |
AdapTime: Enabling Adaptive Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yimin Deng, Yejing Wang, Zhenxi Lin, Zichuan Fu, Guoshuai Zhao, Derong Xu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Xian Wu, Li Zhu, Xueming Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal reasoning are limited and apply a fixed pipeline to all questions. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive temporal reasoning method that dynamically executes reasoning steps based on context and task requirements. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two temporal QA benchmarks show the proposed method works. |
SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenxi Chen, Ziyang Ma, Ruiqi Yan, Yuzhe Liang, Xiquan Li, Ruiyang Xu, Zhikang Niu, Yanqiao Zhu, Yifan Yang, Zhanxun Liu, Kai Yu, Yuxuan Hu, Jinyu Li, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | a new spoken dialogue system with single-stage training is demonstrating its low latency and high quality . SLAM-Omni achieves zero-shot timbre control by modeling spoken language with semantic tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose a timbre-controllable, end-to-end voice interaction system with single-stage training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms previous models on 4 GPUs with limited data. |
Structure-aware Generation Model for Cross-Domain Aspect-based Sentiment Classification (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing generation models for cross-domain aspect-based sentiment classification ignore syntactic structures . syntaktic structures are pre-trained on natural language and can be catastrophic forgetting of distributional knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware generation model that explicitly encodes syntactic structure into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn domain-irrelevant features based on syntactic pivot features. |
SOLAR: Serendipity Optimized Language Model Aligned for Recommendation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zichen Yuan, Lifan Sun, Yucen Zhuang, Yue Wang, Xinyuan Song, Tianqi Xu, Siyuan Li, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Sirui Hong, Jiaqi Chen, Joemon M. Jose, Yongxin Ni
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have shown strong potential in recommendation tasks . however, their application to serendipity-oriented recommendations remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptive instruction tuning method that aligns Large Language Models with recommendation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the domain gap between LLMs and recommendation tasks. |
Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing via Critic-Guided Multi-Agent Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xudong Li, Yuhang Tian, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Shuhao Zhang, Jun Yang, Yongyu Huo, Changzhi Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Chenhao Li, Huipeng Ma, Luan Zhang, Yan Xu, Qian Liu
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods rely on unidirectional, feed-forward pipelines . a minor retrieval error or logical mismatch at an early hop can become a silent failure . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for closed-loop post-edit reasoning that uses a Critic agent to verify coherence and step-wise correctness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MQuAKE-2002 and MQuADE-hard show that CARE effectively mitigates error propagation . a minor retrieval error or logical mismatch at an early hop can become a silent failure . |
GenTKG: Generative Forecasting on Temporal Knowledge Graph with Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal relational forecasting are limited and require limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses temporal logical rule-based retrieval and parameter-efficient instruction tuning to solve temporal knowledge forecasting challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms conventional methods in the temporal knowledge graph domain with low computation resources. |
DyLex: Incorporating Dynamic Lexicons into BERT for Sequence Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, especially in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose several strategies for deploying RAG that balance performance and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy. |
RelEdit: Evaluating Conceptual Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Relational Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods struggle to reason about related conceptual knowledge effectively, despite a lack of model-level relational reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess concept-level and instance-level relational reasoning abilities of edited models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains the best scores on the memory-based in-context editing baseline, MICE, suggesting a promising direction for model editing. |
Unifying Language Agent Algorithms with Graph-based Orchestration Engine for Reproducible Agent Research (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Qianqian Zhang, Jiajia Liao, Heting Ying, Yibo Ma, Haozhan Shen, Jingcheng Li, Peng Liu, Lu Zhang, Chunxin Fang, Kyusong Lee, Ruochen Xu, Tiancheng Zhao
| Challenge: | Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and executing complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible framework that addresses engineering overhead and insufficient evaluation frameworks for fair comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework simplifies language agent development and establishes a foundation for reproducible agent research. |
StreamMeCo: Long-Term Agent Memory Compression for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Junxi Wang, Te Sun, Jiayi Zhu, Junxian Li, Haowen Xu, Zichen Wen, Xuming Hu, Zhiyu li, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | StreamMeCo is an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework that evicts redundant memory nodes and introduces a time-decay memory retrieval mechanism to mitigate performance degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.87 speedup in memory retrieval while delivering an average accuracy improvement of 1.0% on three challenging benchmark datasets. |
IntactKV: Improving Large Language Model Quantization by Keeping Pivot Tokens Intact (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing quantization methods are compromising performance of large language models (LLMs) despite their high computational intensity, LLMs are still demanding intensive computation. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate the KV cache of pivot tokens losslessly from the full-precision model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates the KV cache of pivot tokens losslessly from the full-precision model with no extra inference overhead. |
Neural reality of argument structure constructions (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | lexicalist linguistic theories assume argument structure is predictable from meaning of verbs . construction grammarians propose argument structure constructions distinct from verbs. |
| Approach: | They adapt psycholinguistic studies to probe for the existence of argument structure constructions in Transformer-based language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could be used to probe argument structure constructions in LMs . the study shows that LM learners prefer grouping by construction over verb grouping . |
UNIMO-G: Unified Image Generation through Multimodal Conditional Diffusion (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
SnapNTell: Enhancing Entity-Centric Visual Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Multimodal LLM (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jielin Qiu, Andrea Madotto, Zhaojiang Lin, Paul Crook, Yifan Xu, Babak Damavandi, Xin Dong, Christos Faloutsos, Lei Li, Seungwhan Moon
| Challenge: | Vision-extended LLMs have made significant strides in VQA, but they still encounter significant difficulties in handling queries involving long-tail entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to test models' ability to identify entities and provide detailed, entity-specific knowledge by combining 10 images and 10 knowledge-intensive QA pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on the SnapNTell dataset, achieving a 66.5% improvement in the BELURT score. |
Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, the generalization issues hinder the applicability of neural table-to-text models due to the limited source tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-structureaware text generation model with pretrained language model and propose TASD to bridge the gap between the structured table and text input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between the structured table and text input and generates accurate and fluent descriptive texts on two public datasets. |
EvoAgent: Towards Automatic Multi-Agent Generation via Evolutionary Algorithms (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on extending specialized agents to multi-agent systems is dependent on human-designed frameworks, limiting the functional scope and scalability of agent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic method to automatically extend specialized agents to multi-agent systems via evolutionary algorithm . they consider existing agent frameworks as the initial individual and apply evolutionary operators to generate multiple agents with diverse settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can extend specialized agents to multi-agent systems . it can generate multiple agents with diverse settings, and improves performance across tasks . |
Multi-Stage LLM Fine-Tuning with a Continual Learning Setting (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Changhao Guan, Chao Huang, Hongliang Li, You Li, Ning Cheng, Zihe Liu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Jian Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in knowledge-intensive applications, but they may face a multi-stage continuous learning scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage continuous learning paradigm that includes a preference-based learning bias to identify potential knowledge conflicts and a self-distillation-based data augmentation strategy to expand and enrich the training corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm achieves a significant improvement in accuracy after 7 stages of fine-tuning compared to previous methods while preserving general knowledge. |
MCDTB: A Macro-level Chinese Discourse TreeBank (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Discourse analysis is becoming increasingly important in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate macro discourse information and additional discourse information to make annotation more objective and accurate. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the annotations are more objective and accurate than the previous ones. |
When Is Thinking Enough? Early Exit via Sufficiency Assessment for Efficient Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to early exit reasoning often rely on handcrafted or empirical indicators that are unreliable and impractical. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows LRMs to assess the sufficiency of its chain-of-thought and determine the optimal point for early exit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces reasoning length by 28.9%–34.9% with minimal performance loss, effectively mitigating overthinking. |
PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Guanting Dong, Daichi Guo, Liwen Wang, Xuefeng Li, Zechen Wang, Chen Zeng, Keqing He, Jinzheng Zhao, Hao Lei, Xinyue Cui, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing slot filling models memorize inherent patterns of entities and contexts from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for slot filling models . they use two MLM-based training strategies to learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and gains strong generalization while preventing model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts. |
CoTEvol: Self-Evolving Chain-of-Thoughts for Data Synthesis in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve LLMs' reasoning abilities suffer from diminishing returns or high computing overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic evolutionary framework that casts CoT generation as a population-based search over reasoning trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves correct-CoT synthesis success by over 30% and enhances structural diversity with markedly improved efficiency. |
F²Bench: An Open-ended Fairness Evaluation Benchmark for LLMs with Factuality Considerations (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing fairness evaluation benchmarks for large language models rely on closed-ended evaluation formats that overlook factuality considerations rooted in historical, social, physiological, and cultural contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-ended fairness evaluation benchmark for large language models . they incorporate factuality considerations and multi-turn reasoning into the benchmark . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates factual grounding and text generation to better reflect the complexities of real-world model usage. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
Beyond Static Evaluation: A Dynamic Approach to Assessing AI Assistants’ API Invocation Capabilities (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for human-machine interactions are static and can be misleading. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a LLM-based user agent to assess an assistant's API call capability without human involvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mirrors real human conversation patterns in human-machine interactions, and shows that it aligns more closely with human assessment. |
CompileAgent: Automated Real-World Repo-Level Compilation with Tool-Integrated LLM-based Agent System (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Li Hu, Guoqiang Chen, Xiuwei Shang, Shaoyin Cheng, Benlong Wu, LiGangyang LiGangyang, Xu Zhu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu
| Challenge: | CompileAgent is the first LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves compilation success rate, ranging from 10% to 71%. |
Logits-Based Finetuning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for developing compact and efficient large language models lack token-level dependencies and linguistic diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a logits-based fine-tuning framework that integrates supervised learning and knowledge distillation to build enriched training targets using teacher logits and ground truth labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on a large-scale logits dataset and a series of science-focused models. |
Bit-by-Bit: Progressive QAT Strategy with Outlier Channel Splitting for Stable Low-Bit LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Binxing Xu, Hao Gu, Lujun Li, Hao Wang, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Qiyuan Zhu, Xintong Yang, Chao Li, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training LLMs at ultra-low precisions suffer from convergence instability and substantial training costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive QAT framework with outlier channel splitting to address these issues . they use nested structure of integer quantization grids to enable a "train once, deploy any precision" paradigm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on both Llama2/3 and W2A16, with an 11 speedup over BF16. |
Attention Consistency for LLMs Explanation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing interpretability methods face limitations such as low resolution and high computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-layer attention consistency score to estimate the importance of input tokens in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed heuristic achieves a favorable trade-off between interpretability quality and computational efficiency . |
Rethinking the Role of Prompting Strategies in LLM Test-Time Scaling: A Perspective of Probability Theory (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that scaling test-time compute can also effectively improve reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic method to efficiently predict scaling performance and identify the best prompting strategy under large sampling times. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the scaling performance of majority voting on large language models. |
AnaMeta: A Table Understanding Dataset of Field Metadata Knowledge Shared by Multi-dimensional Data Analysis Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
How Do We Answer Complex Questions: Discourse Structure of Long-form Answers (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work explored long-form answers, where answers are free-form texts consisting of multiple sentences. |
| Approach: | They develop an ontology of six sentence-level functional roles for long-form answers . they annotate 3.9k sentences in 640 answer paragraphs and train a strong classifier . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-generated answers agree less with model-driven answers than human-written answers. |
From Implicit Exploration to Structured Reasoning: Guideline and Refinement for LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models rely on implicit exploration, which leads to unstable reasoning paths and lack of error correction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts from implicit exploration to structured reasoning through guideline and refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on the Big-Bench Hard benchmark. |
Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
EDDA: An Encoder-Decoder Data Augmentation Framework for Zero-Shot Stance Detection (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing text or data are limited by lack of logical connections between generated texts and training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder data augmentation framework that combines large language models and chain-of-thought prompting to summarize texts into target-specific if-then rationales, establishing logical relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves over state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets while enabling interpretable rationale-based learning. |
Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning abilities when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize Chain-of-X methods by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks, and then categorise them by taxanomies and discuss potential future directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorised by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks. |
Towards Understanding Omission in Dialogue Summarization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialogue summarization are far from satisfactory . omission is a major factor in affecting the quality of summarizing, but few studies have explored the problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that provides high-quality omission labels for dialogue summarization . they propose to use this dataset to detect omitted dialogue utterances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves summarization quality by providing ground-truth omission labels . the proposed dataset and codes are publicly available . |
LLMsPark: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Strategic Gaming Contexts (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly important for their intelligence evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a game theory-based evaluation platform that measures LLMs’ decision-making strategies and social behaviors in classic game-theoretic settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system cross-evaluates 15 leading LLMs using leaderboard rankings and scoring mechanisms. |
From Misleading Queries to Accurate Answers: A Three-Stage Fine-Tuning Method for LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on correcting the output but overlook the ability of LLMs to detect and correct misleading content in the input itself. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage fine-tuning method that improves LLMs' ability to detect and correct misleading information in input queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and factuality of LLM responses while also reducing hallucinations. |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency. |
Forgetting before Learning: Utilizing Parametric Arithmetic for Knowledge Updating in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods of model editing and knowledge updating add additional network parameters, knowledge bases, knowledge base, and model parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for fine-tuning called F-Learning that employs parametric arithmetic to facilitate the forgetting of old knowledge and learning of new knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two datasets and is comparable to full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-uning. |
Prototype Tuning: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (FSDLRE) aims to develop models capable of generalizing to new categories with minimal support examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-training approach to train Large Language Models to improve their ICL capabilities . they construct simulated episodes using relation types that do not overlap with test corpus . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline models on few-shot tasks. |
FastCorrect 2: Fast Error Correction on Multiple Candidates for Automatic Speech Recognition (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yichong Leng, Xu Tan, Rui Wang, Linchen Zhu, Jin Xu, Wenjie Liu, Linquan Liu, Xiang-Yang Li, Tao Qin, Edward Lin, Tie-Yan Liu
| Challenge: | Error correction is widely used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) to post-process the generated sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a fast correction model that takes multiple ASR candidates as input for better correction accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reduce the word error rate (WER) with multiple candidates by 3.2% and 2.6%. |
NarGINA: Towards Accurate and Interpretable Children’s Narrative Ability Assessment via Narrative Graphs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing children's narrative ability are limited to evaluating completeness of narrative content and the coherence of expression, as well as interpretability of assessment results. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational framework for assessing narrative ability using a narrative graph to provide a concise and structured summary representation of narrative text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvement over baselines while possessing good interpretability. |
HyperIDP: Customizing Temporal Hypergraph Neural Networks for Multi-Scale Information Diffusion Prediction (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on information diffusion prediction have focused on both macroscopic and microscopic scales. |
| Approach: | They propose a hypergraph-based model that manages both macroscopic and microscopic diffusion predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on both macroscopic and microscopic tasks. |
MPL: Multiple Programming Languages with Large Language Models for Information Extraction (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on Python for code-style simulation, overlooking the potential of other widely-used PLs during the supervised fine-tuning phase. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates programming languages into IE tasks . they introduce function-prompt with virtual running to simulate code-style inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits the potential of different programming languages during the supervised fine-tuning phase. |
Don’t Forget Your Reward Values: Language Model Alignment via Value-based Calibration (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models have been criticized for their complexity and instability. |
| Approach: | They propose a value-based calibration method to better align Large Language Models with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on AI assistant and summarization datasets, providing impressive generalizability, robustness, and diversity in different settings. |
Nuclear Deployed!: Analyzing Catastrophic Risks in Decision-making of Autonomous LLM Agents (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are evolving into autonomous decision-makers, raising concerns about catastrophic risks in high-stakes domains, particularly in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that is carefully constructed to effectively and naturally expose catastrophic risks in high-stakes domains such as CBRN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exposes LLM agents to catastrophic behaviors and deception without being deliberately induced. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
FacLens: Transferable Probe for Foreseeing Non-Factuality in Fact-Seeking Question Answering of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing non-factuality detection methods require response generation, which incurs significant computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight model called Factuality Lens which effectively probes hidden representations of fact-seeking questions for the NFP task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to probe hidden representations of fact-seeking questions and reduce development costs. |
EnigmaToM: Improve LLMs’ Theory-of-Mind Reasoning Capabilities with Neural Knowledge Base of Entity States (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing ToM reasoning methods rely excessively on off-the-shelf LLMs, reducing their efficiency and limiting their applicability to high-order ToM. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic framework that integrates a Neural Knowledge Base of Entity States and knowledge injection to enhance ToM reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves ToM reasoning on ToMi, HiToM, and FANToM benchmarks. |
MUR: Momentum Uncertainty guided Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hang Yan, Fangzhi Xu, Rongman Xu, Yifei Li, Jian Zhang, Haoran Luo, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Haiteng Zhao, Qika Lin, Jun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for optimizing reasoning quality are limited by overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates thinking budgets to critical reasoning steps by tracking and aggregating step-wise uncertainty over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computation by over 45% on average while improving accuracy by 0.33–3.46%. |
PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yu-Zhe Shi, Shiqian Li, Xinyi Niu, Qiao Xu, Jiawen Liu, Yifan Xu, Shiyu Gu, Bingru He, Xinyang Li, Xinyu Zhao, Zijian Zhao, Yidong Lyu, Zhen Li, Sijia Liu, Lin Qiu, Jinhao Ji, Lecheng Ruan, Yuxi Ma, Wenjuan Han, Yixin Zhu
| Challenge: | PersLEARN is a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives . junior researchers struggle to identify the perspectives reflected in the literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives by interacting with a prompt-based model and allowing students to develop their own perspectives explicitly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from different perspectives. |
PEToolLLM: Towards Personalized Tool Learning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tool learning studies focus on general-purpose tool-use capability, but ignore the importance of personalized tool-user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to adapt Large Language Models to personalized tool learning task, which is trained through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on PEToolBench show that the proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs in the personalized tool learning task. |
Beyond Perplexity: Multi-dimensional Safety Evaluation of LLM Compression (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior work on compression prioritizes preserving perplexity, which is analogous to training loss. |
| Approach: | They examine the impact of model compression along four dimensions: degeneration harm, representational harm, dialect bias, and language modeling and downstream task performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed compression methods can lead to unexpected consequences, the authors show . quantization preserves bias while pruning degrades quickly. |
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Yaxin Li, Jie Ren, Yiding Liu, Han Xu, Pengfei He, Yue Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks. |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
Towards IP Intelligence: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Intellectual Property Knowledge and Practice (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qiyao Wang, Guhong Chen, Hongbo Wang, Huaren Liu, Minghui Zhu, Zhifei Qin, Li Linwei, Yilin Yue, Shiqiang Wang, Jiayan Li, Wu Yihang, Ziqiang Liu, Longze Chen, Run Luo, Liyang Fan, Jiaming Li, Lei Zhang, Kan Xu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Chengming Li, Shiwen Ni, Yuan Lin, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets and benchmarks focus only on patents or cover limited aspects of the IP field, lacking alignment with real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual IP task taxonomy and a large-scale bilingual benchmark to evaluate LLMs in real-world IP practice. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 75.8% accuracy, indicating room for improvement . open-source IP and law-oriented models lag behind closed-source general-purpose models . |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
A Study of Implicit Ranking Unfairness in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior ability to serve as ranking models, but they will exhibit discriminatory ranking behaviors based on users’ sensitive attributes (gender). |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation method to investigate the severity of implicit ranking unfairness and a pair-wise regression method to conduct fair-aware data augmentation for LLM fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in ranking fairness, achieving this with only a small reduction in accuracy. |
PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qianjun Pan, Junyi Wang, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Kaiyin Xu, Yougen Zhou, Yihan Li, JingYuan Zhao, Qin Chen, Ningning Zhou, Kai Chen, Liang He
| Challenge: | Existing models focus on a single therapy, but complex cases require flexible strategies among various therapies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark . it is designed to address three key challenges: 1) can we train a highly realistic AI counselor? 2) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor?" |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is annotated with extensive professional skills and includes over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills. |
DISCO Balances the Scales: Adaptive Domain- and Difficulty-Aware Reinforcement Learning on Imbalanced Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yuhang Zhou, Jing Zhu, Shengyi Qian, Zhuokai Zhao, Xiyao Wang, Xiaoyu Liu, Ming Li, Paiheng Xu, Wei Ai, Furong Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). |
| Approach: | a new study proposes a domain-informed self-consistency policy optimization extension to GRPO that addresses inter-group imbalance. |
| Outcome: | a new extension of GRPO addresses inter-group imbalance with two key innovations . the proposed method outperforms existing GR PO variants by 5% on Qwen3 models . |
Speculating LLMs’ Chinese Training Data Pollution from Their Tokens (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qingjie Zhang, Di Wang, Haoting Qian, Liu Yan, Tianwei Zhang, Ke Xu, Qi Li, Minlie Huang, Hewu Li, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Experiments on GPT and other 23 LLMs indicate that tokens widely exist while GPT’s vocabulary behaves the worst: more than 23% long Chinese tokens (i.e., a token with more than two Chinese characters) are either porn or online gambling. |
| Approach: | They propose to locate Polluted Chinese (PoC) tokens in LLMs and build a PoC token detector to label them in vocabularies by considering each token’s semantics and related contents from the search engines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method predicts that the ratio of “*” related webpages in GPT-4o's training data is around 0.5%. |
Can Large Language Models Mine Interpretable Financial Factors More Effectively? A Neural-Symbolic Factor Mining Agent Model (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing factor mining models are inefficient and inefficient, resulting in a significant challenge to extract interpretable factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates the strengths of both neural and symbolic models for factor mining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the SOTA RankIC and RankICIR in predicting S&P 500 returns on real-world stock market data. |
From Observation to Understanding: Front-Door Adjustments with Uncertainty Calibration for Enhancing Egocentric Reasoning in LVLMs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shenshen Li, Wenxin Meng, Lei Wang, Hao Yang, Chong Peng, Peng Yan, Fumin Shen, Jingkuan Song, Heng Tao Shen, Xing Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods that adapt LVLMs to egocentric tasks overlook critical agent-environment interactions, limiting their ability to perform egoic reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot paradigm to enhance egocentric reasoning by simulating human causal reasoning by formalizing ego-centric reasoning using a structural causal model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves egocentric reasoning abilities on six tasks. |
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Guo Zhancheng, Xu Tan, Ge Zhang, Monan Zhou, Jing Chen, Xuefeng Mu, Yuejie Gao, Yuanliang Dong, Jiafeng Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
SCCS: Semantics-Consistent Cross-domain Summarization via Optimal Transport Alignment (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jielin Qiu, Jiacheng Zhu, Mengdi Xu, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Zhaowen Wang, Bo Li, Ding Zhao, Hailin Jin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal summarization ignore the structure and semantics of the whole video and article. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-consistent cross-domain summarization model that extracts features from video and article and uses fusion methods to select representative one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces high-quality multimodal summaries on three MSMO datasets. |
CLEVE: Contrastive Pre-training for Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing EE methods do not model event characteristics from large unsupervised data. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive pre-training framework for event extraction to better learn event knowledge from large unsupervised data and their semantic structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on ACE 2005 and MAVEN datasets on event extraction tasks. |
Investigating and Mitigating the Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing in Large Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weihong Zhong, Xiaocheng Feng, Liang Zhao, Qiming Li, Lei Huang, Yuxuan Gu, Weitao Ma, Yuan Xu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from multimodal hallucinations . however, the generated hallucines could influence the models’ subsequent generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LVLMs' behaviors when encountering generated hallucinations and a method to revise the output distribution of LVLs with the one derived from the residual visual input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the performance of open-source LVLMs by 31%, indicating that they are prone to accept the generated hallucinations and make false claims that they would not have supported without distractions. |
Position-Aware Tagging for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research efforts focus on extracting the triplets of target entities, their associated sentiment, and opinion spans explaining the reason for the sentiment. |
| Approach: | They propose a position-aware tagging scheme that can extract triplets using a sequence tapping approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on multiple datasets and compares with existing models. |
Logician and Orator: Learning from the Duality between Language and Knowledge in Open Domain (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results reveal dual structure between OIE and OIN tasks helps to build better OIE agents and OINE agents. |
| Approach: | They propose an Open-Domain Information Narration task as the reverse task of Open Information Extraction (OIE) they then propose an OIN task as an OIE agent and an OIR agent to implement the dual structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is the reverse task of Open Information Extraction (OIE) The proposed system is able to implement the dual structure with a reinforcement learning paradigm. |
Chain-of-Memory: Lightweight Memory Construction with Dynamic Evolution for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing paradigms for large language model (LLM) agents use memory construction and retrieval-augmented generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that advocates for a paradigm shift toward lightweight construction paired with sophisticated utilization. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoM outperforms baselines with accuracy gains of 7.5%–10.4% while reducing computational overhead to approximately 2.7% of token consumption and 6.0% of latency compared to complex memory architectures. |
Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Adapter (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for federated multilingual neural machine translation (Fed-MNMT) are limited in language resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that keeps PLMs frozen and only transfers lightweight adapter modules between clients. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces communication cost by over 98% while achieving similar or even better performance compared to baselines. |
Seeing but Not Thinking: Routing Distraction in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haolei Xu, Haiwen Hong, Hongxing Li, Rui Zhou, Yang Zhang, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal Mixture-of-Experts models accurately perceive image content yet fail in subsequent reasoning . Seeing but not thinking phenomenon is a puzzling phenomenon . |
| Approach: | They propose a routing-guided intervention method that enhances domain expert activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent improvements on visual reasoning tasks. |
Improving the Sample Efficiency of Prompt Tuning with Domain Adaptation (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning is a technique for adapting large-scale pretrained language models for downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to condition a frozen pretrained language model with soft prompts from data . they propose to use a domain adaptation technique to regularize the decision boundary . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms full-model tuning in data-scarce settings by a large margin. |
Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies reveal a security threat to natural language processing models, called the Backdoor Attack. |
| Approach: | They propose to hack a model by modifying one single word embedding vector without sacrificing accuracy on clean samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more efficient and stealthier on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks. |
ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing BERT-based pre-trained language models achieve high performance on many downstream tasks, but native derived sentence representations are collapsed and thus poor performance on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-supervised Sentence Representation Transfer that adopts contrastive learning to fine-tune BERT in an unsupervised way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the BERT-derived representations by 8% on STS datasets and shows robustness in data scarcity scenarios. |
Code Generation From Flowcharts with Texts: A Benchmark Dataset and An Approach (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, researchers focus on generating codes from requirement documents. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate source code from flowcharts with texts instead of directly translating requirements into codes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the baselines by transforming flowcharts into pseudo-code . the proposed model is based on 320 flowchartes with their corresponding source codes . |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Pun-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Pun Generation (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating pun sentences with word senses lack large-scale corpus for supervised learning . a pun is a clever and amusing use of a word with two meanings (word senses) |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial generative network for pun generation with a generator and a discriminator to distinguish between generated pun sentences and real sentences with specific word senses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network generates sentences that are more ambiguous and diverse in both automatic and human evaluation. |
A Survey on Training-free Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Birong Pan, Yongqi Li, Weiyu Zhang, Wenpeng Lu, Mayi Xu, Shen Zhou, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | a survey of large language models (LLMs) aims to ensure outputs adhere to human values, ethical standards, and legal norms. |
| Approach: | They present the first systematic review of TF alignment methods . they categorize them by stages of pre-decoding, in-decoder and post-decoration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on training-free (TF) alignment techniques . they are able to be used in open-source and closed-source environments without retraining . |
Evolutionary Contrastive Distillation for Language Model Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Julian Katz-Samuels, Zheng Li, Hyokun Yun, Priyanka Nigam, Yi Xu, Vaclav Petricek, Bing Yin, Trishul Chilimbi
| Challenge: | Existing studies indicate that large language models struggle with challenging instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating high-quality synthetic preference data to enhance the complex instruction-following capability of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exceeds the performance of current SOTA 7B models and is competitive even with open-source 70B models. |
LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems are Scalable Graph Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiarui Ji, Runlin Lei, Jialing Bi, Zhewei Wei, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Xuchen Pan, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding
| Challenge: | Social graphs are mathematical structures stem from pairwise interactions between entities through nodes and edges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dynamic, text-attributed social graph generation that simulates the temporal node and edge generation processes for zero-shot social graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves macroscopic graph structure metrics by 11% . the proposed model can generate graphs with up to 100,000 nodes or 10 million edges . |
EmByte: Decomposition and Compression Learning for Small yet Private NLP (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | EMBYTE is a byte-level tokenization model that reduces embedding parameters by up to 94% . it is also resilient to privacy threats such as gradient inversion attacks . |
| Approach: | EMBYTE is a byte-level tokenization model that decomposes subwords into fine-grained byte embeddings and then compresses them via neural projection. |
| Outcome: | EMBYTE achieves substantial embedding compression while preserving accuracy and enhancing privacy. |
Augmentation, Retrieval, Generation: Event Sequence Prediction with a Three-Stage Sequence-to-Sequence Approach (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict event sequences are complex and ignore the knowledge of external events. |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical induction problem to generate a sequence of events by exploring the similarity between the given goal and known sequences of events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on an event sequence prediction task. |
Exploring the Capability Boundaries of LLMs in Mastering of Chinese Chouxiang Language (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dianqing Lin, Tian Lan, Jiali Zhu, Jiang Li, Wei Chen, Xu Liu, null Aruukhan, Xiangdong Su, Hongxu Hou, Guanglai Gao
| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit clear limitations on multiple tasks, while performing well on tasks that involve contextual semantic understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a mouse-based benchmark to evaluate LLMs' performance on NLP tasks involving Chouxiang Language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of LLMs on six NLP tasks involving Chouxiang Language. |
Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning Networks for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect sentiment toward aspect categories ignore the fact that the sentiment of an aspect category mentioned in a sentence is an aggregation of the sentiments of the words indicating the aspect category in the sentence, which leads to suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-instance multi-label learning network for Aspect-Category sentiment analysis that treats sentences as bags, words as instances, and the words indicating an aspect category as key instances of the aspect category. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on three public datasets showing that it performs well. |
Large Language Models Struggle to Describe the Haystack without Human Help: A Social Science-Inspired Evaluation of Topic Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zongxia Li, Lorena Calvo-Bartolomé, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Paiheng Xu, Daniel Kofi Stephens, Juan Francisco Fung, Alden Dima, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber
| Challenge: | a common use of NLP is to facilitate the understanding of large document collections. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to replace probabilistic topic models in real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more human-readable topics and shows higher average win probabilities than traditional models for data exploration. |
BMAM: Brain-inspired Multi-Agent Memory Framework (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language-model-based agents operating over extended interactions face persistent challenges in preserving temporally grounded information and maintaining behavioral consistency across sessions. |
| Approach: | They propose a general-purpose memory architecture that decomposes agent memory into six components that operate at complementary time scales. |
| Outcome: | BMAM outperforms memory-augmented baselines on LoCoMo benchmarks with 78.45% accuracy . a targeted refinement of the temporal-trigger heuristics raises LongMemEval multi-session accuracy from 45.2% to 56.4%. |
VerIF: Verification Engineering for Reinforcement Learning in Instruction Following (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Best practices for RL in instruction following remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a verification method that combines rule-based code verification with LLM-based verification from a large reasoning model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of comparable size and generalizes well to unseen constraints. |
QuickLLaMA: Query-aware Inference Acceleration for Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with capturing long-distance dependencies within sequences to deeply understand semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that captures relevant information within a fixed window size and provides precise answers to queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can read Harry Potter within 30s and accurately answer the questions. |
TranSFormer: Slow-Fast Transformer for Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haoliang Liu, Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Han Zhu, Shizhou Huang, Xinglin Zhang, Tao Chen, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Zhang Huaping, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing information extraction (IE) tasks rely on in-context learning with large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian-based in-context learning framework that refines label representations across IE tasks using particle filtering and Bayes updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over existing methods (up to 30%) it underperforms one-shot prompting by a substantial margin on NER tasks and CodeIE fails on RE tasks with near-zero micro-F1. |
Semantics-enhanced Cross-modal Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks. |
Interactive Key-Value Memory-augmented Attention for Image Paragraph Captioning (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to image paragraph captioning ignore the past alignment information, resulting in repetitive captioning and incomplete captioning. |
| Approach: | They propose an Interactive key-value Memory-augmented Attention model for image paragraph captioning to keep track of attention history along with update-chain of decoder state. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Sensitivity-LoRA : Low-Load Sensitivity-Based Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
SimPBL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Project-Based Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Daniel Zhang-Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Binglin Liu, Shangqing Tu, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Zhanxin Hao, Ye He, Zekun Li, Jiangyi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Xin Cong, Zhiyuan Liu, Huiqin Liu, Yu Zhang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs provide partial assistance without modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help can reduce learner autonomy. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves learner examination scores by 14% . it is based on a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent . |
Hallucination Detection in Structured Query Generation via LLM Self-Debating (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Hallucination remains a key challenge in applying large language models to structured query generation . we propose the Self-Debating framework to enhance detection performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that prompts an LLM to generate contrastive explanations from opposing perspectives . they also propose 'self-debating' framework to enhance detection performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms LLM-as-a-Judge baselines in hallucination detection . the framework generates contrastive explanations from opposing perspectives . |
EverMemOS: A Self-Organizing Memory Operating System for Structured Long-Horizon Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chuanrui Hu, Xingze Gao, Zuyi Zhou, Dannong Xu, Yi Bai, Xintong Li, Hui Zhang, Tong Li, Chong Zhang, Lidong Bing, Yafeng Deng
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems for LLMs store isolated records and retrieve fragments . Existing systems store isolated data and fragments, limiting their ability to consolidate evolving experience and resolve conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose an engram-inspired memory operating system that implements an 'engram'-inspired lifecycle for computational memory. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LoCoMo, LongMemEval, and PersonaMeM-v2 show that EverMemeOS outperforms state-of-the-art methods on memory-augmented reasoning tasks. |
Lego-MT: Learning Detachable Models for Massively Multilingual Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing monolithic models for multilingual neural machine translation encounter parameter interference and inefficient inference for large models. |
| Approach: | They propose a detachable multi-way model that assigns each language to an individual branch . they use data from OPUS to build a translation benchmark covering 433 languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in OPUS and is faster than existing models. |
Large-Scale Relation Learning for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases with Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing KBQA methods focus on the natural language but ignore textual information carried by the nodes and edges. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform relation extraction, relation matching, and relation reasoning tasks to align the natural language expressions to the relations in the KB and reason over the missing connections. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on WebQSP show that the proposed model outperforms baselines even when the KB is incomplete. |
Advancing Fine-Grained Visual Understanding with Multi-Scale Alignment in Multi-Modal Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
DeepKE: A Deep Learning Based Knowledge Extraction Toolkit for Knowledge Base Population (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xu, Liankuan Tao, Haiyang Yu, Hongbin Ye, Shuofei Qiao, Xin Xie, Xiang Chen, Zhoubo Li, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge extraction tools are not complete due to emerging entities and relations in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE that supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
AMA: Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Weiquan Huang, Zixuan Wang, Hehai Lin, Sudong Wang, Bo Xu, Qian Li, Beier Zhu, Linyi Yang, Chengwei Qin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to longterm memory rely on rigid retrieval granularity, accumulation-heavy maintenance strategies, and coarse-grained update mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages coordinated agents to manage memory across multiple granularities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks while reducing token consumption by approximately 80%. |
Understanding the Language Model to Solve the Symbolic Multi-Step Reasoning Problem from the Perspective of Buffer Mechanism (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiwei Wang, Yunji Wang, Zhongwang Zhang, Zhangchen Zhou, Hui Jin, Tianyang Hu, Jiacheng Sun, Zhenguo Li, Yaoyu Zhang, Zhi-Qin John Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They constructed a symbolic multi-step reasoning task to investigate the information propagation mechanisms in Transformer models when solving the task through direct answering and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on 7 multi-step reasoning datasets, while introducing only 132 trainable parameters. |
OCNLI: Original Chinese Natural Language Inference (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to extend natural language understanding to other languages have focused on (automatically) translating existing English datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dataset to generate annotated sentences from native speakers specializing in linguistics to elicit annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset does not rely on automatic translation or non-expert annotation. instead, it elicits annotations from native speakers specializing in linguistics. |
DCT-Centered Temporal Relation Extraction (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on temporal relation extraction focuses on extracting temporal relations between events . previous work on relation extraction focused on focusing on event-centered tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal relation extraction model that unifies events, timexes and DCT . they propose combining event mentions, time expressions and document creation time into a sentence-style model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on E-E, E-T and E-D significantly. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
AD-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Anomaly Detection (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
CLMLF:A Contrastive Learning and Multi-Layer Fusion Method for Multimodal Sentiment Detection (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment detection do not consider token-level feature fusion. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for multimodal sentiment detection using a combination of text and image to encode and fuse token-level features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can fuse multimodal features with token-level features on three publicly available multimodal datasets. |
Transformer-GCRF: Recovering Chinese Dropped Pronouns with General Conditional Random Fields (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to recover dropped pronouns ignore the dependencies between pronounes in neighboring utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines Transformer network and General Conditional Random Fields to model the dependencies between pronouns in neighboring utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on three Chinese conversation datasets showing that it captures the dependencies between pronouns in neighboring utterances. |
Ancient Chinese Glyph Identification Powered by Radical Semantics (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, about half of ancient Chinese glyphs have not been deciphered yet. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese glyph knowledge graph to infer the Chinese character label for the unknown ancient Chinese . they propose to combine the visual, textual, and the graph data to create a multimodal Chinese morph identification framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can identify ancient Chinese characters from 1300 BC to 200 BC based on image and radical semantics on a 1000-year-old Chinese glyph dataset. |
KV Cache Compression, But What Must We Give in Return? A Comprehensive Benchmark of Long Context Capable Approaches (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiayi Yuan, Hongyi Liu, Shaochen Zhong, Yu-Neng Chuang, Songchen Li, Guanchu Wang, Duy Le, Hongye Jin, Vipin Chaudhary, Zhaozhuo Xu, Zirui Liu, Xia Hu
| Challenge: | Long context capability is a crucial competency for large language models as it mitigates the human struggle to digest long-form texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate 10+ state-of-the-art approaches for long context-capable LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are compared against 10+ state-of-the-art approaches across seven categories of long context tasks. |
SALT: Step-level Advantage Assignment for Long-horizon Agents via Trajectory Graph (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their application to complex, multi-step, and long-horizon tasks remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a finer-grained advantage assignment derived solely from outcome rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a finer-grained advantage assignment, derived solely from outcome rewards. |
Boundary-Driven Table-Filling for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on extracting aspect terms and opinion terms without considering the relations between aspect terms . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to extract aspect terms, opinion terms, and expressed sentiments from a two-dimensional (2D) table. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on several public benchmarks and is well-suited to the ASTE task. |
A Comprehensive Study of Jailbreak Attack versus Defense for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities for generating content that could be deemed harmful. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of existing studies on jailbreaking LLMs and their defense techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques underperform existing white-box attacks and include special tokens significantly affects the likelihood of successful attacks. |
Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Text Classification Using Latent Space Geometry (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models rely on predictive shortcuts that hold in training data but break under distribution shifts, leading to large performance drops for minority groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms abstract biases into interpretable geometric anchors without auxiliary classifiers by manipulating latent space geometry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and improves worst-group accuracy by over 20% on the CivilComments dataset. |
Foresight Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jessie Wang, Jiawen Duan, Jian Wang, Kaitao Song, Chunpu Xu, Johnny K. W. Ho, YU Fenggang, Johan F. Hoorn, Wenjie Li
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning enhancement methods do not capture foresight in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate opponent modeling principles into policy optimization to enhance strategic reasoning in LLMs by integrating opponent modeling into policy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing reasoning-based LLMs in out-of-domain scenarios and shows that it significantly enhances strategic reasoning across LLM of varying sizes and origins. |
“I See What You Did There”: Can Large Vision-Language Models Understand Multimodal Puns? (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Naen Xu, Jiayi Sheng, Changjiang Li, Chunyi Zhou, Yuyuan Li, Tianyu Du, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Puns are a common form of rhetorical wordplay that exploits polysemy and phonetic similarity to create humor. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal pun generation pipeline and a model to evaluate their understanding of puns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves the understanding of multimodal puns by 16.5% in the F1 test. |
GroundingGPT: Language Enhanced Multi-modal Grounding Model (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaowei Li, Qi Xu, Dong Zhang, Hang Song, YiQing Cai, Qi Qi, Ran Zhou, Junting Pan, Zefeng Li, Vu Tu, Zhida Huang, Tao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal large language models focus on capturing global information while neglecting the fine-grained local information in multimodal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end language enhanced multi-modal grounding model that performs fine-grained grounding tasks for image, video and audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive fine-grained understanding of multi-modal inputs while maintaining or improving its global comprehension capabilities. |
ChipSeek: Optimizing Verilog Generation via EDA-Integrated Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhirong Chen, Kaiyan Chang, Zhuolin Li, Cangyuan Li, Xinyang He, Chujie Chen, Mengdi Wang, Haobo Xu, Yinhe Han, Huawei Li, Ying Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code fail to simultaneously optimize functional correctness and hardware efficiency metrics such as Power, Performance, and Area (PPA). |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reward based reinforcement learning framework that integrates direct feedback from EDA simulators and synthesis tools into a reward mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates direct feedback from EDA simulators and synthesis tools into a hierarchical reward based reinforcement learning framework. |
CA*: Addressing Evaluation Pitfalls in Computation-Aware Latency for Simultaneous Speech Translation (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing metrics for Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) are inaccurately measuring latency in unsegmented streaming settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify existing metrics to correctly measure computation-aware latency for SimulST systems, addressing limitations present in existing metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a real-time, lowlatency scenario where the model starts generating the textual translation before the entire audio input is processed. |
Low-probability Tokens Sustain Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guanhua Huang, Tingqiang Xu, Mingze Wang, Qi Yi, Xue Gong, Siheng Li, Ruibin Xiong, Kejiao Li, Yuhao Jiang, Bo Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that RLVR training is slow and results plateau as policy entropy collapses . low-probability regularization (Lp-Reg) reduces the number of low-quality exploratory tokens induced by RL training . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce RLVR over-penalization by eliminating low-probability exploratory tokens . they propose 'Low-provability Regularization' to reduce the gradual elimination of low-quality exploratory entropy tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates low-probability exploratory tokens and prevents suppression of potentially valuable low-property candidates. |
DiffZOO: A Purely Query-Based Black-Box Attack for Red-teaming Text-to-Image Generative Model via Zeroth Order Optimization (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-image (T2I) synthesis diffusion models raise misuse concerns, particularly in creating prohibited or not-safe-for-work (NSFW) images. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses zeroth order optimization to procure gradient approximations and harnesses both C-PRV and D-PRv to enhance attack prompts within a discrete prompt space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an 8.5% higher average attack success rate than previous works on multiple state-of-the-art safety mechanisms. |
Anchored Cyclic Generation: A Novel Paradigm for Long-Sequence Symbolic Music Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Autoregressive sequence modeling has been successful in many domains, but maintaining long-term coherence and structural integrity remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an ACG paradigm that relies on anchor features from previously generated musical content to guide subsequent generation during the autoregressive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in symbolic music generation tasks. |
Enhancing LLM-based Hatred and Toxicity Detection with Meta-Toxic Knowledge Graph (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address toxicity issues with large language models are inadequate . lack of domain-specific knowledge leads to false negatives and excessive sensitivity to toxic speech limits freedom of speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages graph search on a meta-toxic knowledge graph to enhance hatred and toxicity detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method lowers false positive rate and improves toxicity detection performance in out-of-domain scenarios. |
MuSC: Improving Complex Instruction Following with Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Training (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for complex instruction-following with elaborate constraints rely on a weaker model, especially GPT-4, limiting their application. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Training framework to improve instruction alignment without relying on a stronger model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following with elaborate constraints without external supervision on coarse and fine granularity. |
LongReD: Mitigating Short-Text Degradation of Long-Context Large Language Models via Restoration Distillation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have extended context windows through scaling positional encodings and lightweight continual pre-training, but performance degradation is still not fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to reduce short-text performance degradation by minimizing distribution drift in hidden states and attention scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes the distribution discrepancy between the extended and original models while maintaining or even enhancing the model's long-context abilities. |
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos . |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss. |
FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Few-shot domain adaptation and NOTA detection are two real-world challenges for few-shot relation classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate two aspects of few-shot relation classification models . they build upon the FewRel dataset by adding a new test set in a different domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can evaluate few-shot domain adaptation and few- shot none-of-the-above detection on a new domain and NOTA relation choice. |
Self-Attention Guided Copy Mechanism for Abstractive Summarization (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models have been widely used to extract words from source into summary, but how to ensure that important words in source are copied remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based model to enhance copy mechanism by identifying the importance of each source word based on the degree centrality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods on CNN/Daily Mail and Gigaword datasets. |
AprilE: Attention with Pseudo Residual Connection for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods are difficult to model diverse relational patterns, especially symmetric and antisymmetric relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which employs triple-level self-attention and pseudo residual connection to model relational patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on public datasets on symmetric and antisymmetric relations. |
Prompting Large Language Models for Counterfactual Generation: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks, but their ability to generate counterfactuals has not been examined systematically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to generate counterfactuals based on key factors including intrinsic properties and prompt design. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the strengths and weaknesses of large language models (LLMs) and identifies factors that influence their ability to generate counterfactuals. |
Assist Non-native Viewers: Multimodal Cross-Lingual Summarization for How2 Videos (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal summarization methods are limited to monolingual videos . a proposed task aims to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs of videos . they propose fusion network that integrates multimodal and cross-linguistic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms existing methods on a reorganized How2 dataset on the reorganized How2 data set. |
GraphDx: A Cost-Aware Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Agent Framework for Sequential Diagnosis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shaoting Tan, Ning Liu, Yuntao Du, Shuyue Wei, Wu Shuai, Qian Li, Yanyu Xu, Wei Zhang, Lizhen Cui, Haitao Yuan
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models struggle to reason systematically under cost constraints . Existing approaches lack the knowledge-reasoning capability to reason under cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced framework that leverages large language models to construct MDKGs . they propose three collaborative agents that handle language understanding and generation . |
| Outcome: | GraphDx improves diagnostic success rates from 50–68% to 79–93% while reducing test costs by 20–54%. |
Cut the Deadwood Out: Backdoor Purification via Guided Module Substitution (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Model NLP models are often trained on datasets from untrusted platforms, posing significant risks of data poisoning attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a retraining-free method that selectively replaces modules in the victim model based on a trade-off signal between utility and backdoor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms even the strongest defense baseline against challenging attacks like LWS. |
PRiSM: Benchmarking Phone Realization in Speech Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shikhar Bharadwaj, Chin-Jou Li, Yoonjae Kim, Kwanghee Choi, Eunjung Yeo, Ryan Soh-Eun Shim, Hanyu Zhou, Brendon Boldt, Karen Rosero, Kalvin Chang, Darsh Agrawal, Keer Xu, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Jian Zhu, Shinji Watanabe, David R. Mortensen
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of phone recognition systems only measure surface-level transcription accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose to standardize transcription-based evaluation and assess downstream utility in clinical, educational, and multilingual settings with transcription and representation probes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms LALMs in clinical, educational, and multilingual settings. |
Model Unlearning via Sparse Autoencoder Subspace Guided Projections (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing unlearning strategies lack interpretability or fail to provide robust defense against adversarial prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages SAE features to drive targeted updates in the model’s parameter space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces harmful knowledge accuracy by 3.22% compared to baselines and improves adversarial robustness under jailbreak prompts. |
Language-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Qi, Fengran Mo, Yufeng Chen, Xue Zhang, Shuo Wang, Hongliang Li, Xu Jinan, Meng Jiang, Jian-Yun Nie, Kaiyu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (MRAG) use a single-turn retrieval and subsequent optimization to acquire and integrate beneficial external knowledge from multilingual collections. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual search-augmented reinforcement learning framework that integrates a language-coupled Group Relative Policy Optimization into the policy and reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance and is appropriate for various practical scenarios such as constrained training data and retrieval over collections encompassing a large number of languages. |
INSTRUCTSCORE: Towards Explainable Text Generation Evaluation with Automatic Feedback (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate the quality of language generation do not provide explicit explanation of their verdicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained explainable evaluation metric for text generation that harnesses human instruction and implicit knowledge of GPT-4 to fine-tune it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all other unsupervised metrics on translation, captioning, data-to-text, and commonsense generation tasks. |
Enhancing Multimodal Large Language Models for Ancient Chinese Character Evolution Analysis via Glyph-Driven Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored the evolutionary analysis of ancient scripts, with particular attention to the transformation of character forms from oracle bone inscriptions to regular script. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark framework that leverages MLLMs to analyze the evolution of ancient Chinese scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on core tasks and character recognition and evolutionary reasoning tasks while limiting performance on other tasks. |
Long Chain-of-Thought Fine-tuning via Understanding-to-Reasoning Transition (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenxin An, Zhihui Xie, Xiaonan Li, Ming Zhong, Shansan Gong, Lei Li, Jun Zhang, Jingjing Xu, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing research on long-context scaling in language models has focused on managing lengthy input prompts instead of producing long outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level curriculum learning framework that shifts a model’s focus from interpreting long chain-of-thoughts to generating them. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on rigorous reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and GPQA Diamond, show that the proposed approach surpasses standard fine-tuning by over 10% while maintaining robust performance on understanding tasks. |
Defending LLMs against Jailbreak Attacks via Template-Based ICL with a Defensive Suffix (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, such as GCG and AutoDAN. |
| Approach: | They propose to take the advances of online In-Context Learning and an offline defensive suffix and optimize them using an iterative algorithm and an online stochastic random search to identify the most effective ICL demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces attack success rate to nearly *0% while maintaining the model’s utility on benign tasks and incurring only *negligible* computational overhead. |
Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Really Reduce Harmfulness from Jailbreaking? (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak attacks fail against reasoning models enhanced by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak method that uses Chain-of-Thought reasoning to reduce harmfulness from jailbreaking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed jailbreak method performs well against open AI models and deepseek-R1 reasoning models. |
Words Worth a Thousand Pictures: Measuring and Understanding Perceptual Variability in Text-to-Image Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Raphael Tang, Crystina Zhang, Lixinyu Xu, Yao Lu, Wenyan Li, Pontus Stenetorp, Jimmy Lin, Ferhan Ture
| Challenge: | Current diffusion models do not cover recent models, thus we curate three test sets for evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-calibrated measure of variability in a set of images bootstrapped from existing image-pair perceptual distances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms nine baselines by 18 points in accuracy and matches graded human judgements 78% of the time. |
Concise and Precise Context Compression for Tool-Using Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yang Xu, Yunlong Feng, Honglin Mu, Yutai Hou, Yitong Li, Xinghao Wang, Wanjun Zhong, Zhongyang Li, Dandan Tu, Qingfu Zhu, Min Zhang, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing methods suffer from key information loss and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths. |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable performance to the upper-bound baseline under 16x compression ratio. |
CMMaTH: A Chinese Multi-modal Math Skill Evaluation Benchmark for Foundation Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhongzhi Li, Ming-Liang Zhang, Pei-Jie Wang, Jian Xu, Rui-Song Zhang, Yin Fei, Zhi-Long Ji, Jin-Feng Bai, Zhen-Ru Pan, Jiaxin Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in various language tasks, while large multimodal models effectively handle visual-language problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multimodal multimodal model evaluation benchmark to evaluate model performance in Chinese K12 classrooms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluation tool is integrated with the CMMaTH dataset. |
Hard Sample Aware Prompt-Tuning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt-tuning based few-shot learning has garnered increasing attention in recent years due to its efficiency and promising capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to distinguish informative hard samples from misleading ones in model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA results on a series of NLP tasks pushing the SST-5 accuracy to 49.5% (1.1% point absolute improvement), QNLI accuracy to 74.6% (1.9% absolute improvement) |
HyperAdaLoRA: Accelerating LoRA Rank Allocation During Training via Hypernetworks without Sacrificing Performance (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
How to Determine the Most Powerful Pre-trained Language Model without Brute Force Fine-tuning? An Empirical Survey (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Transferability estimation has been a topic of great interest in computer vision fields . a lack of a comprehensive comparison between these estimation methods is a problem . |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough survey of existing methods to find the most suitable model . they also outline difficulties of consideration of training details and applicability to text generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well with superiorities in effectiveness and efficiency. |
SESCORE2: Learning Text Generation Evaluation via Synthesizing Realistic Mistakes (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing learned metrics perform unsatisfactory across text generation tasks or require human annotations for training on specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised approach to train a model-based metric for text generation evaluation using sentences retrieved from a corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all prior unsupervised metrics on four text generation evaluation benchmarks, with an average Kendall improvement of 0.158. |
InferenceDynamics: Adaptive LLM Routing through Structured Capability and Knowledge Profiling (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haochen Shi, Tianshi Zheng, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Chunyang Li, Chunkit Chan, Tao Fan, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) routing is a pivotal technique for navigating a diverse landscape of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible and scalable multi-dimensional routing framework that models the capability and knowledge of models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to generalize and identify top-performing models for group-level routing using modern benchmarks including MMLU-Pro, GPQA, BigGenBench, and LiveBench. |
Dynamic Anticipation and Completion for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Sparse Knowledge Graph (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning methods for sparse KGs are incomplete and lack of evidential paths to target entities makes multi-hop reasoning difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-hop reasoning model over sparse KGs to solve this problem . they use latent prediction of embedding-based models to make the model perform more potential path search over sparses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on five datasets from Freebase, NELL and Wikidata. |
DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) enabled dialogue systems are one of the central modes in human-machine interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark task for dialogue element MOdeling and Element Awareness and a new benchmark for dialogue agent interaction that allows the agent to model dialogue elements via imitation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs well in both dialogue element modeling and out-of-domain tasks. |
Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Help Mobile GUI Agents? An Empirical Study (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reasoning capabilities have improved vision-language models in domains like math, coding, and visual question-answering, but their impact on real-world applications remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They evaluate six pairs of VLMs by comparing their base and reasoning-enhanced versions across static and interactive benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The reasoning-enhanced models perform better on static and interactive benchmarks than non-reasoning models. |
PiKGL: Leveraging Pruned Knowledge Graphs for Explainable Stance Detection (2026.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Bingbing Wang, Jingjie Lin, Zhixin Bai, Xintong Song, Qianlong Wang, Min Yang, Xi Zeng, Jing Li, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that a Pruned interpretable knowledge Graph Learning framework for explainable stance detection is state-of-the-art for social media stance prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pruned interpretable knowledge Graph Learning framework for explainable stance detection that incorporates commonsense knowledge and prunes redundant information to ensure precision and minimize noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on three public datasets. |
EduBench: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Diverse Educational Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bin Xu, Yu Bai, Huashan Sun, Yiguan Lin, Siming Liu, Xinyue Liang, Yaolin Li, Zhuangzhi Dong, Jingren Zhang, Yufan Deng, Xinyu Zou, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that focus on knowledge-intensive tasks do not reflect diverse educational scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates 9 major scenarios and 4,000 educational contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to state-of-the-art large models on the test set. |
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weilin Zhao, Tengyu Pan, Xu Han, Yudi Zhang, Sun Ao, Yuxiang Huang, Kaihuo Zhang, Weilun Zhao, Yuxuan Li, Jie Zhou, Hao Zhou, Jianyong Wang, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution. |
Introducing Semantics into Speech Encoders (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Derek Xu, Shuyan Dong, Changhan Wang, Suyoun Kim, Zhaojiang Lin, Bing Liu, Akshat Shrivastava, Shang-Wen Li, Liang-Hsuan Tseng, Guan-Ting Lin, Alexei Baevski, Hung-yi Lee, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing self-supervised speech encoders contain primarily acoustic rather than semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic unsupervised way to incorporate semantic information from large language model (LLM) systems into self-supervised speech encoders without labeled audio transcriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves spoken language understanding (SLU) performance by over 5% on intent classification (IC), with modest gains in named entity resolution (NER) and slot filling (SF), and spoken question answering (SQA) score by over 22%. |
CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environments (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haotian Xu, Yue Hu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Chen Gao, Ziyou Wang, Junreng Rao, Wenhao Lu, Weishi Li, Quanjun Yin, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on indoor or street settings, overlooking challenges of open-ended urban spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to probe cross-view spatial reasoning capabilities of current VLMs in urban settings. |
| Outcome: | The citycube benchmark examines the performance of current vision-language models in urban environments. |
Not All Experts are Equal: Efficient Expert Pruning and Skipping for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs achieve higher performance with fewer active parameters, but are still difficult to deploy due to their immense parameter sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose expert-level sparsification techniques to enhance the deployment efficiency of large language models by introducing plug-and-play expert pruning and skipping techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce model sizes and increase inference speed while maintaining satisfactory performance across a wide range of tasks. |
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos? (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on video large language models lack a comprehensive feedback on temporal perception ability . current models cannot distinguish between different temporal aspects and are limited in task formats . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate temporal perception ability of video large language models . they construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that video large language models exhibit poor temporal perception ability. |
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset with improved annotation schemes to address these drawbacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude. |
Investigating Cross-Modal Skill Injection: Scenarios, Methods, and Hyperparameters (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research lacks systematic analysis of the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection. |
| Approach: | They investigate the applicability and methodology of cross-modal skill injection by integrating a domain-expert LLM into a VLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables transfer of domain-specific expertise from Large Language Models (LLMs) to VLMs without incurring additional training data requirements or significant computational overhead. |
ACIArena: Toward Unified Evaluation for Agent Cascading Injection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hengyu An, Minxi Li, Jinghuai Zhang, Naen Xu, Chunyi Zhou, Changjiang Li, Xiaogang Xu, Tianyu Du, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing studies consider only limited attack strategies and simplified MAS settings, limiting their generalizability and comprehensive evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the robustness of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) they propose unified evaluation suites spanning attack surfaces and attack objectives . |
| Outcome: | ACIArena provides a benchmark of 1,356 test cases for evaluating MAS robustness . it covers six widely used MAS implementations and provides measurable results . |
GeoRA: Geometry-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation for RLVR (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing parameter-efficient methods for RLVR face limitations . low-rank adaptation methods do not account for the distinct optimization dynamics . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method tailored for RLVR that exploits the anisotropic structure of RL update subspace and extracts its principal directions via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large reasoning models show that GeoRA outperforms strong low-rank baselines across RLVR settings while showing stronger generalization and less forgetting on out-of-domain tasks. |
Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
AutoReproduce: Automatic AI Experiment Reproduction with Paper Lineage (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xuanle Zhao, Zilin Sang, Yuxuan Li, Qi Shi, Weilun Zhao, Shuo Wang, Duzhen Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Efficient reproduction of research papers requires deep domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically mines implicit knowledge from the cited literature to reproduce experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines across all metrics and reproduces experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
PersonaTrace: Synthesizing Realistic Digital Footprints with LLM Agents (2026.eacl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
PATIMT-Bench: A Multi-Scenario Benchmark for Position-Aware Text Image Machine Translation in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current TIMT studies focus on providing translations for all text within an image, neglecting to provide bounding boxes and covering limited scenarios. |
| Approach: | They extend traditional TIMT into position-aware TIMt to support fine-grained translation . they introduce an Adaptive Image OCR Refinement Pipeline to refine results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model supports fine-grained and layout-preserving translation . the experimental data highlight the scalability and generalizability of the model. |
DeMAC: Enhancing Multi-Agent Coordination with Dynamic DAG and Manager-Player Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models struggle to adapt to evolving task dependencies and to handle uncertainties. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Environment-Aware Manager-Player Agents Coordination framework that enhances multi-agent coordination through long-term strategic planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional reinforcement learning and human-agent collaboration in the Overcooked simulation. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
AMoPO: Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization without Reward Models and Reference Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Liu, Jingqing Ruan, Hao Li, Haodong Zhao, Desheng Wang, Jiansong Chen, Wan Guanglu, Xunliang Cai, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models face limitations such as auxiliary reward/reference models and computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions by using dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 28.5% . |
Concept rather than Document: Context Compression via AMR-based Conceptual Entropy (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on lexical or token-level features that fragment semantic units and fail to capture conceptually essential content. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation to preserve essential information while filtering irrelevant text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms RAG and existing baselines while preserving essential information while filtering irrelevant text. |
Leveraging Word-Formation Knowledge for Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods have not explored word-formations in parataxis languages like Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage word-formation knowledge to enhance Chinese WSD by incorporating word-forms into sense disambiguation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines in Chinese word sense disambiguation (WSD) with word-formation knowledge, the results show. |
Ranking-Enhanced Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yeon Seonwoo, Guoyin Wang, Changmin Seo, Sajal Choudhary, Jiwei Li, Xiang Li, Puyang Xu, Sunghyun Park, Alice Oh
| Challenge: | Unsupervised sentence representation learning has progressed through contrastive learning and data augmentation methods such as dropout masking. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel unsupervised sentence encoder, RankEncoder, which predicts the semantic vector of an input sentence by leveraging its relationship with other sentences in an external corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed unsupervised sentence encoder achieves 80.07% Spearman’s correlation, a 1.1% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art system. |
DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for document layout analysis are based on rule-based or machine learning methods that ignore textual information. |
| Approach: | They present a benchmark document layout analysis dataset using a computer vision model . they build strong baselines and manually split train/dev/test sets for evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model trains on DocBank accurately recognize layout information for a variety of documents. |
StructFact: Reasoning Factual Knowledge from Structured Data with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing by leveraging their ability to comprehend and reason with factual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to reason with structured data for knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests on 10 common LLMs show that they struggle with heterogeneity of structured data during reasoning. |
Visualization Recommendation with Prompt-based Reprogramming of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional visualization recommendations require extensive manual maintenance and yet fail to fully comprehend tabular data. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical table prompt-based reprogramming framework that integrates tabular data into LLMs through a strategically crafted prompt learning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and will be made publicly available upon acceptance. |
RePALM: Popular Quote Tweet Generation via Auto-Response Augmentation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that the wording of tweets can significantly impact popularity, reflected by user replies, retweets, and likes. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to generate popular quote tweets by leveraging augmented auto-responses from readers to align language generation with popularity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models that do not incorporate response augmentation and can generate popular quote tweets with augmented auto-responses. |
Weight Perturbation as Defense against Adversarial Word Substitutions (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existence and pervasiveness of textual adversarial examples have raised serious concerns to security-critical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform weight perturbations in the parameter space rather than the input feature space to improve adversarial robustness of NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves adversarial robustness of models by performing weight perturbations in the parameter space rather than the input feature space. |
SGM: Sequence Generation Model for Multi-label Classification (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods ignore the correlations between labels and different parts of the text can contribute differently for predicting different labels. |
| Approach: | They propose to view the multi-label classification task as a sequence generation problem and apply a decoder-based sequence generation model to solve it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform previous work by a substantial margin. |
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Weizhen Qi, Yeyun Gong, Yu Yan, Can Xu, Bolun Yao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Jiusheng Chen, Ruofei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Yu Chen, Madian Khabsa, Sinong Wang, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value extraction focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning approach to extract attributes from product information using mixed prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on two product benchmarks and shows parameter-efficient training and avoids model overfitting. |
Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Tian Lan, Wenwei Zhang, Chengqi Lyu, Shuaibin Li, Chen Xu, Heyan Huang, Dahua Lin, Xian-Ling Mao, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | utilizing human annotations can enhance critique ability, but model-generated critiques suffer from inherent flaws due to complexity of critique . a new framework that leverages multi-agent feedback improves critique ability . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages multi-agent feedback to improve critique ability . they propose to use supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve this capability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves critique ability in both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning stages. |
ARCHITECT: Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Tool Learning via Causal Intervention for Open-World Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods treat all generated tools as equally trustworthy, a "blind trust" assumption that is untenable for reliable agent deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that moves beyond black-box reliability prediction to interpretable failure attribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks including StableToolBench, MINT, T-Eval, and SWE-bench Lite. |
NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Patient-Physician Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | NoteChat is a cooperative multi-agent framework for generating patient-physician dialogues . evaluator finds it outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . clinical documentation is largely done by physicians at both steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models to generate patient-physician dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . it can engage patients directly and help clinical documentation, a leading cause of physician burnout . |
MIND Your Reasoning: A Meta-Cognitive Intuitive-Reflective Network for Dual-Reasoning in Multimodal Stance Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods operate by learning to fuse modalities, leading to frequent misjudgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shift from *learning to fuse* to *learning the reason's process' inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, MIND operationalizes a self-improving loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms baseline models and exhibits strong generalization. |
WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhepei Wei, Wenlin Yao, Yao Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Qin Lu, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Puyang Xu, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li
| Challenge: | Existing work on reinforcement learning has focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns directly from online interactions by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, guided by binary rewards depending on task success. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark show that the framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models. |
Huatuo-26M, a Large-scale Chinese Medical QA Dataset (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Xidong Wang, Jianquan Li, Shunian Chen, Yuxuan Zhu, Xiangbo Wu, Zhiyi Zhang, Xiaolong Xu, Junying Chen, Jie Fu, Xiang Wan, Anningzhe Gao, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models are a powerful tool for medical research, but the data is a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the largest ever medical Question Answering dataset with 26 Million QA pairs as a fine-tuning data for training large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it can be used to train large language models and improves zero-shot performance on other datasets. |
Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract event records from text decompose complex structure prediction task into multiple subtasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can extract events from text . they propose unified event extraction, constrained decoding algorithm and curriculum learning algorithm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve competitive performance using record-level annotations in both supervised learning and transfer learning settings. |
Internal Value Alignment in Large Language Models through Controlled Value Vector Activation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs do not possess consistent values, but many have been developed to align them at the behavioral level, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). |
| Approach: | They propose a Controlled Value Vector Activation method that directly aligns the internal values of Large Language Models by interpreting how a value is encoded in their latent representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves highest success rate across 10 basic values without hurting model performance and fluency, and ensures target values even with opposite and potentially malicious input prompts. |
PRINCE: Prefix-Masked Decoding for Knowledge Enhanced Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-Training (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on injecting noises into the input sequence, but feasibility of injecting them into the decoding sequence remains an open question. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training paradigm that integrates knowledge-enhanced decoding with noises in the prefix to strengthen the representation learning of entities that span over multiple input tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on two knowledge-driven data-to-text generation tasks with up to 2% BLEU gains. |
Automated Structured Radiology Report Generation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jean-Benoit Delbrouck, Justin Xu, Johannes Moll, Alois Thomas, Zhihong Chen, Sophie Ostmeier, Asfandyar Azhar, Kelvin Zhenghao Li, Andrew Johnston, Christian Bluethgen, Eduardo Pontes Reis, Mohamed S Muneer, Maya Varma, Curtis Langlotz
| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to produce consistent, clinically meaningful reports and standard evaluation metrics fail to capture the nuances of radiological interpretation. |
| Approach: | They propose to reformulate free-text radiology reports into a standardized format, ensuring clarity, consistency, and structured clinical reporting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task reformulates free-text radiology reports into a standardized format, ensuring clarity, consistency, and structured clinical reporting. |
Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing video large language models (LMMs) employ an impedance of thousands of frames to understand long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module integrated with VideoLLMs to facilitate efficient lengthy video perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module boosts the performance of open-source VideoLLMs and proprietary assistants on long-form video benchmarks. |
Generator-Assistant Stepwise Rollback Framework for Large Language Model Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate thoughts with actions can cause irreversible error propagation . Xi et al., 2023; Zhang eet coll., 2023) have focused on enhancing large language model (LLM) agents capable of helping humans tackle real-world challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework called Generator-Assistant Stepwise Rollback to induce better decision-making for LLM agents by integrating a generator and an assistant to examine each action produced by the generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three widely used benchmarks and can integrate seamlessly with other methods. |
FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Leveraging Large Language Models for NLG Evaluation: Advances and Challenges (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | introducing Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for assessing generated content quality, e.g., coherence, creativity, and context relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy for organizing existing LLM-based evaluation metrics and a structured framework to understand and compare them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy offers a framework to understand and compare LLM-based evaluation methods. |
ScEdit: Script-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xinye Li, Zunwen Zheng, Qian Zhang, Dekai Zhuang, Jiabao Kang, Liyan Xu, Qingbin Liu, Xi Chen, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Knowledge Editing (KE) has gained increasing attention, yet current evaluation frameworks do not integrate KE into real-world application scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based benchmark which encompasses both counterfactual and temporal edits and integrates token-level and text-level evaluation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines token-level and text-level evaluation methods with a new fact-based evaluation framework. |
MobileVLM: A Vision-Language Model for Better Intra- and Inter-UI Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Qinzhuo Wu, Weikai Xu, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Liujian Liujianfeng, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Recent mobile AI agents based on VLMs lack basic mobile capabilities due to their pre-trained nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile AI agent based on VLMs that includes additional pre-training stages to enhance both intra- and inter-UI understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing VLMs on the Chinese mobile dataset Mobile3M . |
pFedGPT: Hierarchically Optimizing LoRA Aggregation Weights for Personalized Federated GPT Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with data heterogeneity and adapt shared global knowledge to individual client needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization (HBO) for fine-grained, personalized LoRA aggregation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on personalized FL benchmarks while introducing only minimal (approx. 4%) additional optimization overhead. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
Document-level Event Extraction via Heterogeneous Graph-based Interaction Model with a Tracker (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level event extraction are not effective due to two challenges . existing methods fail to extract events whose arguments spread in multiple sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event extraction model with a tracker to capture interdependency among the extracted events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a large-scale dataset by 2.8 F1 . it extracts multiple correlated events and event arguments that scatter across the document . |
AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on cognitive abilities, such as knowledge retrieval, complex reasoning, and instruction following, largely overlooking empathy evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark two core empathetic capabilities of omnimodal large models (OLMs) generating empatries by comprehending affective cues from multi-modal inputs and judging empathy of audio responses without relying on text transcription. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing models with audio output capabilities but is unreliable for evaluating fine-grained paralinguistic expressiveness. |
HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
An Wang, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Zhen Yang, Pinxue Zhao, Weidong Han, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Naoaki Okazaki, Cheng-zhong Xu
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts (MoE) models use homogeneous experts with diverse capacities, resulting in a lack of expert specialization and parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where experts differ in size and possess diverse capacities . they propose HMoE to encourage frequent activation of smaller experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms homogeneous homogenous MoE models on evaluation benchmarks and achieves lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters. |
OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu, Qiushi Sun, Zehao Li, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu, Fangzhi Xu, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Qingyun Li, Yu Qiao, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack visual-aware tutorial retrieval and historical visual context curation and pruning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an orchestrator and a Reflection-Memory Agent for robust automation. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across model scales. |
Premise-based Multimodal Reasoning: Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qingxiu Dong, Ziwei Qin, Heming Xia, Tian Feng, Shoujie Tong, Haoran Meng, Lin Xu, Zhongyu Wei, Weidong Zhan, Baobao Chang, Sujian Li, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Existing work in vision language cross-modal reasoning uses binary or multi-choice classification based on source image and textual query. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where a textual premise is the background presumption on each source image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a dataset of 15,360 movie screenshots and human-curated premise templates from 6 pre-defined categories. |
DEPN: Detecting and Editing Privacy Neurons in Pretrained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that pretrained language models memorize and regurgitate a significant portion of training data, including atypical data points that appear only once in the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to locate and erase risky neurons in order to eliminate the impact of privacy data in the model in batches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates the impact of privacy data in the model in batches without affecting the model's performance. |
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Extending LLM Context Window with Adaptive Grouped Positional Encoding: A Training-Free Method (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing long-context training data is scarce and requires substantial GPU resources for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free plug-and-play method to enhance long-context understanding in existing large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing LLMs on various tasks and surpasses baseline methods. |
Automatic Construction of Enterprise Knowledge Base (2021.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge bases are often based on bootstrapping entities from human-curated sources such as Wikipedia. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a knowledge base from enterprise documents with minimal human intervention by using deep learning models and classical machine learning techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is currently serving as part of a Microsoft 365 service. |
Causal Reasoning of Entities and Events in Procedural Texts (2023.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on entity state tracking or event reasoning is limited to procedural texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for causal reasoning of event plausibility and entity states . they represent entities as programming languages while prompting language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on human reasoning and event reasoning. |
End-to-End Optimization of LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Search Systems via Heterogeneous-Group-Based Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent reinforcement learning methods depend on large critic networks to evaluate joint actions, leading to instability and high memory costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize large language models for agent-specific roles . they propose combining agent-based frameworks with retrieval-augmented generation . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that multi-agent group policy optimization outperforms baselines in task performance and computational efficiency. |
SummaCoz: A Dataset for Improving the Interpretability of Factual Consistency Detection for Summarization (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Summarization is an important application of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They integrate human-annotated and model-generated natural language explanations to elucidate how a summary deviates and becomes inconsistent with its source article. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides rationales for its judgments and improves its accuracy significantly. |
VIRT: Improving Representation-based Text Matching via Virtual Interaction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that representation-based text matching methods suffer from performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual interaction mechanism that enables deep interaction between texts . they propose 'inteRacTion mechanism' that can be integrated into existing methods as plugins . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on six text matching benchmarks. |
End-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Coreference Resolution (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent neural network models for coreference resolution are usually trained with heuristic loss functions that are computed over a sequence of local decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning based coreference resolution model to directly optimize coreference evaluation metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the English OntoNotes v5.0 benchmark. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
TAG : Type Auxiliary Guiding for Code Comment Generation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing code comment generation approaches ignore type information of interpretation of the code, e.g., operator, string, etc. Existing approaches ignore the type information due to the hierarchical dependence among the type. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder framework which considers the source code as an N-ary tree with type information associated with each node. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a Type Auxiliary Guiding encoder-decoder framework and a type-restricted Decoder to resolve training difficulties. |
Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution on Discourse Structure (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms several baselines and achieves the competitive performance with the start-of-the-art baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to use discourse rhetorical structure constructor to construct tree structures to represent documents and a multi-layer perceptron to capture similarities of event mention pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves competitive performance with the start-of-the-art baselines. |
MemCoRL: Alternating Co-Optimization of Memory Retrieval and Utilization via Collaborative Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has proposed external memory modules for Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome the limitations of finite input length and obtain contextual memory beyond the current input. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage alternating co-optimization reinforcement learning method that optimizes evidence retrieval and utilization using semantic feedback and rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on lexical overlap and semantic similarity metrics, confirming the co-optimization in memory retrieval and memory utilization. |
ADELIE: Aligning Large Language Models on Information Extraction (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) struggle to follow complex instructions of IE tasks due to not being aligned with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose an aligned large language moDEL that effectively solves various IE tasks including closed IE, open IE and on-demand IE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance among open-source models. |
Domaino1s: Guiding LLM Reasoning for Explainable Answers in High-Stakes Domains (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) generate brief answers without reasoning processes and explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose supervised fine-tuning and tree search to enhance LLMs’ reasoning capabilities on domain tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on stock investment recommendation and legal reasoning QA tasks. |
A Contrastive Framework for Learning Sentence Representations from Pairwise and Triple-wise Perspective in Angular Space (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning sentence representations focus on constitution of positive and negative representation pairs and do not focus on training objective. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method to learn sentence representations using BERT-like pre-trained models . they use a pairwise discriminating power and a model to model the entailment relation of triplet sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on diverse sentence related tasks. |
SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering abilities of large language models (LLMs) however, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts and limited access to domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that equips large language models with joint capabilities of question answering and question generation for domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets across three different domains verify the efficacy of SimRAG over baselines by 1.2%–8.6%. |
Understanding the Dark Side of LLMs’ Intrinsic Self-Correction (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qingjie Zhang, Di Wang, Haoting Qian, Yiming Li, Tianwei Zhang, Minlie Huang, Ke Xu, Hewu Li, Liu Yan, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that LLMs’ intrinsic self-correction fails without oracle labels as feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to use one simple task and three complex tasks with state-of-the-art LLMs like ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek to interpret LLM's intrinsic self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reveal the dark side of LLMs’ intrinsic self-correction for different tasks, especially for those failure cases. |
AMR-TST: Abstract Meaning Representation-based Text Style Transfer (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic representation that can enhance natural language generation (NLG) by providing a logical semantic input. |
| Approach: | They propose an AMR-based text style transfer technique that converts source text to an AML graph and generates transferred text based on the AMR graph modified by a TST policy named style rewriting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results compared with baseline models in automatic and human evaluations. |
Curse of Knowledge: Your Guidance and Provided Knowledge are biasing LLM Judges in Complex Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Breakthrough from Nuance and Inconsistency: Enhancing Multimodal Sarcasm Detection with Context-Aware Self-Attention Fusion and Word Weight Calculation. (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sarcasm detection rely on feature concatenation to fuse different modalities or model inconsistencies among modalités. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Context-Aware Self-Attention Fusion to integrate local and momentary multimodal information into specific words to illustrate the inconsistencies between connotation and denotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an accuracy of 76.9 and an F1 score of 76.1 on the MUStARD dataset, surpassing the current state-of-the-art IWAN model by 1.7 and 1.6 respectively. |
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Sebastian Gehrmann, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Abinaya Mahendiran, Alex Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Aman Madaan, Angelina Mcmillan-major, Anna Shvets, Ashish Upadhyay, Bernd Bohnet, Bingsheng Yao, Bryan Wilie, Chandra Bhagavatula, Chaobin You, Craig Thomson, Cristina Garbacea, Dakuo Wang, Daniel Deutsch, Deyi Xiong, Di Jin, Dimitra Gkatzia, Dragomir Radev, Elizabeth Clark, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Filip Ginter, Genta Indra Winata, Hendrik Strobelt, Hiroaki Hayashi, Jekaterina Novikova, Jenna Kanerva, Jenny Chim, Jiawei Zhou, Jordan Clive, Joshua Maynez, João Sedoc, Juraj Juraska, Kaustubh Dhole, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Laura Perez Beltrachini, Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro, Lewis Tunstall, Li Zhang, Mahim Pushkarna, Mathias Creutz, Michael White, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Moussa Kamal Eddine, Nico Daheim, Nishant Subramani, Ondrej Dusek, Paul Pu Liang, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Qi Zhu, Ratish Puduppully, Reno Kriz, Rifat Shahriyar, Ronald Cardenas, Saad Mahamood, Salomey Osei, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Sanja Štajner, Sebastien Montella, Shailza Jolly, Simon Mille, Tahmid Hasan, Tianhao Shen, Tosin Adewumi, Vikas Raunak, Vipul Raheja, Vitaly Nikolaev, Vivian Tsai, Yacine Jernite, Ying Xu, Yisi Sang, Yixin Liu, Yufang Hou
| Challenge: | Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark to integrate new evaluation methods into existing evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation infrastructure bridges the gap between the advantages of leaderboards and in-depth and evolving evaluations by allowing model developers to benefit from each other's work. |
Does Acceleration Cause Hidden Instability in Vision Language Models? Uncovering Instance-Level Divergence Through a Large-Scale Empirical Study (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current acceleration evaluations focus on minimal overall performance degradation . however, accelerated models can exhibit significant changes in instance-level predictions . |
| Approach: | They investigate whether accelerated vision-Language Models can still give the same answers as before . they found that accelerated models changed original answers up to 20% of the time . |
| Outcome: | The results show that accelerated models changed their original answers up to 20% of the time. |
Language Representation Projection: Can We Transfer Factual Knowledge across Languages in Multilingual Language Models? (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multilingual pretrained models can recall factual knowledge without additional fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose two parameter-free language representation projection modules to transfer factual knowledge between English and non-English languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed modules improve factual knowledge retrieval accuracy and transferability across diverse non-English languages. |
KG-RAG: Enhancing GUI Agent Decision-Making via Knowledge Graph-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyi Guan, Jason Chun Lok Li, Zhijian Hou, Pingping Zhang, Donglai Xu, Yuzhi Zhao, Mengyang Wu, Jinpeng Chen, Thanh-Toan Nguyen, Pengfei Xian, Wenao Ma, Shengchao Qin, Graziano Chesi, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in GUI agents have limited app-specific knowledge of complex mobile tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Graph-driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework that transforms fragmented UTGs into structured vector databases for efficient real-time retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in a 75.8% success rate and 84.6% decision accuracy test across mobile apps. |
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
UniMoE-Audio: Unified Speech and Music Generation with Dynamic-Capacity Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenyu Liu, Yunxin li, Xuanyu Zhang, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Xinyu Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Haolan Chen, Fanbo Meng, Mingjun Zhao, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in unified multimodal models indicate a clear trend towards comprehensive content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified speech and music generation model built upon a novel framework . they propose specialized MoE architectures and curated training strategies to tackle data imbalances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on major speech and music generation benchmarks. |
PACE: Predictive Adaptive Context Extraction for Long-Horizon LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Discovery and Reinforcement of Tool-Integrated Reasoning Chains via Rollout Trees (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with computational capabilities have focused on short Chain-of-thought (CoT) integrating tool-use into long CoT remains underexplored due to the scarcity of training data and the challenge of integrating it without compromising the model’s intrinsic long-chain reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables spontaneous tool-use during long CoT reasoning without additional human annotation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on AIME and GPQA-Diamond show that DART significantly outperforms existing methods, successfully harmonizing tool execution with long CoT reasoning. |
Entity-level Interaction via Heterogeneous Graph for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for name-based entity recognition neglect the integrity of entity semantics and conduct cross-modal interaction at token-level. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal named entity recognition model that captures visual information and fuses it into tokens to rid non-entity tokens of visual noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures entity-related visual information and fuses it into tokens . it eliminates visual noise and makes non-entity tokens easily misidentified as entities . |
A2ATS: Retrieval-Based KV Cache Reduction via Windowed Rotary Position Embedding and Query-Aware Vector Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Junhui He, Junna Xing, Nan Wang, Rui Xu, Shangyu Wu, Peng Zhou, Qiang Liu, Chun Jason Xue, Qingan Li
| Challenge: | Long context large language models (LLMs) pose significant challenges for efficient serving due to the large memory footprint and high access overhead of KV cache. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based method to reduce the memory footprint of LLMs . they propose Windowed Rotary Position Embedding and query-aware vector quantization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve lower performance degradation with lower overhead compared to existing methods . it can reduce the memory footprint and access overhead of long context large language models . |
Momoka-RAG: MCTS-Organized Mapping of Knowledge Associations for Long-Document Retrieval Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that rely on fixed-length chunking are unsuitable for long-document tasks due to their passive and mechanical approach to knowledge structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search to proactively uncover connections among chunks and construct optimal semantic information paths with the objective of completing semantic relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves higher precision while maintaining competitive recall compared to other RAG frameworks. |
Towards Event Extraction with Massive Types: LLM-based Collaborative Annotation and Partitioning Extraction (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Event Extraction (EE) is a long-standing target, but lacks an efficient and effective annotation framework to construct the corresponding datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based collaborative annotation framework that refines annotations of triggers from distant supervision and carries out argument annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the largest EE dataset to date . it achieves the F1 scores of 90% and 85.3% on the human-annotated test set . |
A Multi-Expert Structural-Semantic Hybrid Framework for Unveiling Historical Patterns in Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yimin Deng, Yuxia Wu, Yejing Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Li Zhu, Qidong Liu, Derong Xu, Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Xueming Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph structure learning or semantic reasoning, lacking the capability to capture the inherent differences between historical and non-historical events. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph reasoning framework that integrates both structural and semantic information to guide the reasoning process for different events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates structural and semantic information to predict future events . it can provide evidence for many downstream tasks, including situation analysis and political decision making . |
From Fake to Real: Mitigating Out-of-Distribution Bias in In-Context Learning via Feedback Supervision from Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is one of the most common methods for complex Natural Language Understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses model confidence and perturbation perplexity to enhance the quality of pseudo-labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces OOD biases by avoiding direct use of source data. |
TP-Link: Fine-grained Pre-Training for Text-to-SQL Parsing with Linking Information (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ziqiang Liu, Shujie Li, Zefeng Cai, Xiangyu Li, Yunshui Li, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training frameworks for text-to-SQL parsing have shown inherent differences in distributions between tables and plain text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve context-dependent Text-to-SQL parsing by leveraging Linking information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two leading downstream benchmarks. |
Distinguish Confusing Law Articles for Legal Judgment Prediction (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to assist legal judgment are limited and can't solve confusing charges issue. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model to predict a legal judgment based on a textual description of the case and a graph neural network to learn subtle differences between confusing law articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn subtle differences between confusing law articles and extract effective discriminative features from fact descriptions. |
Empowering Backbone Models for Visual Text Generation with Input Granularity Control and Glyph-Aware Training (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
MLeVLM: Improve Multi-level Progressive Capabilities based on Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Visual Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dexuan Xu, Yanyuan Chen, Jieyi Wang, Yue Huang, Hanpin Wang, Zhi Jin, Hongxing Wang, Weihua Yue, Jing He, Hang Li, Yu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing MVQA models ignore multi-level progressive capabilities due to unspecific data and plain architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level visual language model for medical visual question answering (MVQA) which covers multi- level questions and answers as well as reasoning processes from visual clues to semantic cognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing medical multimodal large language models on a multi-level instruction dataset and a feature alignment module. |
Semantically Comprehensive Token Pruning in LVLMs via Maximizing Concept Coverage (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing visual token pruning methods leverage simple metrics derived from human experience, such as attention or similarity, to rank and select tokens within a highly entangled feature space. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel visual token pruning method that uses a concept-driven paradigm to quantify the Marginal Semantic Gain of each token's contribution to uncovered concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in a concept-driven model while maintaining semantic completeness. |
S2-MAD: Breaking the Token Barrier to Enhance Multi-Agent Debate Efficiency (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuting Zeng, Weizhe Huang, Lei Jiang, Tongxuan Liu, XiTai Jin, Chen Tianying Tiana, Jing Li, Xiaohua Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit limitations when handling complex mathematical reasoning and logical inference tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparsification strategy to reduce token costs within Multi-agent Debate (MAD) this strategy minimizes ineffective exchanges of information and unproductive discussions among agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces token costs by up to 94.5% while maintaining performance degradation below 2.0%. |
CasEE: A Joint Learning Framework with Cascade Decoding for Overlapping Event Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods assume that events appear in sentences without overlaps . overlapping event extraction is a challenging task in natural language understanding . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework with cascade decoding for overlapping event extraction . they sequentially perform type detection, trigger extraction and argument extraction based on the specific former prediction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a public event extraction benchmark . it sequentially performs type detection, trigger extraction and argument extraction . |
RAP: Robustness-Aware Perturbations for Defending against Backdoor Attacks on NLP Models (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a serious threat to the safety of reusing deep neural networks (DNNs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient online defense mechanism based on robustness-aware perturbations to distinguish poisoned and clean samples to defend against backdoor attacks on natural language processing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better defending performance and lower computational costs than existing defense methods. |
Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for learning and deployment of neural dialogue models have been used for online chit-chat scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical inductive transfer framework to learn and deploy dialogue skills continually and efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable performance under deployment-friendly model capacity. |
Pluggable Neural Machine Translation Models via Memory-augmented Adapters (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years, neural machine translation systems are often developed with large-scale parallel data extracted from the Web. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-augmented adapter to steer pretrained neural machine translation models in a pluggable manner by combining model representations and retrieved results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several representative pluggable baselines on style- and domain-specific experiments. |
Adaptive Gating in Mixture-of-Experts based Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models employ a fixed gating network where each token is computed by the same number of experts. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible training strategy that allows tokens to be processed by a variable number of experts based on expert probability distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces training time and inference quality while maintaining sparsity while maintaining inference accuracy. |
Word class flexibility: A deep contextualized approach (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on word class flexibility have been fraught with difficulties in quantifying it accurately and at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify word class flexibility in 37 languages using contextualized word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method builds on recent work in contextualized word embeddings to quantify semantic shift between word classes and uncovers shared tendencies in class flexibility across languages. |
MTR-DuplexBench: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Round Conversations for Full-Duplex Speech Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating single-round interactions, neglecting other critical aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate full-duplex speech language models in multi-round settings . they segment continuous full-dual dialogues into discrete turns for evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compared full-duplex speech language models with full-dual speech models . the results show that the models perform better in multi-round settings than standard models compared to benchmarks . |
Faithfulness vs. Safety: Evaluating LLM Behavior Under Counterfactual Medical Evidence (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kaijie Mo, Siddhartha Venkatayogi, Chantal Shaib, Ramez Kouzy, Wei Xu, Byron C Wallace, Junyi Jessy Li
| Challenge: | Existing models are overwhelmingly accurate when presented with counterfactual medical evidence . prior work explored conflicts between context and LLM parametric knowledge in the general domain . |
| Approach: | They construct a counterfactual medical QA dataset that requires models to answer clinical comparison questions with evidence from randomized controlled trials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overemphasizes the latter, and the model overestimates the latter. |
GOME: Grounding-based Metaphor Binding With Conceptual Elaboration For Figurative Language Illustration (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal models are unable to illustrate figurative language based on literal objects, ignoring the underlying groundings and associations across disparate metaphorical domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a grounding-based method for metaphor illustration that integrates metaphorical knowledge into systematic instructions for existing large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing LLMs, diffusion models, or their direct collaboration. |
DocEE: A Large-Scale and Fine-grained Benchmark for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets focus on sentence-level event extraction, but document-level EE is limited due to the lack of large-scale and practical training and evaluation datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event extraction dataset with 27,000+ events and 180,000+ arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 27,000+ events, 180,000+ arguments and large-scale manual annotations, fine-grained argument types and application-oriented settings. |
GenesisFunc: Multi-Agent Data Generation for Accurate and Generalizable Function-Calling (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) extend their capabilities through function-calling (FC) however, obtaining and annotating real function-called data is challenging, and synthetic data from existing pipelines suffers from unreliable APIs, limited tool scalability, insufficient diversity, and weak quality control. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for generating FC training data using reliable tools and a multi-agent framework that supports a dialogue generation system that produces conversations spanning diverse scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms open-source models in in-domain FC performance and out-of-domain generalization while reaching FC capabilities comparable to some of the latest API-based models. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
MTAVG-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multi-Talker Dialogue-Centric Audio-Video Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yanghao Zhou, Haitian Li, Rexar Lin, Heyan Huang, Jinxing Zhou, Changsen Yuan, Tian Lan, Ziqin Zhou, Yudong Li, Jiajun Xu, Jingyun Liao, YiMing Cheng, Xuefeng Chen, Xian-Ling Mao, Yousheng Feng
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation are largely designed for human-recorded videos or single-speaker settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-driven diagnostic benchmark for multi-talker dialogue-centric audio-video generation. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark evaluates multi-speaker dialogue generation at four levels: audio-visual signal fidelity, temporal attribute consistency, social interaction, and cinematic expression. |
ArcLight: A Lightweight LLM Inference Architecture for Many-Core CPUs (2026.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for large language model (LLM) inference on CPUs overlook overhead of cross-NUMA memory access. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight LLM inference architecture designed from the ground up for many-core CPUs. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ArcLight surpasses the performance ceiling of mainstream frameworks, achieving up to 46% higher inference throughput. |
Topic Tensor Network for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition in Chinese (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, most studies on implicit discourse relation recognition use sentence-level representations . Chinese is a paratactic language that tends to pro-drop clause connectives . |
| Approach: | They propose a topic tensor network to recognize Chinese implicit discourse relations with both sentence-level and topic-level representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in micro and macro F1 scores on a Chinese discourse corpus. |
The UIR Uncertainty Corpus for Chinese: Annotating Chinese Microblog Corpus for Uncertainty Identification from Social Media (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Uncertainty identification is an important semantic processing task, critical to the quality of information in terms of factuality in many NLP techniques and applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate Chinese microblogs with an open uncertainty corpus . they propose to use contextual uncertain semantics rather than traditional cue-phrases to identify uncertainty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus can be used to identify uncertainty in social media texts. |
Transforming Visual Scene Graphs to Image Captions (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xu Yang, Jiawei Peng, Zihua Wang, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Zhangzikang Li, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate captions using image captioning are based on multi-head attention (MHA) |
| Approach: | They propose to transform scene graphs into more descriptive captions by using multi-head attention to build a Graph Neural Network (GNN) . they construct a Mixture-of-Expert (MOE)-based decoder where each expert is built on MHA for discriminating the graph embeddings to generate different kinds of words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate captions from multiple visual features and objects . it is based on a mixture-of-expert (MOE)-based decoder based upon MHA . |
MIO: A Foundation Model on Multimodal Tokens (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zekun Moore Wang, King Zhu, Chunpu Xu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Jiaheng Liu, Yibo Zhang, Jessie Wang, Ning Shi, Siyu Li, Yizhi Li, Haoran Que, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yuanxing Zhang, Ge Zhang, Ke Xu, Jie Fu, Wenhao Huang
| Challenge: | Existing models lack multimodal understanding capabilities, resulting in closed-source model that does not support multimodal interleaved sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a foundation model built on multimodal tokens capable of understanding and generating speech, text, images, and videos in an end-to-end, autoregressive manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to understand speech, text, images, and videos in an end-to-end, autoregressive manner. |
Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zheng, Hongyi Guo, Zhihan Liu, Xiaoying Zhang, Yuanshun Yao, Xiaojun Xu, Zhaoran Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yang Liu, Hang Li
| Challenge: | Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values. |
| Approach: | They propose an alignment method based on a two-agent game consisting of an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a two-agent game with an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
Retrieval, Reasoning, Re-ranking: A Context-Enriched Framework for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing embedding-based methods rely on triples in the KG, which is vulnerable to specious relation patterns and long-tail entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-enriched framework for KGC that uses a large language model to generate potential answers for each query triple. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on FB15k237 and WN18RR datasets. |
Translation Canvas: An Explainable Interface to Pinpoint and Analyze Translation Systems (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tools for evaluation of translation models focus on high-level metrics like BLEU or COMET scores, which are time-consuming and prone to error. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that provides a detailed analysis of translation models and a user-friendly interface. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit shows superior performance over COMET and SacreBLEU packages under enjoybility and understandbility criteria. |
Fact-based Content Weighting for Evaluating Abstractive Summarisation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarisation is notoriously hard to evaluate since word-overlap-based metrics are insufficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation metric which is based on fact-level content weighting, relating the facts of the document to the facts in the summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric is highly correlated to human perception and compares favourably to the recent manual highlight-based metric of Hardy et al. |
ACEBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM Tool Usage (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chen Chen, Xinlong Hao, Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang, Xingshan Zeng, Shuai Yu, Dexun Li, Yuefeng Huang, Xiangcheng Liu, Wang Xinzhi, Wu Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs’ tool usage face several limitations: limited evaluation scenarios, lacking assessments in real multi-turn dialogue contexts; narrow evaluation dimensions, with insufficient detailed assessments of how LLM use tools; and reliance on LLM or real API executions for evaluation, which introduces significant overhead. |
| Approach: | ACEBench is a benchmark for evaluating tool usage in Large Language Models . it categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
| Outcome: | ACEBench categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
Dual Reader-Parser on Hybrid Textual and Tabular Evidence for Open Domain Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing generative models for open-domain question answering focus on generating direct answers from unstructured textual information, but a large amount of knowledge is stored in structured databases, and need to be accessed using query languages such as SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid framework that takes both textual and tabular evidences as input and generates either direct answers or SQL queries depending on which form could better answer the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on OpenSQuAD datasets and can generate SQL queries on the associated databases to obtain the final answers. |
The Art of (Mis)alignment: How Fine-Tuning Methods Effectively Misalign and Realign LLMs in Post-Training (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zhang, Hongwei Li, Yun Shen, Xinyue Shen, Wenbo Jiang, Guowen Xu, Yang Liu, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang
| Challenge: | Misaligned large language models can magnify harm by exploiting them to undermine safety . et al., 2022b; Bai e.t., 2023): misalignment, realignment and model-specific resistance are important . |
| Approach: | They evaluate four methods to identify a mechanism asymmetry between attack and defense . they find that ORPO is most effective for misalignment, but DPO excels in realignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show a mechanism asymmetry between attack and defense . the proposed methods excel in realignment, but at the expense of model utility . |
Investigating Learning Dynamics of BERT Fine-Tuning (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that the fine-tuning process improves performance on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose two new pre-training tasks to improve the model performance on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on a wide array of NLP tasks. |
ChatHF: Collecting Rich Human Feedback from Real-time Conversations (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | We present an interactive framework for chatbot evaluation that integrates configurable annotation within a chat interface. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive framework for chatbot evaluation that integrates configurable annotation within a chat interface. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports fine-grained error detection and human evaluation at the same time. |
Unraveling the Mystery: Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks Via Unearthing Real Intention (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to elusive and implicit intentions, causing security risks and compromising user experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect and mitigate implicit jailbreak attacks using LLMs by unearthing real intentions and a greedy gradient-based algorithm to remove the least important parts of a sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces attacks success rate and Harmful Score while maintaining overall model performance. |
OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxiang Zheng, Shichao Sun, Lin Qiu, Dongyu Ru, Cheng Jiayang, Xuefeng Li, Jifan Lin, Binjie Wang, Yun Luo, Renjie Pan, Yang Xu, Qingkai Min, Zizhao Zhang, Yiwen Wang, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Global scientific publications are growing annually by about 4%-5% (Pinedo et al., 2024). |
| Approach: | They introduce an AI-assisted platform that answers diverse questions from researchers using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) they develop various tools to understand queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine answers. |
| Outcome: | OpenResearcher is built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. |
Large Language Models as Reader for Bias Detection (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional methods analyze text from the writer’s perspective, leaving the reader’s viewpoint underexplored. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models can be leveraged as readers for bias detection by generating reader-perspective comments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to GPT4's in detecting bias in media content. |
Calibrating Factual Knowledge in Pretrained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that Pretrained Language Models can store factual knowledge, but facts stored in PLMs are not always correct. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight method to calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to calibrate factual knowledge in PLMs without re-training from scratch. |
Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenhao Zhu, Hongyi Liu, Qingxiu Dong, Jingjing Xu, Shujian Huang, Lingpeng Kong, Jiajun Chen, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual machine translation (MMT) However, the multilingual translation ability of LLMs remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They evaluate eight popular LLMs including ChatGPT and GPT-4 to determine their performance in multilingual machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate moderate translation even on zero-resource languages and cross-lingual exemplars can provide better task guidance for low-resourced translation than exemplar in the same language pairs. |
KBioXLM: A Knowledge-anchored Biomedical Multilingual Pretrained Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for multilingual biomedical training are monolingual, resulting in limited cross-lingual capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that transforms a multilingual biomedical corpus into a biomedically domain using a knowledge-anchored approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms monolingual and multilingual models in cross-lingual scenarios. |
Novel Slot Detection With an Incremental Setting (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current dialogue systems face diverse user requests and rapid change domains, making quickly adapt to scenarios with previous unseen slot types becomes a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an incremental novel slot detection task which separates the dialogue system to deal with novel types as two major phrases: 1) model discovers unknown slots; 2) training model to possess the capability to handle new classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes catastrophic forgetting during the process of INSD and is highly effective. |
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
Fine-Grained Modeling of Narrative Context: A Coherence Perspective via Retrospective Questions (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a novel graph for narrative comprehension captures coherence between passages in narratives . end-to-end paradigms are effective for comprehension tasks, but may not be sufficient for all comprehension scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph dubbed NarCo which explicitly depicts task-agnostic coherence dependencies that are ready to be consumed by downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph is practically instantiated by LLMs without human annotations. |
Exploring Deductive and Inductive Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models in Procedural Planning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Deductive and inductive reasoning are fundamental components of human cognition . authors present a benchmark to assess their performance in procedural planning . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the deductive and inductive reasoning abilities of LLMs . they propose IMSE to enable LLM to generate multiple similar procedural plans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves inductive reasoning abilities of LLMs, the authors show . they show that LLM models show excellent deductive reasoning capabilities but suboptimal inductive performance. |
DocEE-zh: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Chinese Document-level Event Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese document-level event extraction is still largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese document-level event extraction dataset with over 36,000 events and 210,000 arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes over 36,000 events and more than 210,000 arguments . it is an extension of the DocEE dataset, utilizing the same event schema and annotated by human experts. |
Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruohong Zhang, Liangke Gui, Zhiqing Sun, Yihao Feng, Keyang Xu, Yuanhan Zhang, Di Fu, Chunyuan Li, Alexander G Hauptmann, Yonatan Bisk, Yiming Yang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that direct preference optimization (DPO) can be effective in generalizing large language models, but its effectiveness in video domain remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes detailed video captions as a proxy of video content to enable language models to incorporate this information as supporting evidence for scoring video Question Answering (QA) predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it can be used to align language models with video content and improves performance on open-ended video QA tasks. |
Set Learning for Generative Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to employ sequence-to-sequence models to solve IE tasks have been focused on a single problem: structured objects are an unordered set, resulting in a potential order bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Sequen) model that considers multiple permutations of structured objects to optimize set probability approximately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves existing frameworks on vast tasks and datasets. |
Towards Faithful Industrial RAG: A Reinforced Co-adaptation Framework for Advertising QA (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Wenwei Li, Ming Xu, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA in industrial environments are inherently relational and often updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes retrieval and generation through two components: Graph-aware Retrieval and evidence-constrained reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on an internal advertising QA dataset show consistent gains across expert-judged dimensions including accuracy, completeness, safety, and URL validity. |
Key Fact as Pivot: A Two-Stage Model for Low Resource Table-to-Text Generation (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation use encoder-decoder framework, but lack of large parallel data is a problem for many domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to separate table-to-text generation into two stages: key fact prediction and surface realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 27.34 BLEU score with only 1,000 parallel data, while the baseline model only achieves 9.71 BLUE score. |
E-EVAL: A Comprehensive Chinese K-12 Education Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jinchang Hou, Chang Ao, Haihong Wu, Xiangtao Kong, Zhigang Zheng, Daijia Tang, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang
| Challenge: | despite the rapid development of Large Language Models, there is no dedicated benchmark for evaluating LLMs in Chinese K-12 education. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a benchmark specifically tailored for Chinese K-12 education. |
| Outcome: | EVAL is the first evaluation benchmark specifically tailored for Chinese K-12 education. |
World Models with Hints of Large Language Models for Goal Achieving (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods address this by adding intrinsic rewards, but they fail to provide meaningful guidance in long-horizon decision-making tasks with large state and action spaces lacking purposeful exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal model-based RL approach that integrates the proposed hinting subgoals into the model rollouts to encourage goal discovery and reaching in challenging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in challenging, sparse-reward environments such as HomeGrid, Crafter, and Minecraft by 41.8%, 21.1%, and 9.9%. |
Planning and Editing What You Retrieve for Enhanced Tool Learning (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating external tools with Large Language Models fall short on effectively shortlisting relevant tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a plan-and-retrieve and edit-and ground paradigms for LLMs that decompose complex queries into actionable tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigms significantly improve recall and NDCG in tool retrieval tasks, surpassing current state-of-the-art models. |
Contextual Representation Learning beyond Masked Language Modeling (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | masked language models adopt sampled embeddings as anchors to estimate and inject contextual semantics to representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation learning approach that uses embeddings as anchors to model contextual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5x speedup and 1.2 points average improvement over MLM. |
Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-goal navigation fail to extract informative visual cues, leading agents to wander around. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both simulation and real-world environments. |
WindowsWorld: A Process-Centric Benchmark of Autonomous GUI Agents in Professional Cross-Application Environments (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents perform poorly on multi-application tasks, stalling at early sub-goals. |
| Approach: | They propose to assess GUI Agents on complex multi-step tasks that mirror real-world professions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contains 181 tasks with an average of 5.0 sub-goals across 17 common desktop applications, of which 78% are inherently multi-application. |
ICON: Improving Inter-Report Consistency in Radiology Report Generation via Lesion-aware Mixup Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to radiology report generation lack inter-report consistency, exhibiting biases towards common patterns and susceptibility to lesion variants. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which improves the inter-report consistency of radiology report generation by extracting lesions from input images and examining their characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system captures similarities in semantically equivalent lesions and can be used to generate reports for two semantically identical cases. |
Action Boundary Blindness: When LLM Agents Cannot Tell Where One Action Ends and Another Begins (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language model agents exhibit action boundary blindness, granularity confusion, scope creep and boundary ambiguity . Explicit boundary prompting improves ABS by 0.08–0.13 across all models . |
| Approach: | They propose four automatic metrics that require no human annotation to detect boundary blindness . they propose to use a multi-label attribution framework to validate the models . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with seven large language model agents show that the best model achieves only 0.424 ABS . Explicit Boundary Prompting improves ABS by 0.08–0.13 across all models . |
SAMem: State-Aware Memory as a Fine-Grained Memory for LLM Agents in Decision-Making (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing experiential memory approaches rely on task-level memory, but this lacks the situational alignment required for complex multi-step decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a new fine-grained memory paradigm that aligns memory retrieval with the current state instead of storing and reusing globally shared experiences. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on complex decision-making benchmarks show that the proposed state-aware memory outperforms existing experiential memory approaches and significantly improves task-solving efficiency. |
HAD: HAllucination Detection Language Models Based on a Comprehensive Hallucination Taxonomy (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | relying on large language models for information has raised concerns about reliability and accuracy of outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination taxonomy with 11 categories for various NLG tasks and propose HAllucination Detection models which integrate hallucinism detection, span-level identification, and correction into a single inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baselines on HaluEval, FactCHD, and FaithBench, confirming their robustness and versatility. |
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Improve Low-Resource Machine Translation Leveraging Domain Monolingual Data (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning domain adaptation have overfitting problem in low-resource domains . lack of parallel data makes it difficult for model to learn domain-specific knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a Reinforcement Learning Domain Adaptation method for Neural Machine Translation that uses in-domain source monolingual data to make up for the lack of parallel data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can alleviate overfitting and reinforce the model to learn domain-specific knowledge. |
SegTune: Structured and Fine-Grained Control for Song Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuejiao Wang, Zihao Ji, Pengfei Cai, Xu Li, Haorui Zheng, Zewen Song, Zhongliang Liu, Chen Zhang, Pengfei Wan
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural song generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from lyrics and global textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to specify local musical descriptions aligned to song segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in musicality and controllability. |
Low-Resource Response Generation with Template Prior (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing open domain response generation models are limited to paired data, but are less explored in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a neural response generation model with unpaired data and paired data as prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in both automatic and human evaluation when only a few pairs are available. |
LLMs as World Models: Data-Driven and Human-Centered Pre-Event Simulation for Disaster Impact Assessment (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promise in simulating complex scenarios. |
| Approach: | They examine multiple LLMs to proactively estimate perceived earthquake impacts using multimodal datasets and multimodal imagery. |
| Outcome: | The framework generates Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) predictions at zip code and county scales using multimodal datasets. |
AutoAlign: Get Your LLM Aligned with Minimal Annotations (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xinyu Lu, Dong Xu, Chunkang Zhang, Xinyan Guan, Junxiang Wang, Qingyu Zhang, Pengbo Wang, Yingzhi Mao, Hao Xiang, Xueru Wen, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Automated Alignment (ALM) is a set of algorithms designed to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intentions and values while minimizing manual intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit that integrates mainstream automated algorithms through a consistent interface and an accessible workflow supporting one-click execution for prompt synthesis and automatic alignment signal construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables easy reproduction of existing results through extensive benchmarks and facilitates the development of novel approaches via modular components. |
Beyond Benchmarks: A Capability-Based Maturity Model for Systematic AI Integration in Hospitals (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in standardized tests focused on medical knowledge recall, but not in real-world healthcare scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a "capability-based hospital AI Maturity Model" framework that categorizes capabilities into distinct maturity levels . medical artificial intelligence is currently at a critical transition stage from technical verification to deep clinical integration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides a clear, stepwise evolutionary path for hospitals from foundational infrastructure construction to ubiquitous intelligence. |
Learning Architectures from an Extended Search Space for Language Modeling (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
LET: Leveraging Error Type Information for Grammatical Error Correction (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for grammatical error correction (GEC) are mainly divided into detection-based and end-to-end generative models. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework which Leverages Error Type (LET) information in the generation process to introduce more convincing error type information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on various datasets by a clear margin. |
On the Faithfulness for E-commerce Product Summarization (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | e-commerce product summarization requires consistency between product attributes and summary . inconsistent product summaries can mislead users and decrease public credibility . |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate e-commerce product summaries with product attributes . they encode product attribute table and constrain attribute words to be presented only through copying . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the faithfulness of e-commerce product summarization tasks. |
FanChuan: A Multilingual and Graph-Structured Benchmark For Parody Detection and Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yilun Zheng, Sha Li, Fangkun Wu, Yang Ziyi, Lin Hongchao, Zhichao Hu, Cai Xinjun, Ziming Wang, Jinxuan Chen, Sitao Luan, Jiahao Xu, Lihui Chen
| Challenge: | Parody is an emerging phenomenon on social media, where individuals imitate a role or position opposite to their own . limited available data and deficient diversity in current datasets hinder study of parody . |
| Approach: | They build a dataset of parody users and annotated comments from both English and Chinese corpora to test parody detection and comment sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets provide richer contextual information, which is lacking in existing datasets. |
Unlocking the Power of Large Language Models for Entity Alignment (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xuhui Jiang, Yinghan Shen, Zhichao Shi, Chengjin Xu, Wei Li, Zixuan Li, Jian Guo, Huawei Shen, Yuanzhuo Wang
| Challenge: | Entity Alignment (EA) is a crucial step in unifying data from heterogeneous sources and plays a critical role in data-driven AI applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates large language models to improve EA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates large language models (LLMs) to improve EA accuracy while preserving efficiency. |
Muffin: Mitigating Unhelpfulness in Emotional Support Conversations with Multifaceted AI Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that emotional support conversation models generate unhelpful responses that can hinder their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework called Mitigating unhelpfulness with multifaceted AI feedback for emot io nal support (Muffin) it uses a multifaceted feedback module to assess helpfulness model responses across various facets of emotional support and contrasts helpful and unhelpful responses generated by the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the likelihood of unhelpful responses by comparing helpful and unhelpfully responses generated by previous models to improve response fluency and relevance. |
ToW: Thoughts of Words Improve Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
ZiNet: Linking Chinese Characters Spanning Three Thousand Years (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | tens of thousands of ancient characters must be deciphered by experts to interpret unearthed documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a diachronic Chinese knowledge base to help researchers discover glyph similar characters by measuring glyph similarities between ancient Chinese characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows strong correlations between the scores obtained from the method and from human experts. |
The CRECIL Corpus: a New Dataset for Extraction of Relations between Characters in Chinese Multi-party Dialogues (2022.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yuru Jiang, Yang Xu, Yuhang Zhan, Weikai He, Yilin Wang, Zixuan Xi, Meiyun Wang, Xinyu Li, Yu Li, Yanchao Yu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets focus on relation extraction between two entities in one sentence, and some focus on cross-sentence relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese multi-party dialogue dataset for automatic extraction of dialogue-based character relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset extracts relationships between 140 entities on the CRECIL corpus and another existing relation extraction corpus. |
LAMBDA: Large Language Model-Based Data Augmentation for Multi-Modal Machine Translation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-modal machine translation methods are underperforming compared to pre-trained models due to lack of triplet training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal machine translation method that integrates images and visual modality to enhance language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enrich the original samples and expand the dataset without requiring external images and text. |
Exposing Numeracy Gaps: A Benchmark to Evaluate Fundamental Numerical Abilities in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haoyang Li, Xuejia Chen, Zhanchao Xu, Darian Li, Nicole Hu, Fei Teng, Yiming Li, Luyu Qiu, Chen Jason Zhang, Li Qing, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on linguistic competence or structured mathematical problem-solving, neglecting fundamental numerical reasoning required in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate numerical capabilities for large language models . they use a dataset to assess number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates six fundamental numerical capabilities: number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. |
Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fu Cheng, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-constituency applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can scale up the context window of large language models to perform in-depth analysis of multiple long documents. |
Understanding the Repeat Curse in Large Language Models from a Feature Perspective (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from repetitive text generation, a phenomenon we refer to as the ”Repeat Curse”. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to induce and analyze the Repeat Curse in large language models by using mechanistic interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method induces and analyzes the Repeat Curse in large language models using mechanistic interpretability. |
AwarenessBench: Assessing Cognitive Capabilities of Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaojian Li, Rongwu Xu, Tianyun Zhang, Yue Wang, Shuo Chen, Qiner Lyu, Briana Zhang, Peiran Yang, Kyle Xue Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Yu Wang, Wei Xu
| Challenge: | Language models exhibit increasingly consciousness-like behaviors, requiring a baseline to evaluate their cognitive abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the cognitive abilities of language models (LMs) they compare 18 state-of-the-art LMs to human models in metacognition, self-awareness, social awareness and situational awareness . |
| Outcome: | Evaluating 18 state-of-the-art LMs, they find they consistently surpass baselines . but most models fall short in metacognition and self-awareness, the study finds . |
Towards Better Chain-of-Thought: A Reflection on Effectiveness and Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to recall extra information from the question to enhance CoT generation and evaluate CoTs based on their information gain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both the faithfulness and effectiveness of CoT and evaluates it based on their information gain. |
Narrative Order Aware Story Generation via Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing storytelling systems suffer from insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative order aware framework to generate coherent stories with flashbacks . they propose 'bidirectional pretraining model with Optimal Transport Reward' to improve quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates coherent stories with flashbacks with a novel optimal transport reward. |
Manual Evaluation Matters: Reviewing Test Protocols of Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tianyu Gao, Xu Han, Yuzhuo Bai, Keyue Qiu, Zhiyu Xie, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Distantly supervised relation extraction (RE) has attracted much attention in the past few years . previous methods to evaluate models manually or directly on autolabeled data have produced inaccurate evaluations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use distant supervision to generate large-scale autolabeled data . they build manually-annotated test sets for two DS-RE datasets and evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces 53% wrong labels at the entity pair level in the popular NYT10 dataset. |
Adaption-of-Thought: Learning Question Difficulty Improves Large Language Models for Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods do not differentiate question difficulty when designing prompting methods for them. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive method to improve large language models for reasoning problems by measuring question difficulty and tailoring demonstration set construction and difficulty-adapted retrieval strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows an absolute improvement of up to 5.5% on arithmetic reasoning, 7.4% on symbolic reasoning, and 2.3% on commonsense reasoning. |
DiffusionNER: Boundary Diffusion for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks are fundamental to many structured information extraction tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a named entity recognition task that uses a boundary-denoising diffusion process to denoise noisy spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable or even better performance than previous state-of-the-art models on flat and nested datasets. |
MATINF: A Jointly Labeled Large-Scale Dataset for Classification, Question Answering and Summarization (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets labeled for one task hinder multi-task learning . task-specific data make models learn task-related leakage features rather than meaningful knowledge that could generalize to other tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to jointly label large-scale NLP dataset MATINF . it contains 1.07 million question-answer pairs with human-labeled categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is applicable for classification, question answering, and summarization. |
To Code or not to Code? Adaptive Tool Integration for Math Language Models via Expectation-Maximization (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tools that integrate chain-of-thought reasoning and code execution lack metacognitive awareness to integrate tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergizes structured exploration with off-policy RL optimization to create a cycle between metacognitive tool-use decisions and evolving capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over 11% on MATH500 and 9.4% on AIME without o1-like CoT. |
PREE: Towards Harmless and Adaptive Fingerprint Editing in Large Language Models via Knowledge Prefix Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing black-box fingerprinting techniques rely on overfitting high-perplexity trigger patterns . experimental results show that model editing in the fingerprint domain exhibits unique advantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-enhanced fingerprint editing framework that encodes copyright information into parameter offsets through dual-channel knowledge edit to achieve covert embedding of fingerprint features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model editing framework achieves 90% trigger precision in mainstream architectures . the proposed model editor achieves the 90% accuracy in mainstream models . |
Query and Output: Generating Words by Querying Distributed Word Representations for Paraphrase Generation (N18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models tend to memorize words instead of learning meaning of words . existing models tend not to model semantic information, resulting in incorrect sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model that generates words by querying distributed word representations . they evaluate model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks, namely text simplification and short abstractive summarization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on these benchmark datasets . |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Towards Open-World Product Attribute Mining: A Lightly-Supervised Approach (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing task setting for attribute mining on e-commerce products is closed-world, but recent work has moved towards open-world aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a task setting for attribute mining on e-commerce products that uses a high-quality seed attribute set bootstrapped from existing resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses baselines on existing attributes by 12 F1 and discovers values from 39% new attributes. |
Incorporating Review-missing Interactions for Generative Explainable Recommendation (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models of explainable recommendation use user reviews as ground truths, but in practice, a large amount of users may not leave reviews after purchasing items. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate user preferences into explainable recommender models by leveraging generative models to predict the missing reviews and then training the model based on all the predicted and original reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the explanation quality on three publicly available datasets. |
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
ProxyQA: An Alternative Framework for Evaluating Long-Form Text Generation with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haochen Tan, Zhijiang Guo, Zhan Shi, Lu Xu, Zhili Liu, Yunlong Feng, Xiaoguang Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Linqi Song
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models are labor-intensive and lack efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework dedicated to assessing long-text generation that includes in-depth human-curated meta-questions spanning various domains . they use a set of proxy-quests with pre-annotated answers to assess the content's quality by incorporating the generated texts as contextual background. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the quality of long-text content by matching it with references through human evaluation or automated metrics. |
Vocabulary Learning via Optimal Transport for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that VOLT beats widely-used vocabularies in diverse scenarios, including WMT-14 English-German translation, TED bilingual translation, and TED multilingual translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a token dictionary solution that can be used without trial training to find the best dictionary with a proper size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution beats widely-used vocabularies in English-German translation, TED bilingual translation, and TED multilingual translation. |
RAR2: Retrieval-Augmented Medical Reasoning via Thought-Driven Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on refining queries without modeling the reasoning process, limiting their ability to retrieve and integrate clinically relevant knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework that improves Reasoning-Augmented Retrieval and Retri-Agmented Reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms RAG baselines on biomedical question answering datasets. |
V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Jiapeng Wang, YiFan Zhang, Zhuoma GongQue, Chong Sun, Yida Xu, Yadong Xue, Ye Tian, Zhimin Bao, Lan Yang, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Deciphering oracle bone scripts using AI technology is not an overnight task due to the evolution of written language over millennia. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) for interpreting Oracle Bone Script (OBS). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability. |
Rethinking Stealthiness of Backdoor Attack against NLP Models (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks are not stealthy to system deployers or users. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel backdoor attack method based on negative data augmentation and modifying word embeddings that is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
Bot-Adversarial Dialogue for Safe Conversational Agents (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new method for evaluating chatbot safety is proposed to mimic human-generated data . a bot-adversarial dialogue model learns undesirable features from this data, a study finds . |
| Approach: | They propose a human-and-model-in-the-loop framework for evaluating toxicity of chatbots . they propose two methods for safe conversational agents by either training on data or ”baking-in” safety to the generative model itself. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are safer than existing models while maintaining usability metrics, the authors say . they show that the proposed methods can be used to make safer models with human-model interactions . |
RAGLAB: A Modular and Research-Oriented Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xuanwang Zhang, Yun-Ze Song, Yidong Wang, Shuyun Tang, Xinfeng Li, Zhengran Zeng, Zhen Wu, Wei Ye, Wenyuan Xu, Yue Zhang, Xinyu Dai, Shikun Zhang, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing research on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) does not address the problem of hallucinations and real-time updating of knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular open-source library to equip LLMs with external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the need for expensive open-source tools and lacks fair comparisons between novel RAG algorithms. |
Beyond ’Aha!’: Toward Systematic Meta-Abilities Alignment in Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) can incidentally elicit advanced reasoning behaviors such as self-correction, backtracking, and verification. |
| Approach: | They explicitly align large reasoning models with three meta-abilities: deduction, induction, and abduction, using automatically generated, self-verifiable tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model aligns models with deduction, induction, and abduction meta-abilities using automatically generated, self-verifiable tasks. |
KNN-SSD: Enabling Dynamic Self-Speculative Decoding via Nearest Neighbor Layer Set Optimization (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have proven highly capable in handling downstream tasks, but the token-by-token generation in autoregressive decoding results in quadratic computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that proposes skipping certain layers to construct a draft model, which eliminates the need for additional parameters or training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.31.6 speedup in LLM inference while being sensitive to domain shifts. |
MoDE-CoTD: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Complex Reasoning Tasks with Mixture of Decoupled LoRA-Experts (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current Chain-of-thought Distillation methods hinder CoT reasoning performance . student models are separately distilled from specific reasoning tasks . parameter update of student models severely harms CoT ability on unseen reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which distills Chain-of-thought reasoning ability of large language models to much smaller student models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the reasoning ability of large language models on 14 datasets. |
Medical Dialogue System: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Li Du, Yuxuan Wang, Hongru Wang, Yuhang Guo, Tong Ruan, Jie Xu, Xiaofan Zhang, Shaoting Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing medical dialogue systems have significant potential to simplify diagnostic procedure and reduce the cost of collecting information from patients. |
| Approach: | They analyze 325 papers from well-known computer science, natural language processing conferences and journals to find out the major challenges of medical dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems have been surveyed in the medical community but have not been evaluated from a technical perspective. |
A Simple and Effective Approach to Coverage-Aware Neural Machine Translation (P18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
QuantAgents: Towards Multi-agent Financial System via Simulated Trading (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agent models exhibit significant deviations from real-world fund companies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent financial system that incorporates simulated trading . they propose simulated trades are evaluated without assuming actual risks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system evaluates various investment strategies without assuming actual risks without involving real-world investors. |
mPMR: A Multilingual Pre-trained Machine Reader at Scale (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing mPLMs only transfer NLU capability from source to target languages . mPMR allows direct inheritance of multilingual NLU capabilities to downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to guide multilingual pre-trained language models to perform natural language understanding in multiple languages. |
| Outcome: | mPMR enables multilingual pre-trained language models to perform natural language understanding (NLU) in multiple languages. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset . |
Rethinking the Reversal Curse of LLMs: a Prescription from Human Knowledge Reversal (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhicong Lu, Li Jin, Peiguang Li, Yu Tian, Linhao Zhang, Sirui Wang, Guangluan Xu, Changyuan Tian, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) are limited by their aggressive sample permutation and lack a detailed understanding of the underlying reasons for the reversal curse. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which enhances bidirectional entity correlation modeling and pairwise relationship reasoning to overcome the reversal curse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overcomes the reversal curse by augmenting the samples with entity order-reversals and semantically preserved question-answer pairs. |
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models . |
Reinforced IR: A Self-Boosting Framework For Domain-Adapted Information Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle with highly specialized situations that require extensive domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates additional information from an LLM-based generator to enhance query performance and train the retriever to better discriminate the relevant documents identified by the generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing domain adaptation methods by a large margin and leads to substantial improvements in retrieval quality across a wide range of application scenarios. |
Document Graph for Neural Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing document-level NMT methods fail to leverage contexts beyond a few set of previous sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent a document as a graph that connects relevant contexts regardless of distances. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on IWSLT English–French, Chinese-English, WMT English–German and Opensubtitle English–Russian show that using document graphs can significantly improve translation quality. |
Altogether: Image Captioning via Re-aligning Alt-text (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Hu Xu, Po-Yao Huang, Xiaoqing Tan, Ching-Feng Yeh, Jacob Kahn, Christine Jou, Gargi Ghosh, Omer Levy, Luke Zettlemoyer, Wen-tau Yih, Shang-Wen Li, Saining Xie, Christoph Feichtenhofer
| Challenge: | Existing captioning models ignore existing alt-text metadata and lack transparency if training data is unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to edit and re-align alt-texts associated with images using human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves image captions and improves text-to-image generation and zero-shot image classification tasks. |
Identifying Collective Intelligence Factor in LLM Agent Groups for Generalizable Multi-Agent System Design (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on designing customized MAS for specific tasks . a critical research question remains: do LLM agent groups exhibit a form of "general intelligence" |
| Approach: | They find a Collective Intelligence factor in human groups that captures their general capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the ACI factor based on the features of LLM agent groups and can improve generalization abilities. |
EmoPrompt-ECPE: Emotion Knowledge-aware Prompt-tuning for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) do not distinguish between the emotion-caused pairs that belong to different types of emotions, limiting their applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose an Emotion-cause pair extraction method which integrates the implicit knowledge of cause clauses into a prompt template and extends the emotion labels to categories with an external emotion word base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts all potential emotion clauses and corresponding cause clauses from unannotated documents. |
Syntactically Robust Training on Partially-Observed Data for Open Information Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction models have shown promising results with sufficient supervision, but the syntactic distribution of training data is partially observable in comparison to the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactically robust training framework that enables models to be trained on a multi-paraphrase distribution based on diverse paraphrase generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to other syntactic partial observable domains. |
Multilingual Collaborative Defense for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing safeguards for Large Language Models are vulnerable to "jailbreaking" harmful queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning method that optimizes a continuous soft safety prompt automatically to facilitate multilingual safeguarding of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous approaches in multilingual jailbreak defense while exhibiting strong cross-lingual generalization. |
Temporal Sampling for Forgotten Reasoning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuetai Li, Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Bhaskar Ramasubramanian, Luyao Niu, Bill Yuchen Lin, Xiang Yue, Radha Poovendran
| Challenge: | a new metric measures the percentage of questions that were answered incorrectly during fine-tuning . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy that draws outputs from multiple checkpoints along the training trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves reasoning performance and consistency across benchmarks. |
Business as Rulesual: A Benchmark and Framework for Business Rule Flow Modeling with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents are limited by simplistic schemas and shallow logical dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for extracting structured procedural knowledge from unstructured business documents . they propose BREX, a carefully curated benchmark comprising 409 real-world business documents and 2,855 expert-annotated rules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard prompts in rule extraction and execution. |
OS-Sentinel: Towards Safety-Enhanced Mobile GUI Agents via Hybrid Validation in Realistic Workflows (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiushi Sun, Mukai Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Zhihui Xie, Fangzhi Xu, Zhangyue Yin, Kanzhi Cheng, Zehao Li, Zichen Ding, Qi Liu, Zhiyong Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ben Kao, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting unsafe mobile GUI agents are underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile agent safety detection framework that integrates a formal verifier and a VLM-based contextual judge to detect system-level violations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. |
LogiGraph: Logical Reasoning with Contrastive Learning and Lightweight Graph Networks (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods emphasize contextual semantics while others pay more attention to explicit logical features. Existing models utilize graph convolutional networks (GCN) for node updates, still exhibiting some shortcomings. |
| Approach: | They propose a logical reasoning method with contrastive learning and lightweight graph networks (LogiGraph) they employ conjunction and punctuation marks as two types of edges to construct a dual graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the GCN and employs conjunction and punctuation marks as two types of edges to construct a dual graph. |
R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Tongxin Yuan, Zhiwei He, Lingzhong Dong, Yiming Wang, Ruijie Zhao, Tian Xia, Lizhen Xu, Binglin Zhou, Fangqi Li, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Gongshen Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown compelling abilities in reasoning, decision-making, and instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in judging and identifying safety risks given agent interaction records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best-performing model, GPT-4o, while no other models significantly exceed the random. |
On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19 (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Meng Zhou, Zechen Li, Bowen Tan, Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Xuehai He, Zeqian Ju, Subrato Chakravorty, Shu Chen, Xingyi Yang, Yichen Zhang, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu, Kun Xu, Eric Xing, Pengtao Xie
| Challenge: | under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVI D19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. |
| Approach: | They develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations . they use two dialog datasets containing conversations between doctors and patients . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can provide COVID19-related consultations, but is too small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. |
Improving AMR Parsing with Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract meaning representation (AMR) parsing is limited by the size of curated datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a seq2seq pre-training approach to build pre-trained models on three relevant tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on three relevant tasks while maintaining the response of pre-trained models. |
A General Knowledge Injection Framework for ICD Coding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve ICD coding focus on a single type of knowledge and design specialized modules that are complex and incompatible with each other. |
| Approach: | They propose a general knowledge injection framework that integrates three key types of knowledge without specialized design of additional modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and is comparable to models relying on extra human annotations. |
Rotation Control Unlearning: Quantifying and Controlling Continuous Unlearning for LLM with The Cognitive Rotation Space (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to remove undesirable data from Large Language Models suffer from cumulative catastrophic utility loss under continuous unlearning requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the rotational salience weight of RCU to quantify and control the unlearning degree in the continuous unlearning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves SOTA performance without a retained dataset. |
Prompt-learning for Fine-grained Entity Typing (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Ning Ding, Yulin Chen, Xu Han, Guangwei Xu, Xiaobin Wang, Pengjun Xie, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Hong-Gee Kim
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on fine-grained entity typing under fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of prompt-learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-learning pipeline that stimulates versatile knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by constructing entity-oriented verbalizers and templates and conducting masked language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to fine-grained entity typing in fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios. |
QaRL: Rollout-Aligned Quantization-Aware RL for Fast and Stable Training under Training–Inference Mismatch (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Gu, Hao Wang, Jiacheng Liu, Lujun Li, Qiyuan Zhu, Bei Liu, Binxing Xu, Lei Wang, Xintong Yang, Sida Lin, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning with simple rule-based reward functions (RLVR) can induce emergent reasoning behaviors and yield gains in challenging domains such as math problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a rollout-alignment-quantization-aware RL which aligns training-side forward with the quantized rollout to minimize mismatch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms quantized-rollout training by +5.5 on Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE for math problems while maintaining low-bit throughput. |
Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a promising capability for large language models (LLMs) but its underlying mechanism remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a demonstration compression technique to expedite inference and an analysis framework for diagnosing ICL errors in GPT2-XL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ICL performance and expedites inference. |
SafeChain: Safety of Language Models with Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Capabilities (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Fengqing Jiang, Zhangchen Xu, Yuetai Li, Luyao Niu, Zhen Xiang, Bo Li, Bill Yuchen Lin, Radha Poovendran
| Challenge: | Emerging large reasoning models (LRMs) leverage long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to enhance their reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic study of LRM safety using human annotations to assess their safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed safety measures are compared to state-of-the-art models on strong and wildjailbreak datasets. |
Rethinking Denoised Auto-Encoding in Language Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained models such as BERT have achieved success in learning sequence representations, but they tend to learn representations that are covariant with the noise of pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to train self-trained models to learn noise invariant sequence representations . they encourage consistency between original sequence and corrupted version via unsupervised instance-wise training signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 11 natural language understanding and cross-modal tasks and achieves 0.6% gain on GLUE benchmarks and 0.8% increment on NLVR2 . |
Multi-Scale Progressive Attention Network for Video Question Answering (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental evaluations on three benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA show our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale progressive attention network to fuse visual and text information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA. |
FaithfulPersona: Balancing Faithfulness and Personalization in Code Explanations through Self-Critique (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating faithful code explanations face challenges balancing faithfulness to the original code and personalization for diverse user needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and method for generating faithful personalized code explanations using code samples and user profiles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 3.7% improvement in Pass@5 compared to the strong baseline method, Self-Consistency, while maintaining high personalization with a 61.08% win rate in the LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. |
Borrowing Human Senses: Comment-Aware Self-Training for Social Media Multimodal Classification (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Social media users are using images and text to voice opinions and share ideas. |
| Approach: | They propose to use user comments to extract hinting features from user comments and explore them via self-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on four social media benchmarks for image-text relation classification, sarcasm detection, sentiment classification, and hate speech detection. |
EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang, Honghao Gui, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Runnan Fang, Lei Li, Zhen Bi, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved performance across tasks and domains . instruction tuning is a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of LLMs - but there is no standard open-source instruction processing framework available for the community . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source instruction tuning framework for Large Language Models that modularizes instruction generation, selection, prompting and their combination and interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is open-source and available on Github. |
Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing entity typing models are subject to spurious correlations due to shortcuts and biased training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to augment existing model biases by combining spurious correlations with debiasedcounterparts to improve generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization of different entity typing models on the original and debiased test sets. |
LegalReasoner: Step-wised Verification-Correction for Legal Judgment Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weijie Shi, Han Zhu, Jiaming Ji, Mengze Li, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing legal judgment prediction methods struggle with logical errors when conducting complex legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which enhances LJP reliability through step-wise verification and correction of the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves concordance with court decisions from 72.37 to 80.27 on LLAMA-3.1-70B. |
On the Role of Discriminative Models in Generative Relation Extraction (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction (RE) are discriminative and generative . previous studies show that discriminative models can support generative RE . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages discriminative models to produce a top-k set of candidate relations and integrates this knowledge into generative models via in-context or prompt learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on five widely used RE benchmarks. |
Mind’s Mirror: Distilling Self-Evaluation Capability and Comprehensive Thinking from Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, but their scale and computational demands pose challenges to their practical application. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for distilling the self-evaluation capability from LLMs into SLMs and advocate for more comprehensive thinking by incorporating multiple distinct CoTs and self-estimation outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of distilled SLMs on three NLP benchmarks. |
HMEAE: Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing event extraction methods classify each argument role independently, ignoring conceptual correlations between different argument roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction model to provide inductive bias from the concept hierarchy of event argument roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on real-world datasets and shows that it leverages useful knowledge from the concept hierarchy. |
ZeroGen: Efficient Zero-shot Learning via Dataset Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate training data with pre-trained language models have been found effective in various scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised zero-shot learning method that generates a dataset from scratch and trains a tiny task model under supervision of the synthesized dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is annotated-free and efficient, but can provide useful insights from the perspective of data-free model-agnostic knowledge distillation and unreferenced text generation evaluation. |
EconProver: Towards More Economical Test-Time Scaling for Automated Theorem Proving (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) Existing cost analyses regulate only the number of sampling passes, ignoring the substantial disparities in sampling costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate two complementary methods into a unified EconRL pipeline to increase pass rates under constrained sampling passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. |
Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human States (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Automatic Gloss Dictionary for Sign Language Learners (2022.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | 430 million people worldwide have developed hearing loss and 700 million more are learning a sign language as a second language . sign language learners have limited means of seeking assistance and are restricted to class offerings or relying on a webcam to look up the sign. |
| Approach: | They propose an online tool supporting 2, 000 signs to assist language learners in determining the meaning of given signs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can lower the barrier in sign language learning by addressing the common problem of sign finding and make it accessible to the wider community. |
The Strength of the Weakest Supervision: Topic Classification Using Class Labels (N19-3)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a topic classifier can understand only class labels when training for tasks that require a large amount of labeled documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that can initialize a topic classifier using only class labels . they propose a method that combines word embedding and naive Bayes classification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach saves significant initial labeling effort by providing a "warm start" the proposed approach can be fine-tuned with more labeled documents to reach a certain performance level. |
MCIP: Protecting MCP Safety via Model Contextual Integrity Protocol (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Model Context Protocol (MCP) introduces an easy-to-use ecosystem for users and developers, but it also brings underexplored safety risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that addresses the missing safety mechanisms in MCP and a taxonomy that captures diverse range of unsafe behaviors observed in MMP scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves safety performance on state-of-the-art LLMs by capturing unsafe behaviors and analyzing the results. |
Semantic Contribution-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for Black-Box Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval-agmented generation fail to generalize effectively in black-box scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the semantic importance of words to dynamically adjust retrieval thresholds and filter information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest score on four long-form, knowledge-intensive generation datasets. |
Interpret and Improve In-Context Learning via the Lens of Input-Label Mappings (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at downstream NLP tasks through in-context learning . however, the internal mechanisms behind ICL remain under-explored . |
| Approach: | They propose a PC patching approach to identify modules where input-label mappings function . they observe and verify that key heads utilize input-labeled mappings to generate target labels for new queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach detects modules where input-label mappings function . it also detects that key heads use the mappings to generate labels for new queries . |
Let LLMs Take on the Latest Challenges! A Chinese Dynamic Question Answering Benchmark (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhikun Xu, Yinghui Li, Ruixue Ding, Xinyu Wang, Boli Chen, Yong Jiang, Haitao Zheng, Wenlian Lu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Recent work has noted that due to the extremely high cost of iterative updates of LLMs, they are often unable to answer dynamic questions well. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Dynamic QA benchmark containing question-answer pairs related to the latest dynamic questions on the Chinese Internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark will be one of the key data resources for improving LLMs’ Chinese question-answering ability in the future. |
Orchestrating Audio: Multi-Agent Framework for Long-Video Audio Synthesis (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-to-audio dubbing for long-form content are fragmented and lack dedicated datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that offers a coordinated, multi-component approach to long-video audio generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art V2A models in audio quality. |
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoyun Du, LujieZheng LujieZheng, Renjun Hu, Yuyang Xu, Xiawei Li, Ying Sun, Wei Chen, Jian Wu, Haolei Cai, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
Decomposed Prompt Tuning via Low-Rank Reparameterization (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
SAKI-RAG: Mitigating Context Fragmentation in Long-Document RAG via Sentence-level Attention Knowledge Integration (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks segment documents into larger chunks to preserve contextual coherence . however, such chunking methods lead to fragmented contexts, isolated chunk semantics, and broken inter-chunk relationships . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that maintains granular chunks while recovering their intrinsic semantic connections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves better recall and precision compared to other RAG frameworks in long-document retrieval scenarios. |
DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shaoshen Chen, Yangning Li, Zishan Xu, Yongqin Zeng, Shunlong Wu, Xinshuo Hu, Zifei Shan, Xin Su, Jiwei Tang, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing semantic vector-based compression methods do not account for the intrinsic information density variations between context chunks, instead allocating soft tokens uniformly across context chunk. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the LLM's intrinsic understanding of contextual relevance to guide compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on long context tasks. |
From 128K to 4M: Efficient Training of Ultra-Long Context Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Long-context capabilities are essential for document and video understanding, in-contact learning, and inference-time scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient training recipe for building ultra-long context LLMs from aligned instruct model, pushing the boundaries of context lengths from 128K to 1M, 2M, and 4M tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extends the context window while maintaining short context capabilities while maintaining the performance of the existing model. |
LCMA-SRT: Language-Conditional Mixture-of-Experts Adapters for Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Translation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing hierarchical transducers suffer from negative transfer and unstable target-language generation, while training separate models for each direction is computationally prohibitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical transducer with language-conditional Mixture-of-Experts adapters to improve multilingual joint automatic speech recognition and speech translation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Europarl-ST (9 languages, 72 directions) show that LCMA-SRT improves both ASR and ST within a single joint model, reducing average WER and improving BLEU and COMET over strong hierarchical transducer baselines. |
Regularizing Dialogue Generation by Imitating Implicit Scenarios (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue generation lack the flexibility to handle such freedoms. |
| Approach: | They propose to take into account dialogue history and future conversation to implicitly reconstruct the scenario knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on diversity and relevance and expresses scenario-specific knowledge. |
Debate-of-Thoughts: Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in LLMs Through Internal Deliberation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmented generation are based on a simplistic binary choice of relying on external contexts or memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms conflict resolution into an active deliberation process by incorporating contradictions as opportunities for deeper reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DoT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while generating transparent debate transcripts that explain its decisions. |
MultiDx: A Multi-Source Knowledge Integration Framework towards Diagnostic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yimin Deng, Zhenxi Lin, Yejing Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Pengyue Jia, Zichuan Fu, Derong Xu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Li Zhu, Xian Wu, Xueming Qian
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on diagnostic reasoning based on internal model knowledge or static knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage diagnostic reasoning framework that integrates multi-perspective evidence to generate a diagnostic prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates suspected diagnoses and reasoning traces from web search, SOAP-formatted case, and clinical case database. |
TESTA: Temporal-Spatial Token Aggregation for Long-form Video-Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that TESTA reduces the number of visual tokens by 75% and thus accelerates video encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to condense video semantics by aggregating similar frames and patches within each frame. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces visual tokens by 75% and accelerates video encoding. |
ROMA: Real-time Omni-Multimodal Assistant with Interactive Streaming Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing omni-multimodal large language models lack incomplete modality support or lack autonomous proactive monitoring. |
| Approach: | They propose a real-time omni-multimodal assistant for unified reactive and proactive interaction that decouples response initiation from generation to ensure precise triggering without task conflict. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on proactive tasks while competing in reactive settings. |
H-MAS: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Scheduling for Multi-Tenant LLM Serving (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuhan Liu, Cong Xu, Qi Jia, Yihua Wang, Feiyu Chen, Liang Jin, Lu Liu, Yaqian Zhao, Yuting Ding, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Multi-tenant Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) workloads exhibit non-stationarity across multiple time scales . existing request schedulers often rely on a fixed policy that remains unchanged at runtime . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multi-agent scheduler that operates in a layered closed loop . they propose to maintain 1.2–3.0 higher Goodput than SGLang and vLLM . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that H-MAS achieves 1.2–3.0 higher Goodput than SGLang and vLLM . it maintains more stable QoS under diverse request lengths and heterogeneous SLO targets . |
Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can be used to effectively utilize tools in multi-turn interactions, but acquiring diverse and realistic multi-step tool-use data remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based data synthesis pipeline that generates multi-turn tool-use trajectories from text corpora using relevance filtering, workflow tool extraction, trajectory grounding, and complexity refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 14.9% improvement on the BFCL V3 Multi-turn benchmark while significantly reducing inference latency and costs. |
A Simple and Efficient Learning-Style Prompting for LLM Jailbreaking (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Learning-style queries can reliably elicit harmful responses, highlighting a critical safety blind spot in modern LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a new reframing paradigm that hides intention by learning from LLMs and uses 4 conceptual components to construct learning-style queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves top attack success rates on most models and across malicious categories while maintaining high efficiency with concise prompts. |
EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | EASYTOOL combines tools from diverse tool documentation into a single tool instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms tool documentation into a unified tool instruction. |
| Outcome: | EASYTOOL combines extensive tool documentation into a concise tool instruction . it reduces token consumption and improves performance of LLM-based agents . |
Search-P1: Path-Centric Reward Shaping for Stable and Efficient Agentic RAG Training (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Tianle Xia, Ming Xu, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Wenwei Li, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, yet traditional singleround retrieval struggles with complex multistep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces path-centric reward shaping for agentic RAG training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods with an average accuracy gain of 7.7 points. |
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Baixuan Xu, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Huihao Jing, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Long Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods. |
Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
Combating Label Sparsity in Short Text Topic Modeling via Nearest Neighbor Augmentation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing topic models suffer from poor performance when applied to short text contents due to the limited length of a single topic. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural short text topic model that augments reconstruction labels with k-nearest documents to complement relevant but unobserved words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on multiple public short-text datasets and can derive high-quality topics and document representations. |
Complex Event Schema Induction with Knowledge-Enriched Diffusion Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on event schema induction have been hindered by errors and data quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enriched discrete diffusion model that distills event scenario knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves outstanding performance across evaluation metrics. |
Flexibly Utilize Memory for Long-Term Conversation via a Fragment-then-Compose Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Cai Ke, Yiming Du, Bin Liang, Yifan Xiang, Lin Gui, Zhongyang Li, Baojun Wang, Yue Yu, Hui Wang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models extract useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fragment-then-Compose framework to optimize memory utilization for long-term open-domain conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to extract useful information from conversation history . it can be adapted to different situations and improve response generation . |
Noise Learning for Text Classification: A Benchmark (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing noise learning methods for text classification are underdeveloped . authors propose a noise learning benchmark for text classification . |
| Approach: | They propose to use four state-of-the-art methods of noise learning from the image domain to classify text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark of noise learning for text classification is based on four methods and five noise modes. |
SemAttack: Natural Textual Attacks via Different Semantic Spaces (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to attack pre-trained language models suffer from low success rates or fail to search efficiently in the exponentially large perturbation space. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient framework to generate natural adversarial text by constructing different semantic perturbation functions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates natural adversarial texts for different languages with high success rates. |
Self-Improvement Programming for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods implicitly model time constraints by learning time-aware embeddings of questions and candidate answers, which is far from understanding the question comprehensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-based temporal programming method that leverages the in-context learning ability of Large Language Models to understand combinatory time constraints in questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multiTQ and CronQuestions datasets and is highly efficient on multi-level questions. |
From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) are fine-tuned and released for research and deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a PLM reuse paradigm that merges teacher-PLM knowledge into a student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can reduce the computational cost and environmental side-effects of retraining the PLM from scratch. |
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Assessing and Mitigating Medical Knowledge Drift and Conflicts in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Rapid medical concept drift can lead LLMs to provide incorrect or outdated advice. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate how large language models manage knowledge conflicts in clinical guidelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates how LLMs manage varied knowledge conflicts in clinical guidelines. |
MRE-MI: A Multi-image Dataset for Multimodal Relation Extraction in Social Media Posts (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Multimodal Relation Extraction focus on single image scenarios . current approaches focus on text paired with a single image, ignoring valuable insights provided by remaining images. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-annotated dataset that includes multi-image and single-image instances for relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves relation extraction in multi-image scenarios. |
Learning to Align Multi-Faceted Evaluation: A Unified and Robust Framework (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Yi Cheng, Wenjun Hou, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning open-source LLMs are limited to text-based analysis under predefined general criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fine-tunes LLMs to replicate the evaluation explanations and judgments of proprietary models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework outperforms existing fine-tuned evaluation methods in effectiveness and robustness. |
Where Did It Go Wrong? Capability-Oriented Failure Attribution for Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing testing methods are system-level and provide limited insight into which capability deficiencies cause task failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a capability-oriented testing approach that enables failure detection and attribution by seed selection and mutation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects more failure cases and pinpoints capability-level deficiencies than state-of-the-art baselines, providing more interpretable and actionable guidance for improving embodied agents. |
Compiling Activation Steering into Weights via Null-Space Constraints for Stealthy Backdoors (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Yin, Tianxu Han, Naen Xu, Changjiang Li, Ping He, Chunyi Zhou, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Tianyu Du, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods to inject safety-aligned large language models rely on token-level mappings, which do not guarantee sustained harmful output. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that directly modifies model weights to map a trigger to an attacker-specified response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high triggered attack success while maintaining non-triggered safety and general utility. |
Learning to Generate Question by Asking Question: A Primal-Dual Approach with Uncommon Word Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing automatic question generation methods focus on encoding passage and answer to generate question. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic question generation approach which integrates question generation with its dual problem, question answering, into a unified primal-dual framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on SQuAD and HotpotQA benchmarks. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
Discover and Prove: An Open-source Agentic Framework for Hard Mode Automated Theorem Proving in Lean 4 (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chengwu Liu, Yichun Yin, Ye Yuan, Jiaxuan Xie, Botao Li, Siqi Li, Jianhao Shen, Yan Xu, Lifeng Shang, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solving mathematical problems fall into two broad categories: informal methods and formal methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLM natural-language reasoning to discover answers . they introduce Discover And Prove framework that rewrites Hard Mode statements into Easy Mode ones for existing ATP provers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to prove hard mode statements on ATP benchmarks. |
Ambiguity Awareness Optimization: Towards Semantic Disambiguation for Direct Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically re-weights ambiguous content to reduce ambiguities by calculating semantic similarity from preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in performance across multiple model scales and widely adopted benchmark datasets. |
MT2: Towards a Multi-Task Machine Translation Model with Translation-Specific In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sentence-level translation, document-level and terminology constrained translations are important in machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task machine translation model that integrates translation memory sentences . they propose 'in-context learning' paradigm that allows translation-specific context learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation memory, document-level translation, and document-constrained translation tasks. |
Improving BERT with Syntax-aware Local Attention (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that attention-based models benefit from more focused attention over local regions. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-aware local attention which restrains attention over syntactically relevant words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on all benchmark datasets, including sentence classification and sequence labeling tasks. |
AesBiasBench: Evaluating Bias and Alignment in Multimodal Language Models for Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models are increasingly used in Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment (PIAA) however, their predictions may reflect subtle biases influenced by demographic factors such as gender, age, and education. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate MLLMs along two complementary dimensions: (1) stereotype bias and (2) alignment between model outputs and genuine human aesthetic preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers three subtasks: aesthetic perception, assessment, empathy and alignment between outputs and genuine human aesthetic preferences. |
A Multi-modal Debiasing Model with Dynamical Constraint for Robust Visual Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that many well-developed Visual Question Answering systems suffer from bias problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to mitigate bias problem by subtracting bias score from standard VQA base score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the VQA v2.0 and VQA-CP V2,0 datasets. |
WSDPO: A Generative Word Sense Disambiguation Framework with Chain-of-Thought and Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kunpeng Kang, Shuaimin Li, Kaiyuan Zhang, Luyang Zhang, Jiasheng Si, Bing Xu, Kehai Chen, Muyun Yang, Wenpeng Lu
| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework for generative WSD with chain-of-thought (CoT) and preference optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance gains on rare and unseen settings and exhibits strong generalization in standard evaluation settings. |
Delving into the Openness of CLIP (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) allows for open-vocabulary visual recognition, where the model can recognize images from an open class set in a zero-shot manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image classification as an image-to-text matching task instead of discrete category IDs to achieve open-vocabulary visual recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognize images from an open vocabulary in a zero-shot manner, but its performance deteriorates as the vocabulary expands. |
Structure Trumps Size: Rethinking Data Quality for LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models rely on heuristic strategies and lack systematic, quantitative frameworks for evaluating data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional quantitative framework for reasoning data management . they rigorously evaluate and optimize datasets along six orthogonal dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework rigorously evaluates and optimizes datasets along six orthogonal dimensions. |
FactPICO: Factuality Evaluation for Plain Language Summarization of Medical Evidence (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Sebastian Joseph, Lily Chen, Jan Trienes, Hannah Göke, Monika Coers, Wei Xu, Byron Wallace, Junyi Jessy Li
| Challenge: | FactPICO is a factuality benchmark for plain language summarization of medical texts describing randomized controlled trials . existing metrics for factual summarizing medical evidence are poorly correlated with expert judgments on the instance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a factuality benchmark for plain language summarization of medical texts . they assess factuality of critical elements of RCTs in those summaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the factuality of medical summaries using LLMs . the summary summators are based on 345 plain language summaires with fine-grained evaluation . |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
Look Within or Beyond? A Theoretical Comparison Between Parameter-Efficient and Full Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is an alternative to Full-Parameter Fine-tuning, but its effectiveness on complex tasks such as reasoning and instruction-following remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to use PEFT to reduce the number of trainable parameters while freezing the weights of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well on standard tasks, but weaknesses on complex and adversarial settings call for new directions beyond current paradigms. |
Understanding the Thinking Process of Reasoning Models: A Perspective from Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Li, Nan Zhang, Chenrui Fan, Hong Jiao, Yanbin Fu, Sydney Peters, Qingshu Xu, Robert Lissitz, Tianyi Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate extensive chain-of-thought reasoning, but we lack a principled framework for understanding how these thoughts are structured. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to analyze the reasoning traces of Large Reasoning Models using Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a theoretically grounded methodology for interpreting LRM cognition and enables future work on more controllable and transparent reasoning systems. |
BioGraphia: A LLM-Assisted Biological Pathway Graph Annotation Platform (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for obtaining pathway information from biomedical literature rely on simplifying assumptions that limit their ability to capture true complexity of biological reactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-based platform to facilitate collaborative pathway graph annotation. |
| Outcome: | The platform supports multi-user collaboration with real-time monitoring, curation, and interactive pathway graph visualization. |
RAG-RewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoran Jin, Hongbang Yuan, Tianyi Men, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval augmented language models often overlook effective alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RMs in retrieval augmented language models . they incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity of data sources. |
Topic-Guided Reinforcement Learning with LLMs for Enhancing Multi-Document Summarization (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results in single-document summarization, but their performance on MDS still leaves room for improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-guided reinforcement learning approach to improve content selection in MDS . explicit prompting models with topic labels enhances the informativeness, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on multi-News and multi-XScience datasets. |
Improving Factual Consistency in Abstractive Summarization with Sentence Structure Pruning (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Dingxin Hu, Xuanyu Zhang, Xingyue Zhang, Yiyang Li, Dongsheng Chen, Marina Litvak, Natalia Vanetik, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Yanquan Zhou, Lei Li, Yuze Li, Yingqi Zhu
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models suffer from factual inconsistency problem . post-editing methods focus on replacing suspicious entities, failing to modify incorrect content hidden in sentence structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sentence pruning operation to correct possible errors . they propose to apply sentence pruning operations to the syntactic dependency tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves factual consistency on the FRANK dataset compared with baselines . it is model-independent and can serve as the final step in ensuring factual consistentness. |
Dense Retrievers Can Fail on Simple Queries: Revealing The Granularity Dilemma of Embeddings (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a limited number of text encoders are able to recognize fine-grained entities or events within encoded semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation dataset to examine embeddings' ability to recognize fine-grained entities or events within encoded semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows embeddings struggle with fine-grained matching . the proposed encoder outperforms the state-of-the-art 7B model in a small sample . |
Bringing Pedagogy into Focus: Evaluating Virtual Teaching Assistants’ Question-Answering in Asynchronous Learning Environments (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing assessments rely on surface-level metrics and lack sufficient grounding in educational theory . a new framework is proposed to evaluate VTAs in asynchronous learning environments . |
| Approach: | They propose a pedagogically-oriented evaluation framework tailored to asynchronous forum discussions . they construct classifiers using expert annotations of VTA responses on a diverse set of forum posts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is rooted in learning sciences and tailored to asynchronous forum discussions. |
Entropy-Aware Reshaping of Reinforcement Signals for Multi-Answer Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a standard post-training paradigm for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reshapes how learning signals are normalized and aggregated. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MCTACO and MMLU-Multi show that the proposed framework improves accuracy, training stability and cross-dataset transfer performance. |
Bridging the Gap between Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning for Commonsense Generation (2023.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focusing on this task usually concatenate the concatened concepts words as the inputs of a pre-trained language model (PLM) however, in pre-training, the input is often corrupted sentences with correct word order. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework to improve the ability of pre-trained language models to deal with masked sentences with incorrect word order and a special token to make the input distribution more similar to the one used in pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to generate a sentence containing all given concepts and correctly describe the relations between concepts. |
CCPrefix: Counterfactual Contrastive Prefix-Tuning for Many-Class Classification (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve pre-trained language models for many-class classification suffer from verbalizer ambiguity . a significant disparity exists between the pre-training and fine-tuning stages of the model . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to tune pre-trained language models to a broad spectrum of tasks . they use an instance-dependent soft prefix to complement language verbalizers in many-class classification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on many-class datasets. |
Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for process-oriented math reward models rely on manual annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-oriented math process reward model called Math-shepherd which assigns a reward score to each step of math problem solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model breaks the bottleneck of manual supervision in two scenarios. |
LegoMT2: Selective Asynchronous Sharded Data Parallel Training for Massive Neural Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a single model for massive languages have huge communication overheads and parameter interference. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient training approach with an asymmetric multi-way model architecture for massive multilingual neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 16.2 faster than the distributed training method for M2M-100-12B while improving the translation performance by an average of 2.2 BLEU on Flores-101. |
AutoVecCoder: Teaching LLMs to Generate Explicitly Vectorized Code (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
ShangZhan Li, Xinyu Yin, Xuanyu Jin, Ye He, Yuxin Zhou, Yuxuan Li, Xu Han, Wanxiang Che, Qi Shi, Ting Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current development practices face a dichotomy between automation and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to empower LLMs with the capability of automated explicit vectorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SSE and AVX subsets of SimdBench. |
Learning from Miscellaneous Other-Class Words for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to classify named entity mentions with fewshots fail to differentiate rich semantics in other-class words, which will aggravate overfitting under few shot scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can automatically induce different unde- fined classes from the other class to improve few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms five state-of-the-art models in 1- shot and 5-shots settings on four NER bench marks. |
Modelling Long-distance Node Relations for KBQA with Global Dynamic Graph (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on deep graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture rich structural information, but they lack the structural information needed for QA. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which captures structural information from KBs and models long-distance node relations from two perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework models long-distance node relations from two perspectives . it is based on two widely used multi-hop KBQA datasets . |
FaithBench: A Diverse Hallucination Benchmark for Summarization by Modern LLMs (2025.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Forrest Sheng Bao, Miaoran Li, Renyi Qu, Ge Luo, Erana Wan, Yujia Tang, Weisi Fan, Manveer Singh Tamber, Suleman Kazi, Vivek Sourabh, Mike Qi, Ruixuan Tu, Chenyu Xu, Matthew Gonzales, Ofer Mendelevitch, Amin Ahmad
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of hallucinations in large language models suffer from a lack of diversity and recency in the LLM and LLM families considered. |
| Approach: | They propose a summarization hallucination benchmark that challenges models to disagree on hallucines . they use models to generate answers or summaries from textual input . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model combines the best of 10 modern LLMs with ground truth annotations. |
LongDocURL: a Comprehensive Multimodal Long Document Benchmark Integrating Understanding, Reasoning, and Locating (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chao Deng, Jiale Yuan, Pi Bu, Peijie Wang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Jian Xu, Xiao-Hui Li, Yuan Gao, Jun Song, Bo Zheng, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding benchmarks only handle a small number of pages . existing models are limited to handling only a limited number of documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a long document understanding benchmark that integrates three primary tasks and 20 sub-tasks based on different primary tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on open-source and closed-source models . the model outpersforms other models on more than 33,000 pages of documents . |
A Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Grounded Dialogues (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train grounded dialogues require large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data generation framework for grounded dialogues that takes knowledge data and heuristics to determine a dialogue flow and incrementally turn it into a dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts model performance in training data and low-resource scenarios. |
PeerDA: Data Augmentation via Modeling Peer Relation for Span Identification Tasks (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results on ten datasets across seven domains demonstrate the effectiveness of PeerDA. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach which uses span pairs with the PR relation as the augmentation data for training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on ten datasets across seven domains. |
Logits Reranking via Semantic Labels for Hard Samples in Text Classification (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenliang Li, Haiyang Xu, Junfeng Tian, Wei Wang, Ming Yan, Bin Bi, Jiabo Ye, He Chen, Guohai Xu, Zheng Cao, Ji Zhang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained vision-language models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language foundation model with cross-modal skip-connections that can be pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. |
TInR: Exploring Tool-Internalized Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on external tool documentation during reasoning, leading to tool mastery difficulty, tool size constraints, and inference inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-internalized reasoning framework for unified reasoning and tool usage that integrates external tools into Large Language Models (LLMs) to address these issues, they propose 'tool-internet-based' reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance across in-domain and out-of-domain settings, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency. |
Intra-Correlation Encoding for Chinese Sentence Intention Matching (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve sentence intention matching for Chinese text are limited due to the particularity of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines character-granularity and word-granulularity features to perform sentence intention matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture sentence feature information from multiple perspectives and correlation information between different levels of sentences. |
Hierarchical Relation Extraction with Coarse-to-Fine Grained Attention (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction use knowledge graphs to automatically label training data . but, it suffers from the wrong labeling problem because not all sentences containing two entities can express their relations in KGs . |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision approach to automatically label training instances . they integrate hierarchical information of relations into distantly supervised relation extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a large-scale dataset. |
EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jianfeng Chi, Jiahao Liu, Jingang Wang, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Yi Fang, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product attribute value require multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction approach using lightweight sparse-layer interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large. |
Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation: A Cycled Reinforcement Learning Approach (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies for sentiment-to-sentiment "translation" only change the underlying sentiment and fail to keep the semantic content. |
| Approach: | They propose a cycled reinforcement learning method that combines neutralization module and emotionalization module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art systems on Yelp and Amazon review datasets. |
Learn to Copy from the Copying History: Correlational Copy Network for Abstractive Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for abstractive summarization use encoder-decoder attention, but this leads to incomplete copying. |
| Approach: | They propose a copying scheme that takes advantage of prior copying distributions and explicitly encourages the model to copy the input word that is relevant to the previously copied one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art on summarization benchmarks . it takes advantage of prior copying distributions and explicitly encourages copying . |
DroidCall: A Dataset for LLM-powered Android Intent Invocation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | We present DroidCall, the first training and testing dataset for accurate Android intent invocation. |
| Approach: | We introduce DroidCall, the first training and testing dataset for accurate Android intent invocation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a training and testing pipeline for Android intent invocation. |
Debiasing Large Language Models via Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from excessive token usage and limited generalisability across diverse reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought framework that leverages structural causal models to infer the causal effect of a query on its answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing prompting baselines in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. |
A Neural Local Coherence Analysis Model for Clarity Text Scoring (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for scoring text clarity use local coherence between adjacent sentences . local cohesion is one of the main properties to identify whether a text is well-structured or not. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for scoring text clarity by utilizing local coherence between adjacent sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the PeerRead benchmark dataset. |
CoreEval: Automatically Building Contamination-Resilient Datasets with Real-World Knowledge toward Reliable LLM Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Publicly available datasets can be used to evaluate performance of large language models . however, contamination of test data can artificially inflate model performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a Contamination-resilient Evaluation strategy that updates data with real-world knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation strategy can be used to update datasets with real-world knowledge. |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
Can We Further Elicit Reasoning in LLMs? Critic-Guided Planning with Retrieval-Augmentation for Solving Challenging Tasks (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to problem-solving for large language models fail to provide accurate reasoning and factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide reasoning and retrieval processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on domain-knowledge-intensive tasks . it can be used to iterate retrieval and reasoning, and improve retrieval relevance . |
Variational Graph Autoencoding as Cheap Supervision for AMR Coreference Resolution (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a way to preserve the semantic meaning of a sentence in a graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a general pretraining method that leverages any general AMR corpus and even automatically parses AMR data to achieve performance gains of up to 6% absolute F1 points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on the previous state-of-the-art model by up to 11% F1. |
DFAMS: Dynamic-flow guided Federated Alignment based Multi-prototype Search (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhibang Yang, Xinke Jiang, Rihong Qiu, Ruiqing Li, Yihang Zhang, Yue Fang, Yongxin Xu, Hongxin Ding, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ambiguous queries struggle to retrieve high-quality documents . DFAMS outperforms advanced FR methods by 14.37% in knowledge classification accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages dynamic information flow to identify latent query intents and construct semantically aligned knowledge partitions for accurate retrieval across heterogeneous sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in classification accuracy and retrieval recall tests. |
Learning to Sample Replacements for ELECTRA Pre-Training (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that ELECTRA pretrains a discriminator to detect replaced tokens . despite compelling performance, there is no direct feedback loop from discriminator and generator to generator, making replacements biased to correct tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment sampling with a hardness prediction mechanism to encourage the discriminator to learn what it has not acquired. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ELECTRA pre-training on various downstream tasks. |
From Knowing to Teaching: Scaffolding Pedagogical Decisions for LLM Agent (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yucheng Wang, Shen Yang, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Daniel Zhang-Li, Huiqin Liu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Bin Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models produce content lacking pedagogical depth when asked to generate lessons . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows teachers to select content according to pedagogical intent and sequence topics so foundations precede applications. |
| Outcome: | The framework achieves 67.8% win rate in human evaluation and 79.6% in LLM-based evaluation against eight baselines. |
Unlocking Instructive In-Context Learning with Tabular Prompting for Relational Triple Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relational triple extraction (RTE) are unnatural and recast RTE tasks to text-to-text prompting formats. |
| Approach: | They propose a tabular prompting for RTE which frames RTE task into a table generation task and propose an instructive in-context learning which only selects and annotates samples considering triple semantics in massive unlabeled samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prompting for RTE with TableIE achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other methods . the proposed prompts are based on off-the shelf LLMs and are scalable to multiple scenarios . |
FedLEKE: Federated Locate-then-Edit Knowledge Editing for Multi-Client Collaboration (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for updating large language models are inefficient in multi-client scenarios . Existing approaches assume a single-user setting and are ineffective in multiclient scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task that enables multiple clients to perform LEKE while preserving privacy and reducing computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LEKE frameworks on two benchmark datasets and retains 96% of performance. |
Sparse Progressive Distillation: Resolving Overfitting under Pretrain-and-Finetune Paradigm (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shaoyi Huang, Dongkuan Xu, Ian Yen, Yijue Wang, Sung-En Chang, Bingbing Li, Shiyang Chen, Mimi Xie, Sanguthevar Rajasekaran, Hang Liu, Caiwen Ding
| Challenge: | Conventional wisdom in pruning Transformer-based language models is that it reduces model expressiveness, but new research shows pruning increases risk of overfitting when performed at the fine-tuning phase. |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce pruning risk under pretrain-and-finetune paradigm . they propose to use knowledge distillation to improve pruning performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the leading competitors on the GLUE benchmark. |
Variational Autoregressive Decoder for Neural Response Generation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing variational Bayesian models generate responses from a single latent variable, which is not sufficient to model high variability in responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional variable auto-encoder that sequentially introduces latent variables to condition the generation of each word in the response sequence. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model improves on state-of-the-art models on Opensubtitle and Reddit datasets. |
Multi-modal Action Chain Abductive Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Jiahe Xu, Kairong Han, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing models for Abductive Reasoning are limited in their ability to infer the most plausible explanation of incomplete known phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language task that aims to imagine the most plausible event by spatio-temporal grounding in past video and infer the hypothesis of subsequent action chain layer by layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing video-language models in terms of effectiveness on the proposed dataset. |
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Zijun Yao, Yuanyong Chen, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Amy Xin, Jifan Yu, Hailong Jin, Jianjun Xu, Peng Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering systems that parse natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL) . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge base question answering system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can debug and edit knowledge base questions on a million-entity-level . it provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer. |
mABC: Multi-Agent Blockchain-inspired Collaboration for Root Cause Analysis in Micro-Services Architecture (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Wei Zhang, Hongcheng Guo, Jian Yang, Zhoujin Tian, Yi Zhang, Yan Chaoran, Zhoujun Li, Tongliang Li, Xu Shi, Liangfan Zheng, Bo Zhang
| Challenge: | Root cause analysis (RCA) in Micro-services architectures with escalating complexity is challenging due to fault propagation and circular dependencies among nodes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where multiple agents follow Agent Workflow and collaborate in blockchain-inspired voting to ensure the reliability of root cause analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of steps and standardizes task processing through Agent Workflow. |
Migician: Revealing the Magic of Free-Form Multi-Image Grounding in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
You Li, Heyu Huang, Chi Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Chao Huang, Zonghao Guo, Zhiyuan Liu, Jinan Xu, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs still struggle to achieve precise grounding in multi-image scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Thought framework that integrates single-image grounding with multi-image comprehension to address this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in multi-image grounding tasks by 24.94% and surpasses larger 70B models. |
LM-Interview: An Easy-to-use Smart Interviewer System via Knowledge-guided Language Model Exploitation (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Semi-structured interviews are a crucial method of data acquisition in qualitative research. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-structured interview system that automates interview preparation, analysis and control by interviewers. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LM-Interview performs comparable to human interviewers . the system can be used to analyze semi-structured interviews without interviewers' involvement . |
GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are often finetuned for downstream tasks, which has been shown to improve performance over non-pretrained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for few-shot learning with pretrained language models by gradient-free algorithm. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse datasets show that the proposed method outperforms manual prompts by 2.6 points. |
MAVEN-FACT: A Large-scale Event Factuality Detection Dataset (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Event factuality detection is under-explored due to the lack of high-quality large-scale data . efd is a subfield of event understanding, which aims to determine the factuity of textual events. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale EFD dataset with factuality annotations of 112,276 events . they find that adopting event arguments and relations helps in event factuity detection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes factuality annotations of 112,276 events . it is the largest EFD dataset and is challenging for fine-tuned models and large language models . |
Towards Noise-Tolerant Speech-Referring Video Object Segmentation: Bridging Speech and Text (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language learning have significantly advanced Human-Computer Interactions (HCI). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to align the semantic spaces between speech and text by incorporating two modules to align semantic spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on AVOS benchmarks. |
Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, XingYu XingYu, Yuqiu Ji, Guohai Xu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Debing Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese resources are small in scale and limited to specific domains, making them insufficient for LLM post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-annotated reward model and a preference dataset to address this gap . they evaluate Chinese RMs on CheemsBench and construct an RM that captures human preferences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed RM achieves state-of-the-art performance on CheemsBench and CheeMePreference. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
Few-shot Temporal Pruning Accelerates Diffusion Models for Text Generation (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing acceleration methods for text generation ignore the importance of the distribution of sampling steps, resulting in slow sampling rates. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to accelerate diffusion models for text generation without additional training by using a Bayesian optimization approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves 400x acceleration even with minimal sampling steps after down to less than 1 minute of optimization yielding a competitive performance even with minimum sampling steps. |
Narrowing the Gap between Zero- and Few-shot Machine Translation by Matching Styles (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Weiting Tan, Haoran Xu, Lingfeng Shen, Shuyue Stella Li, Kenton Murray, Philipp Koehn, Benjamin Van Durme, Yunmo Chen
| Challenge: | Recent work shows that large language models can generalize to machine translation using zero-shot examples with in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They investigate the factors contributing to this gap by matching the writing styles of the target corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be enhanced without the need for parallel demonstration examples. |
Think in Sentences: Explicit Sentence Boundaries Enhance Language Model’s Capabilities (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on dummy tokens but fail to leverage the inherent sentence-level structure of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that inserts delimiters at sentence boundaries to enhance large language models' capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on 7B LLMs to 600B Deepseek-V3 with 7.7% gains on GSM8k and 12.5% on DROP. |
ProMedTS: A Self-Supervised, Prompt-Guided Multimodal Approach for Integrating Medical Text and Time Series (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuai Niu, Jing Ma, Hongzhan Lin, Liang Bai, Zhihua Wang, V. W., Richard Yi Da Xu, Guo Li, Xian Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at processing unstructured data, but integrating time series data with text remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised multimodal framework that uses prompt-guided learning to unify heterogeneous data types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on disease diagnosis tasks using real-world datasets. |
LLMRefine: Pinpointing and Refining Large Language Models via Fine-Grained Actionable Feedback (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenda Xu, Daniel Deutsch, Mara Finkelstein, Juraj Juraska, Biao Zhang, Zhongtao Liu, William Yang Wang, Lei Li, Markus Freitag
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) are leveraging human feedback to improve their output quality. however, human feedback is costly to collect, especially at inference time when the model provides new, unseen input. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time optimization method to refine large language models' output based on fine-grained feedback to pinpoint defects and guide iterative refinement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently outperforms baseline approaches on three text generation tasks, including machine translation, long-form question answering, and topical summarization. |
TableEval: A Real-World Benchmark for Complex, Multilingual, and Multi-Structured Table Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing TableQA benchmarks focus on simple flat tables and suffer from data leakage . current benchmarks are monolingual and fail to capture cross-lingual variability . |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based TableQA benchmark to evaluate LLMs on real-world tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they achieve high agreement with human judgment . the proposed framework improves on the alignment between model responses and reference answers . |
Prediction and Calibration: Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graph with Bi-directional Directed Acyclic Graph Neural Network (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs (KGs) organize world knowledge as interlinked triples which describe entities and their relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-directional Directed Acyclic Graph neural network that splits the reasoning process into prediction and calibration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous QE models on FB15k, FB16k-237, and NELL995 on prediction and calibration. |
LOG: A Local-to-Global Optimization Approach for Retrieval-based Explainable Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering emphasize single-step and multi-step iterative decomposition or retrieval, which are susceptible to failure in long-chain reasoning due to the progressive accumulation of erroneous information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Local-tO-Global optimized retrieval method to discover more beneficial information and improve tuplet objective loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models and significantly improves multi-hop reasoning. |
Visualizing and Understanding the Effectiveness of BERT (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has achieved strong performance in many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to visualize loss landscapes and optimization trajectories of fine-tuning BERT on specific datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance and generalization capability across tasks. |
Mitigating Position Bias in Transformers via Layer-Specific Positional Embedding Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenghua Wang, Yiran Ding, Changze Lv, Yixin Wu, Tianlong Li, Zhibo Xu, Muling Wu, Tianyuan Shi, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Xuanjing Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address the "lost-in-the-middle" problem suffer from high latency or suboptimal hand-crafted scaling strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-specific positional embedding scaling method that assigns distinct scaling factors to each layer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method mitigates positional attention bias and delivers consistent improvements across multiple long-context benchmarks. |
NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Getting More Juice Out of Your Data: Hard Pair Refinement Enhances Visual-Language Models Without Extra Data (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haonan Wang, Minbin Huang, Runhui Huang, Lanqing Hong, Hang Xu, Tianyang Hu, Xiaodan Liang, Zhenguo Li, Hong Cheng, Kenji Kawaguchi
| Challenge: | Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is a standard for cross-modal image-text representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances pre-trained CLIP models by exploiting challenging text-image pairs within existing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves CLIP models by exploiting text-image pairs in training. |
CryptoTrade: A Reflective LLM-based Agent to Guide Zero-shot Cryptocurrency Trading (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for financial decision-making and stock market prediction for years. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to analyze on-chain and off-chain data to provide a comprehensive overview of the cryptocurrency market. |
| Outcome: | The proposed trading agent leverages the transparency and immutability of on-chain data, as well as the timeliness and influence of off-chain signals, providing a comprehensive overview of the cryptocurrency market. |
Dataset Bias Mitigation in Multiple-Choice Visual Question Answering and Beyond (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhecan Wang, Long Chen, Haoxuan You, Keyang Xu, Yicheng He, Wenhao Li, Noel Codella, Kai-Wei Chang, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have examined dataset biases in VQA benchmarks with short-phrase answers Multiple-choice Question with the LONG Answers (VCR, VLEP, etc.) |
| Approach: | They propose to use Adversarial Data Synthesis (ADS) to generate synthetic training and debiased evaluation data and introduce Intra-sample Counterfactual Training (ICT) to assist models in utilizing synthesized training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves model performance even in domain-shifted scenarios. |
Understanding Translationese in Cross-Lingual Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets involve translation, but translationese is distinguished from original text . previous studies have shown that translationeses in CLS are not a problem in training sets . |
| Approach: | They propose to use cross-lingual summarization to generate a concise summary in a target language from a document in . existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation, but the translated text is distinguished from the original written in that language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method systematically investigates how translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in source documents or target summaries. |
MarkupLM: Pre-training of Text and Markup Language for Visually Rich Document Understanding (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing layout-based pre-training approaches are not easy to apply to VRDU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use markup languages as the backbone for document understanding tasks where text and markup information are jointly pre-trained. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on document understanding tasks. |
JudgeAgent: Beyond Static Benchmarks for Knowledge-Driven and Dynamic LLM Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhichao Shi, Xuhui Jiang, Chengjin Xu, Cangli Yao, Shengjie Ma, Yinghan Shen, Zixuan Li, Jian Guo, Yuanzhuo Wang
| Challenge: | Current evaluation methods for large language models rely on static benchmarks . limited knowledge coverage and fixed difficulties hinder the targeted optimizations resulting in superficial evaluations of LLMs - a problem that has been addressed by JudgeAgent . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-driven and dynamic evaluation framework for large language models . judgeAgent leverages LLM agents equipped with context graphs to traverse knowledge structures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve comprehensive evaluations and facilitate effective model iterations. |
Continual Relation Learning via Episodic Memory Activation and Reconsolidation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn incessantly emerging novel relations are overfitting the few memorized examples of old relations, causing confusion among existing relations. |
| Approach: | They introduce episodic memory activation and reconsolidation (EMAR) to continual relation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in catastrophic forgetting old relations. |
Think in Safety: Unveiling and Mitigating Safety Alignment Collapse in Multimodal Large Reasoning Model (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Large Reasoning Models have demonstrated broad application potential, yet their safety and reliability remain critical concerns. |
| Approach: | They conduct a safety evaluation of 13 MLRMs across 5 benchmarks and examine their safety performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves safety on jailbreak and safety-awareness benchmarks. |
Automatic Marketing Theme and Commodity Construction System for E-commerce (2023.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing recommendation system invites experts to write marketing themes and select relevant commodities, which suffer from difficulty in mass production, poor timeliness and low online indicators. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pretrained language model to generate marketing themes and commodity consistency module to select relevant commodities for the generative theme. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can generate popular marketing themes and select relevant commodities automatically and improve theme online effectiveness compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
PerMemSafe: Benchmarking Implicit Personalized Safety of Long Horizon Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing self-evolving agents have a low safety rate in long-horizon interactions . however, this reliance on context-independent safety evaluations is insufficient . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly models personalized risk inference and memory evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves implicit personalized safety by 23.8% over prior frameworks while maintaining helpfulness in long-horizon interactions. |
Graph-to-Tree Neural Networks for Learning Structured Input-Output Translation with Applications to Semantic Parsing and Math Word Problem (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graph2Tree model encodes graph-structured input and decodes tree-structures output. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Graph-to-Tree Neural Network consisting of a graph encoder and a hierarchical tree decoder that encodes an augmented graph-structured input and decodes a tree-structure-output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or matches the performance of other state-of-the-art models on two problems, neural semantic parsing and math word problem. |
Synergistic Augmentation: Enhancing Cross-Domain Zero-Shot Slot Filling with Small Model-Assisted Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to slot filling are limited due to data scarcity and timeconsuming efforts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harnesses the power of a small model to augment inferential capabilities of LLMs without additional training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves slot filling performance on a spoken language dataset and a NER dataset. |
MNER-MI: A Multi-image Dataset for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition in Social Media (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) but current approaches focus on text and a single accompanying image, leaving a significant research gap in multi-image scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a human-annotated MNER dataset with multiple images called MNER-MI and a temporal prompt model with multiple image to address the new challenges in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on both MNER-MI and MNER -MI-Plus, demonstrating its effectiveness. |
Dyve: Thinking Fast and Slow for Dynamic Process Verification (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing process verification methods struggle with reliably assessing incomplete reasoning traces and are limited by the cost of high-quality human annotations or the inherent noise in automatically generated labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic process verifier that integrates fast and slow thinking to enhance reasoning error detection in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing process-based verifiers and maintains computational efficiency while maintaining high performance. |
CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generalize commonsense reasoning lack instantiated knowledge and require pre-built concept taxonomies and annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. |
Taming the Real-world Complexities in CPT E/M Coding with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Islam Nassar, Yang Lin, Yuan Jin, Rongxin Zhu, Chang Wei Tan, Zenan Zhai, Nitika Mathur, Thanh Tien Vu, Xu Zhong, Long Duong, Yuan-Fang Li
| Challenge: | Evaluation and Management (E/M) coding is performed by physicians and trained human coders who review clinical encounter notes and electronic health record data to assign appropriate codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automates evaluation and management coding tasks using the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an increase in coding accuracy of more than 36% over a commercial CPT E/M coding system and almost 5% over our strongest single-prompt baseline. |
Gradient-Based Adversarial Factual Consistency Evaluation for Abstractive Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models often produce inconsistent statements or false facts. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient weak-supervised adversarial data augmentation approach to generate factual consistency datasets by backpropagating gradients on token embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make interpretable factual errors tracing on public datasets and is cost-effective. |
Building Parallel Monolingual Gan Chinese Dialects Corpus (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In particular, we manually annotate a Gan Chinese Dialects Corpus (GCDC) including 131.5 hours and 310 documents with 6 different genres, containing news, official document, story, prose, poet, letter and speech, from 19 different Gan regions. |
| Approach: | They propose a scheme to represent Gan Chinese dialects using Chinese character, Chinese Pinyin and Chinese audio forms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme is based on a Gan Chinese Dialects Corpus (GCDC) with 131.5 hours and 310 documents with 6 different genres, containing news, official document, story, prose, poet, letter and speech, from 19 different Gan regions. |
Align-smatch: A Novel Evaluation Method for Chinese Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing based on Alignment of Concept and Relation (2022.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
OpenKE: An Open Toolkit for Knowledge Embedding (D18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge embedding tools are available for embeddable knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework and various fundamental models to embed knowledge graphs into a continuous low-dimensional space. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit and pre-trained embeddings are available on http://openke.thunlp.org/. |
Relaxing the Constraints: A Dual-Importance Projection Mechanism for Lifelong Model Editing (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenghai Chen, Senbin Xu, Jiaxi Tan, Xinhua Wu, Yan Zhang, Xiawu Zheng, Shengchuan Zhang, Ke Li, Sicheng Zhao, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong Ji
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods rely on strict orthogonal projection to preserve previously edited knowledge, but this constraint limits gradient expressiveness, resulting in degradation of model generalization and overall performance as the number of edits increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages Singular Value Decomposition to identify critical gradient subspaces and introduces a dual mechanism comprising "accumulated importance" and "projection importance" |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on five mainstream LLMs show that the proposed method achieves an average comprehensive performance improvement of 10.36% and effectively maintains the model’s general capabilities on downstream tasks. |
GlotEval: A Test Suite for Massively Multilingual Evaluation of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Hengyu Luo, Zihao Li, Joseph Attieh, Sawal Devkota, Ona de Gibert, Xu Huang, Shaoxiong Ji, Peiqin Lin, Bhavani Sai Praneeth Varma Mantina, Ananda Sreenidhi, Raúl Vázquez, Mengjie Wang, Samea Yusofi, Fei Yuan, Jörg Tiedemann
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks focus on English and a handful of high-resource languages, thereby overlooking the realistic performance of large language models in multilingual and lower-resourced scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified and lightweight framework that integrates 27 benchmarks under a standard ISO 639-3 language identifier system to enable seamless incorporation of new benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates 27 benchmarks under a standard ISO 639-3 language identifier system, allowing for seamless incorporation of new benchmarks. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Defining and Evaluating Visual Language Models’ Basic Spatial Abilities: A Perspective from Psychometrics (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies assessing the spatial abilities of VLMs lack a solid theoretical foundation and lack measurable data. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychometric framework defining five basic spatial abilities in Visual Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines five basic spatial abilities in Visual Language Models (VLMs) it provides a comprehensive evaluation benchmark and methodological perspective for embodied AI development . |
QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Making RALM Robust to Irrelevant Contexts via Layer Knowledge Guided Attention (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Weijie Shi, Hao Chen, Jiaming Li, Yao Zhao, Yazhong Zhang, Qijin Chen, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face factual hallucination and knowledge obsolescence when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-knowledge guided attention method which harnesses the layer-wise knowledge of large language models to optimize per-layer attention on useful passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on RALM benchmarks. |
Upsample or Upweight? Balanced Training on Heavily Imbalanced Datasets (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a lack of data across domains creates significant imbalances in training data sizes . a recent study shows that temperature sampling and scaling are equivalent but differ under stochastic gradient descent due to differences in gradient variance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that upsamples low-resource languages and upweights their loss functions to address this disparity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method competes effectively with existing data re-weighting techniques while offering computational efficiency. |
MoZIP: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Large Language Models in Intellectual Property (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Shiwen Ni, Minghuan Tan, Yuelin Bai, Fuqiang Niu, Min Yang, Bowen Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Xiaojun Chen, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for the evaluation of large language models in the IP domain . they also propose supervised multilingual large language model called MoZi . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms four well-known LLMs on the MoZIP benchmark . the most powerful ChatGPT does not reach the passing level . |
Stance Detection on Social Media with Background Knowledge (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies of stance detection focus on learning stance information about specific targets from context, but in real-world scenarios, we usually have a certain understanding of a target when we express our stance on it. |
| Approach: | They propose to take the background knowledge of the target into account for better stance detection by categorizing it into episodic and discourse knowledge categories and a heuristic retrieval algorithm based on the topic to retrieve the Wikipedia documents relevant to the sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmark datasets showing that the proposed framework is able to detect stances in-target and zero-shot scenarios. |
Exploring Chain-of-Thought for Multi-modal Metaphor Detection (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Metaphors are commonly found in advertising and internet memes, but lack of high-quality textual data is a challenge for language models . a new framework for multi-modal metaphor detection is being developed to address these challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts and integrates knowledge from Large Language Models into smaller ones to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on the MET-MEME dataset. |
MADAWSD: Multi-Agent Debate Framework for Adversarial Word Sense Disambiguation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Kaiyuan Zhang, Qian Liu, Luyang Zhang, Chaoqun Zheng, Shuaimin Li, Bing Xu, Muyun Yang, Xinxiao Qiao, Wenpeng Lu
| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a fundamental yet challenging task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | a novel multi-agent Debate framework for adversarial word Sense disambiguation is proposed . the framework simulates a real-world debate environment where multiple agents engage in discussions about ambiguous words in the context of adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates with existing LLMs and improves models in Chinese language . it shows that it can be used to improve models in the Chinese language and improve performance . |
Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Association (2024.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing information retrieval datasets cannot capture abstract semantic associations well. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that retrieves relevant plots from the book for a query using a labeled dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be used to evaluate the performance of IR models on the novel task Plot Retrieval. |
Retrieval-free Knowledge Injection through Multi-Document Traversal for Dialogue Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Wang, Jianzhu Bao, Fei Mi, Yi Chen, Hongru Wang, Yasheng Wang, Yitong Li, Lifeng Shang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Existing research on retrieval-augmented and retrieval free dialogue models focuses on retrieving knowledge from external sources and rely on finely annotated retrieval training data and knowledge-grounded responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-free approach by turning knowledge documents into simulated multi-turn dialogues using a Multi-Document Traversal algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms retrieval-augmented models while being cheaper and faster at domain transfer. |
Multi-view Classification Model for Knowledge Graph Completion (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models only evaluated candidate triples from content information. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view classification model where multiple views are performed based on both content and context information for candidate triple evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two representative datasets and improves performance. |
UnihanLM: Coarse-to-Fine Chinese-Japanese Language Model Pretraining with the Unihan Database (2020.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese and Japanese share many characters with similar surface morphology. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-Japanese pretrained masked language model with a coarse-to-fine training approach to exploit the shared knowledge across the languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is effective on mono- and cross-lingual Chinese and Japanese tasks. |
Beyond Itinerary Planning—A Real-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn and Tool-Using Travel Tasks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM performance on travel planning have shown that existing settings are limited due to limited domain coverage, insufficient modeling of users’ implicit preferences in multi-turn conversations, and a lack of evaluation of agents’ capability boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' planning and tool-use abilities in real-world settings by collecting user queries, user preferences, and tools from real scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates agents' capabilities in real-world settings and shows that even advanced models exhibit imbalanced performance across different capabilities. |
BenchMAX: A Comprehensive Multilingual Evaluation Suite for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual benchmarks focus primarily on language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They develop a multi-way multilingual benchmark that measures critical capabilities of large language models across languages. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on BenchMAX reveal uneven utilization of core capabilities across languages, emphasizing the performance gaps that scaling model size alone does not resolve. |
Self-supervised Preference Optimization: Enhance Your Language Model with Preference Degree Awareness (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised preference optimization framework that replaces the reward model with a preference loss and alignment loss to improve LLMs' ability to understand human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be integrated with existing preference optimization methods and significantly boost their performance. |
StyleDGPT: Stylized Response Generation with Pre-trained Language Models (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating responses following a desired style are lacking of parallel data for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a KL loss and a style classifier to fine-tune response generation . they show that their model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in style consistency and contextual coherence with two public datasets. |
Residual Learning of Neural Text Generation with n-gram Language Model (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that n-gram models can achieve satisfactory performance on a large proportion of testing cases. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a neural LM that fits the residual between an n-gram LM and the real-data distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves additional performance gains over popular standalone models on three typical language tasks. |
Let the Expert Stick to His Last: Expert-Specialized Fine-Tuning for Sparse Architectural Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for dense-architecture LLMs are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an expert-specialized fine-tuning method that tunes the experts most relevant to downstream tasks while freezing the other experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or surpasses full-parameter fine-tuning. |
Bridging the Gap between Prior and Posterior Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue models lack prior and posterior knowledge selection . prior selection module may not learn to select knowledge properly because of lack of posterior information . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation-based training strategy to remove the exposure bias of knowledge selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets. |
CleanGen: Mitigating Backdoor Attacks for Generation Tasks in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuetai Li, Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Luyao Niu, Dinuka Sahabandu, Bhaskar Ramasubramanian, Radha Poovendran
| Challenge: | Generative large language models (LLMs) have remarkable performance in generation tasks, but datasets used to train or fine-tune these models are often not disclosed to users. |
| Approach: | They develop an inference time defense called CleanGen to mitigate backdoor attacks for generation tasks in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed inference time defense achieves lower attack success rates (ASR) compared to baseline defenses for all five backdoor attacks. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
Refining and Synthesis: A Simple yet Effective Data Augmentation Framework for Cross-Domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) data augmentation has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to data sparsity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to augment ABSA data using pseudo labels for target domain . they refine generated labeled data using a natural language inference filter . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms 7 strong baselines on 4 kinds of ABSA tasks. |
Agentic Reward Modeling: Integrating Human Preferences with Verifiable Correctness Signals for Reliable Reward Systems (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reward models focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward system that combines human preference rewards with verifiable correctness signals to provide reliable rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward agent significantly outperforms vanilla reward models on benchmarks and inference-time best-of-n searches on real-world tasks. |
CodeDPO: Aligning Code Models with Self Generated and Verified Source Code (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing training methods for code generation do not improve code correctness and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates preference learning into code generation to improve code correctness and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves code correctness and efficiency by integrating preference learning into code generation. |
Metagent-P: A Neuro-Symbolic Planning Agent with Metacognition for Open Worlds (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
YanfangZhou YanfangZhou, Yuntao Liu, Xiaodong Li, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Jinlong Tian, Zhenyu Li, Xinhai Xu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promising potential through their world knowledge and language processing capabilities in open-world planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates the world knowledge of large language models, symbolic reasoning capabilities of cognitive architectures, and metacognition to improve experience utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in Minecraft and reduces the average replanning counts by 34% and exceeds the human success rate by 18.96%. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
TEXTOIR: An Integrated and Visualized Platform for Text Open Intent Recognition (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . currently, many dialogue systems are limited to handle the uncertain open intents . |
| Approach: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . it is composed of two main modules: open intent detection and open intent discovery . authors propose a framework to implement a complete process to identify known intents and discover open intents . |
| Outcome: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated and visualized platform for text open intent recognition . it integrates state-of-the-art algorithms and benchmark intent datasets . however, there are still some issues, which bring difficulties for future research . |
Pre-train and Plug-in: Flexible Conditional Text Generation with Variational Auto-Encoders (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing conditional generation models cannot handle emerging conditions due to their joint end-to-end learning fashion. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for conditional text generation that decouples the text generation module from the condition representation module to allow "one-to-many" conditional generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples the text generation module from the condition representation module to allow “one-to-many” conditional generation. |
CONSTRUCTURE: Benchmarking CONcept STRUCTUre REasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
RankAdaptor: Hierarchical Rank Allocation for Efficient Fine-Tuning Pruned LLMs via Performance Model (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current compression techniques entail structural pruning and a recovery phase that leverages the Low-Rank Adaptation algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical rank allocation method that enables efficient fine-tuning of pruned LLMs according to layerwise specific recovery requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods across pruning settings and LLM architectures with improvements ranging from 0.7% to 5.5%. |
Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), many downstream NLP tasks can be well solved given appropriate prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate ChatGPT and Bing GPT3 into their applications to create a set of LLMs that can be used to generate NLP tasks with appropriate prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be zero-shot or few-shot learners to solve specified tasks and can even be zero or few shot learners. |
Breaking through Deterministic Barriers: Randomized Pruning Mask Generation and Selection (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods focus on a single pruning criterion and lack variety. |
| Approach: | They propose a model pruning strategy that generates several pruning masks randomly and then chooses the optimal mask from the pool of mask candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning strategy achieves state-of-the-art performance across eight datasets from GLUE, particularly excelling at high levels of sparsity. |
TRIPS: Efficient Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Text-Relevant Image Patch Selection (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing vision-and-language pre-training models suffer from long visual sequences . experimental results show that TRIPS gains a speedup of 40% over previous similar VLP models . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient vision-and-language pre-training model with text-relevant image patch selection, TRIPS, which reduces the visual sequence progressively with a text-guided patch-selection layer in the visual backbone for efficient training and inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can speed up training and inference by 40% over previous models. |
SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Akbar, Lester James Miranda, Jennifer Santoso, Elyanah Aco, Akhdan Fadhilah, Jonibek Mansurov, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Onno Kampman, Joel Moniz, Muhammad Habibi, Frederikus Hudi, Jann Montalan, Ryan Hadiwijaya, Joanito Lopo, William Nixon, Börje Karlsson, James Jaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Yuze Gao, Patrick Irawan, Bin Wang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Chenxi Whitehouse, Ivan Parmonangan, Maria Khelli, Wenyu Zhang, Lucky Susanto, Reynard Ryanda, Sonny Hermawan, Dan Velasco, Muhammad Kautsar, Willy Hendria, Yasmin Moslem, Noah Flynn, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Haochen Li, Johanes Lee, R. Damanhuri, Shuo Sun, Muhammad Qorib, Amirbek Djanibekov, Wei Qi Leong, Quyet V. Do, Niklas Muennighoff, Tanrada Pansuwan, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Yan Xu, Tai Chia, Ayu Purwarianti, Sebastian Ruder, William Tjhi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Alham Aji, Sedrick Keh, Genta Winata, Ruochen Zhang, Fajri Koto, Zheng Xin Yong, Samuel Cahyawijaya
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia (SEA) is home to over 1,300 indigenous languages and 671 million people . prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a resource center that provides standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the quality of AI models on 36 SEA languages across 13 tasks . the results highlight the importance of SEA as a culturally diverse region . |
MedDCR: Learning to Design Agentic Workflows for Medical Coding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical coding is the process of translating unstructured clinical notes into standardized diagnostic and procedural codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop framework that treats workflow design as a learning problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art workflows on benchmark datasets and produces interpretable, adaptable workflows that better reflect real coding practice. |
InfiniSST: Simultaneous Translation of Unbounded Speech with Large Language Model (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for simultaneous speech translation assume pre-segmented speech, limiting their real-world applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue task that can translate unbounded streaming speech . they construct translation trajectories and robust segments from MuST-C with multi-latency augmentation during training and develop a cache management strategy to facilitate efficient inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces computation-aware latency by 0.5 to 1 second while maintaining the same translation quality compared to baselines. |
AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yujie Feng, Jian Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Pengfei Xu, Xiaohui Zhou, Yujia Zhang, Zexin Lu, Yasha Wang, Alan Zhao, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Recent model merging-based methods struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model’s training status. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B). |
Towards Adversarially Robust Text Classifiers by Learning to Reweight Clean Examples (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing defense methods improve the adversarial robustness by making models adapt to training set augmented with some adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a reweighting mechanism to calibrate the training distribution to obtain robust models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method minimizes the loss of validation set mixed with clean examples and adversarial ones in an online learning manner. |
MM-ChatAlign: A Novel Multimodal Reasoning Framework based on Large Language Models for Entity Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing MMEA methods rely on knowledge representation learning (KRL) to measure the similarity of entity embeddings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes the visual reasoning abilities of MLLMs for multimodal entity alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the visual reasoning abilities of MLLMs for multimodal entity alignment. |
Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wenqi Zhang, Mengna Wang, Gangao Liu, Huixin Xu, Yiwei Jiang, Yongliang Shen, Guiyang Hou, Zhe Zheng, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Jiajun Liu, Weiming Lu, Peng Li, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks, but their effectiveness in embodied domains remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks that synthesizes 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing visual reasoning models by +9%, 24%, and +13% on long-horizon tasks. |
AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhitao He, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have significantly impacted the legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for judicial decision-making that simulates the court trial process . they propose 420 Chinese judgment documents to support their framework and build a large-scale legal knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles. |
Enhancing One-Shot Pruned Pre-trained Language Models through Sparse-Dense-Sparse Mechanism (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Guanchen Li, Xiandong Zhao, Lian Liu, Zeping Li, Yixing Xu, Dong Li, Lu Tian, Jie He, Ashish Sirasao, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are robust in contextual understanding but their considerable size incurs significant computational and storage costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse-Dense-Sparse pruning framework to prune PLMs . they prune less critical connections using conventional pruning methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms SparseGPT and Wanda under identical sparsity. |
HappyDB: A Corpus of 100,000 Crowdsourced Happy Moments (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Akari Asai, Sara Evensen, Behzad Golshan, Alon Halevy, Vivian Li, Andrei Lopatenko, Daniela Stepanov, Yoshihiko Suhara, Wang-Chiew Tan, Yinzhan Xu
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on developing technologies that help users incorporate the findings of the science of happiness into their daily lives. |
| Approach: | They crowd-sourced HappyDB, a corpus of 100,000 happy moments, and applied several state-of-the-art analysis techniques to analyze HappyDB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technology can understand how people express their happy moments in text and analyze them using state-of-the-art techniques. |
AI2Agent: An End-to-End Framework for Deploying AI Projects as Autonomous Agents (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaxiang Chen, Jingwei Shi, Lei Gan, Jiale Zhang, Qingyu Zhang, Dongqian Zhang, Pang Xin, Zhucong Li, Xu Yinghui
| Challenge: | a new framework automates deployment and debugging of AI projects . complexity of environment configurations, dependency conflicts, and debuggering issues hinder scalability and adoption. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework that automates AI project deployment . they conducted experiments on 30 AI deployment cases to evaluate its effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces deployment time and improves success rates by reducing human intervention. |
Rethinking and Improving Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
MoEC: A Memory-Routed Mixture-of-Experts Controller for Adaptive Minecraft Control (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on a monolithic policy to execute subgoals across varying contexts, causing inconsistent outcomes and scaling only partially mitigates. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-routed mixtureof-experts controller for Adaptive Minecraft Control that routes via a subgoal-indexed expert memory and regulates capacity through failure-triggered expert growth and redundancy-aware consolidation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed controller shows significant gains in adaptability, robustness, and execution consistency over strong baselines. |
FactCG: Enhancing Fact Checkers with Graph-Based Multi-Hop Data (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior research on training grounded factuality classification models to detect hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) has relied on public natural language inference (NLI) data and synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages multi-hop reasoning on context graphs extracted from documents to generate complex multi-level claims without relying on LLMs to decide data labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4-o on the LLM-Aggrefact benchmark with much smaller model size. |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history. |
Golden Touchstone: A Comprehensive Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Financial Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaojun Wu, Junxi Liu, Huan-Yi Su, Zhouchi Lin, Yiyan Qi, Chengjin Xu, Jiajun Su, Jiajie Zhong, Fuwei Wang, Saizhuo Wang, Fengrui Hua, Jia Li, Jian Guo
| Challenge: | Existing financial benchmarks suffer from limited language and task coverage, low-quality datasets, and inadequate adaptability for LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual benchmark for financial LLMs that assesses models’ language understanding and generation capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bilingual benchmark assesses models’ language understanding and generation capabilities. |
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models. |
Automatic Academic Paper Rating Based on Modularized Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network (P18-2)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to rate academic papers require a lot of feature engineering and can cause inequality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a novel convolutional neural network to automatically rate academic papers . they propose to build a dataset to automatically determine whether to accept academic papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by a large margin. |
XLPT-AMR: Cross-Lingual Pre-Training via Multi-Task Learning for Zero-Shot AMR Parsing and Text Generation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) research is limited and challenging for languages other than English. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual pre-training approach for AMR parsing and text generation . they use an English-to-English parallel dataset and a multi-task learning approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline pre-training methods on English parsing and text generation tasks. |
Situated Embedding Models for Context-Aware Dense Retrieval (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing embedding models are not well-equipped to encode situated context effectively, i.e., situating a chunk’s meaning within its context. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent short chunks in a way that is conditioned on a broader context window to enhance retrieval performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art embedding models on a book-plot retrieval dataset. |
QueryAttack: Jailbreaking Aligned Large Language Models Using Structured Non-natural Query Language (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets may leak shallow heuristics via entity mentions, thus contributing to the high performance on RE benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-masked contrastive framework for relation extraction to gain a deeper understanding on textual context and type information while avoiding rote memorization of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the effectiveness and robustness of neural models in different RE scenarios. |
PIPER: Benchmarking and Prompting Event Reasoning Boundary of LLMs via Debiasing-Distillation Enhanced Tuning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhicong Lu, Changyuan Tian, PeiguangLi PeiguangLi, Li Jin, Sirui Wang, Wei Jia, Ying Shen, Guangluan Xu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on Large Language Models (LLMs) have failed to evaluate their performance in event reasoning with a single event relational type or reasoning format. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' event reasoning capability using a single event relational type or reasoning format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 10K diverse instruction-tuning demonstrations to alleviate event reasoning-oriented data scarcity. |
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
StitchLLM: Serving LLMs, One Block at a Time (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bodun Hu, Shuozhe Li, Saurabh Agarwal, Myungjin Lee, Akshay Jajoo, Jiamin Li, Le Xu, Geon-Woo Kim, Donghyun Kim, Hong Xu, Amy Zhang, Aditya Akella
| Challenge: | Existing techniques like distillation and pruning are not efficient for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic model routing framework that uses a powerful bottom model to process all queries and a lightweight routing mechanism to allocate computational resources appropriately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves system throughput while minimizing performance degradation. |
The Digital Dunning-Kruger Effect: Decoupling Hallucinations via Geometric Hidden-state Observation for Semantic Truthfulness (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yueheng Mao, Min Yu, Gengwang Li, Jianguo Jiang, Gang Li, Meng Zhang, Zhen Xu, Weiqing Huang, Ming Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate overconfident yet factually incorrect hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box-based framework that captures stubborn hallucinations by integrating internal geometric dynamics with output probability distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms white-box methods and reduces computational overhead by over 90%. |
Gradient-Adaptive Policy Optimization: Towards Multi-Objective Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel algorithm that uses multiple-gradient descent to optimize LLMs with diverse preferences to maximize trade-offs between objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach incorporates user preferences across different objectives and achieves Pareto solutions that better align with the user’s specific needs. |
Do LLMs Know to Respect Copyright Notice? (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the occurrence of copyright violations in LLM output, but a negative answer would suggest that LLMs will become the primary facilitator and accelerator of copy right infringement behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine whether LLMs respect copyright information in user input . they use a set of language models, user prompts, and copyrighted materials . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model will be the primary facilitator and accelerator of copyright infringement behavior, the study finds . the study also provides a benchmark dataset serving as a test bed for evaluating infringement behaviors by LLMs . |
Asymmetric Relational-Geometry Driven Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) methods suffer from limited cross-model transferability in black-box scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimization-based framework that learns universal perturbations under an asymmetric relational-geometry driven objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in black-box transfer settings. |
Profiling LLM’s Copyright Infringement Risks under Adversarial Persuasive Prompting (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in text generation but raise concerns regarding potential copyright infringement. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured persuasion workflow to analyze the influence of persuasive prompts on LLM outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method analyzes the influence of persuasive prompts on LLM outputs. |
DataArc-SynData-Toolkit: A Unified Closed-Loop Framework for Multi-Path, Multimodal, and Multilingual Data Synthesis (2026.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Zhichao Shi, Cehao Yang, Hao Zhou, Xiaojun Wu, Huajie Li, Xuhui Jiang, Chengjin Xu, Yuanzhuo Wang, Jian Guo
| Challenge: | Existing synthetic data tools are limited by convoluted workflows, fragmented data standards, and limited scalability across modalities. |
| Approach: | They develop an open-source framework that aims to reduce the technical barrier to synthetic data generation and subsequent model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an optimal balance between generation efficiency and data quality. |
Can Language Models Understand Physical Concepts? (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing language models do not understand basic physical concepts in the human world. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transfer embodied knowledge from visual models to LMs . they use visual concepts and embodies concepts learned from interaction with the world . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable performance with scaling up parameters of LMs 134. |
Learning When to Concentrate or Divert Attention: Self-Adaptive Attention Temperature for Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation models treat decoding at each time step equally with the same matrix . conventional methods treat decoder outputs at all time steps with the identical weight matrix causing inaccuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a mechanism to control the softness of attention by means of an attention temperature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on Chinese-English and English-Vietnamese translations. |
Target-to-Source Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is an important task in sentiment analysis, but data scarcity limits performance of existing methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a target-to-source augmentation approach to alleviate the issue of data scarcity in Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) they use fluency and alignment discriminators to provide feedback and use this feedback to optimize the generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the performance of existing methods. |
Can Brain Signals Reveal Inner Alignment with Human Languages? (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Brain Signals, such as Electroencephalography, and human languages have been explored independently for many downstream tasks, however, the connection between them has not been well explored. |
| Approach: | They introduce a multimodal transformer alignment model to observe coordinated representations between EEG and language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieved an F1-score improvement of 1.7% on ZuCo and 9.3% on Zuco datasets for sentiment analysis, and 7.4% on ZuCO for relation detection. |
Token-level Preference Self-Alignment Optimization for Multi-style Outline Controllable Generation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing attempts to outline generation are limited by response pair requirements and substantial computation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level preference self-alignment optimization for outline controllable generation that extends the Bradley-Terry model from pair-wise to list-wise comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 19.28% in performance while requiring only 56.25% training time. |
Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Data Leakage from Partial Transformer Gradients (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that distributed machine learning is vulnerable to gradient inversion attacks . a recent study demonstrated the possibility of reconstructing private textual training data using partial gradients . |
| Approach: | They propose to use partial gradients to reconstruct training data using a Transformer model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is vulnerable to gradient inversion attacks, the authors show . they show that applying differential privacy on gradients during training offers limited protection . |
Generative Zero-Shot Prompt Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Inverse Prompting (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to slot filling only learn surface mapping of slot types between D S and D T and get poor generalization capability or robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative zero-shot prompt learning framework for cross-domain slot filling which improves generalization and robustness than previous work. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and robustness on unseen slots and an efficient prompt tuning strategy boosts performance. |
Tree-of-Quote Prompting Improves Factuality and Attribution in Multi-Hop and Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Justin Xu, Yiming Li, Zizheng Zhang, Augustine Yui Hei Luk, Mayank Jobanputra, Samarth Oza, Ashley Murray, Meghana Reddy Kasula, Andrew Parker, David W Eyre
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) produce fluent but factually incorrect outputs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree-of-Quote framework that decomposes complex questions into subquestions and generates quotes to support each step without retrieval. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on StrategyQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, MuSiQue, MoreHopQ, and MedQA show that ToQ improves factuality and attribution over baselines. |
RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Qingsong Lv, Yangning Li, Zihua Lan, Zishan Xu, Jiwei Tang, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing selection methods rely on static, heuristic quality scores and are executed only once before training. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic selection framework that integrates selection into every training step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates selection into every training step. |
Enhancing Cross-target Stance Detection with Transferable Semantic-Emotion Knowledge (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection are struggling to cope with the data across targets. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses external knowledge as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer across different targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on a large real-world dataset. |
TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kai Li, Xuanqing Yu, Ziyi Ni, Yi Zeng, Yao Xu, Zheqing Zhang, Xin Li, Jitao Sang, Xiaogang Duan, Xuelei Wang, Chengbao Liu, Jie Tan
| Challenge: | Existing memory frameworks provide limited support for temporally structured information across hierarchical levels, leading to fragmented memories and unstable long-horizon personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal–hierarchical memory framework that organizes conversations through a Temporal Memory Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while reducing the recalled memory length by 52.20%. |
Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Global Intent-Slot Co-occurrence (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing joint models only use training procedure to determine the implicit correlation between intents and slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to make full use of the statistical co-occurrence frequency between intents and slots as prior knowledge to enhance joint multiple intent detection and slot filling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two public multi-intent datasets. |
Towards Robust Pruning: An Adaptive Knowledge-Retention Pruning Strategy for Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pruning strategies struggle to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks when continually increasing model sparsity and require a retraining process. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning strategy that replicates embedding space and feature space of dense language models and aims to conserve more pre-trained knowledge during the pruning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning strategy replicates embedding space and feature space of dense language models, aiming to conserve more pre-trained knowledge during the pruning process. |
Faithful-First Reasoning, Planning, and Acting for Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to improve task accuracy or enrich COT generation are lacking in multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Faithful-First Reasoning, Planning, and Acting framework that evaluates faithfulness of intermediate reasoning and uses it to plan and execute faithfulness-aware actions during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves perceptual faithfulness by up to 24% over prompt-based and tool-augmented reasoning frameworks without degrading task accuracy. |
Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection via Cross-Modal Graph Convolutional Network (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on multimodal sarcasm detection using textual and visual information have been limited to text-only approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a cross-modal graph for each multi-modal instance to explicitly draw the ironic relations between textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal sarcasm detection. |
Seek-and-Solve: Benchmarking MLLMs for Visual Clue-Driven Reasoning in Daily Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaomin Li, Tala Wang, Zichen Zhong, Ying Zhang, Zirui Zheng, Takashi Isobe, Dezhuang Li, Huchuan Lu, You He, Xu Jia
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ pre-existing knowledge or perceptual understanding, often neglecting the critical capability of reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark designed for visual clue-driven reasoning in daily scenarios that combines rigorous grounding in authentic daily activities and challenging query design that necessitates more than surface-level perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark identifies visual clues and their ability to provide robust reasoning in daily scenarios. |
Graph Neural News Recommendation with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative user and news representations fail to consider high-order connectivity underlying the user-news interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Graph Neural News Recommendation model with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement which can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph and disentangle latent preference factors by a neighborhood routing algorithm. |
Open World Classification with Adaptive Negative Samples (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models with no effective open category data during training are limited by the lack of effective open categories data during the training stage. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to generate effective open category samples in the training stage and without requiring prior knowledge or external datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates effective synthetic open category samples in the training stage and without requiring any prior knowledge or external datasets. |
QCRD: Quality-guided Contrastive Rationale Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Diffuse Thinking: Exploring Diffusion Language Models as Efficient Thought Proposers for Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet their autoregressive generation paradigm makes it computationally prohibitive to explore diverse reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines diffusion-based generation with autoregressive evaluation to efficiently generate diverse intermediate reasoning thoughts and employ LLMs as evaluators to assess and select candidates based on their plausibility and correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference efficiency while maintaining competitive or superior reasoning accuracy. |
DynaCode: A Dynamic Complexity-Aware Code Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing code benchmarks for large language models remain static, resulting in data contamination and unreliable evaluation results. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic, complexity-aware benchmark that overcomes the limitations of static datasets and provides a memorization-advantaged benchmark. |
| Outcome: | DynaCode generates 189 million unique nested code problems across 4 units of code complexity and 16 types of call graphs. |
MVP-Tuning: Multi-View Knowledge Retrieval with Prompt Tuning for Commonsense Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for commonsense reasoning rely on multi-hop knowledge retrieval and suffer low accuracy due toembedded noise in the acquired knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multi-hop knowledge retrieval to model knowledge and input text together. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on 5 commonsense reasoning datasets and is number one on theleaderboard. |
Leros: Learning Explicit Reasoning on Synthesized Data for Commonsense Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenhao Wang, Pengfei Cao, Jiachun Li, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Li Qiuxia, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent work shows large language models can generate useful rationales for commonsense question answering (CQA) however, the cost of deployment and further tuning is relatively expensive for the large models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages both knowledge graphs and large language models to synthesize rationale-augmented CQA data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate useful rationales on unseen CQA benchmarks. |
Escaping the Sisyphus Dilemma: Experience Replay for Robust Text-to-Optimization Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented strategies for large language models fail to capture dynamic reasoning required to resolve execution failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that implements Experience Replay to transform transient rectification steps into persistent knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model accuracy by 8.45% on complex tasks while reducing token consumption by 28.65% and interaction turns by 25.82%. |
Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods conduct knowledge distillation statically, e.g., student model aligns output distribution to teacher model on pre-defined training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic knowledge distillation that empowers the student to adjust the learning procedure according to its competency . they find it is promising and provide discussions on potential future directions towards more efficient methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost student model performance while accelerating training . the proposed method reduces memory usage and accelerates model inference . |
AEG: Argumentative Essay Generation via A Dual-Decoder Model with Content Planning (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on argument generation focus on generating individual short arguments, while research on generating long and coherent argumentative essays is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to automatically generate argumentative essays using a writing prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates persuasive essays with higher diversity and less repetition compared to baselines. |
ZeroPrompt: Scaling Prompt-Based Pretraining to 1,000 Tasks Improves Zero-Shot Generalization (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization . they focus on task scaling and zero-shooting to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot generalization efficiency by 30 times with task scaling. |
Logic-of-Thought: Injecting Logic into Contexts for Full Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tongxuan Liu, Wenjiang Xu, Weizhe Huang, Yuting Zeng, Jiaxing Wang, Xingyu Wang, Hailong Yang, Jing Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks but their performance in complex logical reasoning tasks remains unsatisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose a propositional logic prompting method which generates expanded logical information descriptions and utilizes them as an additional augmentation to original contexts. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that Logic-of-Thought boosts the performance of various prompting methods with a striking margin across five logical reasoning tasks. |
A Cause-Effect Look at Alleviating Hallucination of Knowledge-grounded Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue systems have demonstrated impressive performance conducting fluent and natural-sounding conversations, but they are plagued by the Knowledge Hallucination problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that exploits the dialogue-knowledge interaction to reduce hallucination by using external knowledge resources to generate more informative responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination without disrupting other dialogue performance while keeping adaptive to different generation models. |
BPO: Staying Close to the Behavior LLM Creates Better Online LLM Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing offline DAP methods for aligning large language models with human preference are computationally expensive due to their two-stage training pipeline that consists of a reward modeling phase. |
| Approach: | They propose to align large language models to human desiderata from offline preference datasets by using an online approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across a wide range of tasks when training with the same amount of preference data. |
CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which emits predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing methods on six classification tasks yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions. |
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenyang Song, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Xiyu Shi, Kuai Li, Chen Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Guangli Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance. |
Rhombus: Incentivizing Coordination in Parallel Thinking through Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyuan Nan, Qi Yi, Di Huang, Yutong Wu, Guanhua Huang, Xue Gong, Kejiao Li, Yuhao Jiang, Chenchen Zhang, Zenan Xu, Xing Hu, Bo Zhou
| Challenge: | Parallel thinking is a promising avenue for scaling test-time compute in Large Language Models . however, coordinating the exploration and aggregation stages remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel thinking framework that explicitly incentivizes coordination between components via end-to-end reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 6.0% over long chain-of-thought baselines while reducing wall-clock latency by 39.4% under matched token budgets. |
RADAR: Enhancing Radiology Report Generation with Supplementary Knowledge Injection (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance radiology report generation overlook the knowledge already embedded within the models, leading to redundant information integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing radiology report generation with supplementary knowledge injection that leverages both internal and external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR, CheXpert-Plus, and IU X-ray show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs in both language quality and clinical accuracy. |
Mitigating Biases of Large Language Models in Stance Detection with Counterfactual Augmented Calibration (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ang Li, Jingqian Zhao, Bin Liang, Lin Gui, Hui Wang, Xi Zeng, Xingwei Liang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models generate biased stances due to spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual Augmented Calibration Network to calibrate potential bias in stance detection of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration network can mitigate biases of large language models, achieving state-of-the-art results. |
DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yuan Yao, Deming Ye, Peng Li, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lixin Huang, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation extraction dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features . document-level relation extraction is a task to identify relational facts between entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text. |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
ET-MIER: Entity Type-guided Key Mention Identification and Evidence Retrieval for Document-level Relation Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work does not fully distinguish the contribution of different mentions to entity representation and the importance of mentions in evidence sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction task that uses entity mentions to identify relations between entities in a text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on widely-adopted datasets. |
SpikeVoice: High-Quality Text-to-Speech Via Efficient Spiking Neural Network (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | SpikeVoice performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN . major obstacle to using SNN for such generative tasks lies in the demand for models to grasp long-term dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a brain-inspired Spiking Neural Network (SNN) which performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN and explores the potential of SNN to "speak". |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with only 10.5% energy consumption of ANN. |