Papers by Liang Yan

A Mousetrap: Fooling Large Reasoning Models for Jailbreak with Chain of Iterative Chaos (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for style transfer are based on an inductive learning approach, which represents the style as embeddings, decoder parameters, or discriminator parameters and directly applies these general rules to the test cases.
Approach:	They propose a retrieval-based context-aware style representation that involves top-K relevant sentences in the target style in the transfer process.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms several strong baselines and is general and effective to the task of unsupervised style transfer.

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Yang Yao, Xuan Tong, Ruofan Wang, Yixu Wang, Lujundong Li, Liang Liu, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have advanced beyond traditional Large Language Models, yet they pose heightened safety risks.
Approach:	They propose a first jailbreak attack targeting Large Reasoning Models . they exploit a Chaos Machine component to transform attack prompts with diverse one-to-one mappings based on the reasoning chain .
Outcome:	The proposed attack exploits the unique vulnerabilities of LRMs by integrating a Chaos Machine. success rates of the mousetrap attack are as high as 96%, 86% and 98% respectively.

Enhancing Medical Dialogue Generation through Knowledge Refinement and Dynamic Prompt Adjustment (2025.findings-acl)

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Hongda Sun, Jiaren Peng, Wenzhong Yang, Liang He, Bo Du, Rui Yan

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Medical dialogue systems (MDS) struggle to identify relevant medical knowledge and generate accurate responses.
Approach:	They propose a medical dialogue system that integrates knowledge refining and dynamic prompt adjustment to improve medical knowledge and accuracy.
Outcome:	The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art systems in both generation quality and medical entity accuracy.

SAC: Neural Speech Codec with Semantic-Acoustic Dual-Stream Quantization (2026.acl-long)

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Wenxi Chen, Ruiqi Yan, Yushen Chen, Zhikang Niu, Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yuzhe Liang, null Wenhanlin, Shunshun Yin, Ming Tao, Xinsheng Wang, Xie Chen

Cool-Fusion: Fuse Large Language Models without Training (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing speech codecs struggle to balance high-quality reconstruction with semantically rich representations, limiting their effectiveness in both generative and understanding tasks.
Approach:	They propose a neural speech codec with semantic-acoustic dual-stream quantization that disentangles semantic and acousian modeling into two dedicated streams.
Outcome:	The proposed codec outperforms state-of-the-art speech tokenizers in auto-propagating text-to-speech models.

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Cong Liu, Xiaojun Quan, Yan Pan, Weigang Wu, Xu Chen, Liang Lin

LM-Lexicon: Improving Definition Modeling via Harmonizing Semantic Experts (2026.eacl-long)

Challenge:	Cool-Fusion is a simple yet effective approach to combine two or more heterogeneous large language models .
Approach:	They propose a method that fuses the knowledge of two or more heterogeneous large language models to leverage complementary strengths.
Outcome:	The proposed method increases accuracy from three strong source LLMs on GSM8K by 17.4%.

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Yang Liu, Jiaye Yang, Weikang Li, Jiahui Liang, Yang Li, Lingyong Yan

Ask-and-Verify: Span Candidate Generation and Verification for Attribute Value Extraction (2022.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	LM-LEXICON is a definition modeling approach that integrates data clustering, semantic expert learning, and model merging.
Approach:	They propose a definition modeling approach that integrates data clustering, semantic expert learning, and model merging using a sparse mixture-of-experts architecture.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing methods on five widely used benchmarks and achieves a BLEU score of 7%.

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Yifan Ding, Yan Liang, Nasser Zalmout, Xian Li, Christan Grant, Tim Weninger

Information Extraction & Text Mining

Challenge:	Existing reading comprehension models can over-generate attribute values which hinders precision.
Approach:	They propose a product attribute value extraction task that captures key factual information from product descriptions and a new end-to-end pipeline framework called Ask-and-Verify.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing models by up to 3.1% F1 absolute improvement points while scaling to thousands of attributes.

SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility (2026.acl-long)

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Xuyang Zhi, Peilun Zhou, Chengqiang Lu, Hang Lv, Yiwei Liang, Rongyang Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Hongchao Gu, Defu Lian, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) are shifting the focus from single verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a framework that automatically adjusts reward weights and data importance to synchronize learning intent with data utility for optimal performance.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves model capabilities across all domains and scales.

An Auxiliary Task Boosted Multi-task Learning Method for Service Account Retrieval with Limited Human Annotation (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Yuanzhou Yao, Zhao Zhang, Kaijia Yang, Huasheng Liang, Qiang Yan, Yongjun Xu

RealChart2Code: Bridging the Gap in Real-World Chart-to-Code Generation via Multi-Task Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to service account retrieval have limited human annotation, resulting in labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks.
Approach:	They propose an Auxiliary task Boosted Multi-Task Learning method which introduces multiple auxiliary tasks and enhances the performance of the main task, service account retrieval.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the performance of the main task, service account retrieval.

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Jiajun Zhang, Yuying Li, Zhixun Li, Xingyu Guo, Jingzhuo Wu, Leqi Zheng, Yiran Yang, Jianke Zhang, Qingbin Li, Shannan Yan, Changguo Jia, Junfei Wu, Zilei Wang, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang

Text Generation

Challenge:	Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation across various domains, but their ability to replicate complex, multi-panel visualizations remains largely unassessed.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale benchmark to evaluate chart generation from large- scale raw data and assess iterative code refinement in a multi-turn conversational setting.
Outcome:	The new benchmark evaluates 14 leading VLMs on real-world data and shows they struggle with complex plot structures and authentic data.

Topology Matters: Measuring Memory Leakage in Multi-Agent LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Jinbo Liu, Defu Cao, Yifei Wei, Tianyao Su, Yuan Liang, Yushun Dong, Yan Liu, Yue Zhao, Xiyang Hu

mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Multi-agent LLMs are rapidly moving from prototype to real-world use . network topology is a first-order security parameter in multi-aggent systems .
Approach:	They propose a framework for comparing topology-conditioned memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems.
Outcome:	The proposed framework evaluates topology-conditioned memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems.

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Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Jiabo Ye, Ming Yan, Liang Zhang, Bo Zhang, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou

mPLUG-DocOwl2: High-resolution Compressing for OCR-free Multi-page Document Understanding (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing Multimodal Large Language Models lack general structure understanding abilities for text-rich document images.
Approach:	They propose to use unified structure learning to boost the performance of MLLMs by encoding structure information into text-rich images.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 10 visual document understanding benchmarks.

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Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Liang Zhang, Jiabo Ye, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have improved document understanding performance but generate thousands of visual tokens for a single document image, leading to excessive GPU memory and slower inference times.
Approach:	They propose a high-resolution document compression module to generate 324 tokens for a single document image.
Outcome:	The proposed module reduces first token latency by more than 50% and improves document comprehension performance.

Concept2Box: Joint Geometric Embeddings for Learning Two-View Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-acl)

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Zijie Huang, Daheng Wang, Binxuan Huang, Chenwei Zhang, Jingbo Shang, Yan Liang, Zhengyang Wang, Xian Li, Christos Faloutsos, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang

Retrieval Augmented Instruction Tuning for Open NER with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to embed knowledge graphs have ignored the fact that they contain two fundamentally different views: high-level ontology-view concepts and fine-grained instance-view entities.
Approach:	They propose a novel geometric representation that jointly embeds the two views of a KG using dual geometric representations.
Outcome:	Experiments on the public DBpedia KG and a newly-created industrial KG show the proposed method works well.

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Tingyu Xie, Jian Zhang, Yan Zhang, Yuanyuan Liang, Qi Li, Hongwei Wang

Thinking Before You Speak: A Proactive Test-time Scaling Approach (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies have focused on integrating large language models (LLMs) with information extraction (IE) however, the best approach to incorporate information with LLMs for IE remains an open question.
Approach:	They propose to use a Chinese IT dataset to perform RA-IT for IE . they use semantically similar examples from the training dataset as the context .
Outcome:	The proposed approach is evaluated in English and Chinese scenarios.

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Cong Liu, Wenchang Chai, Hejun Wu, Yan Pan, Pengxu Wei, Liang Lin

Reasoning

Challenge:	Large Language Models often exhibit deficiencies with complex reasoning tasks, such as maths, due to the discrepancy between human reasoning patterns and those presented in training data.
Approach:	They propose to insert insights between consecutive reasoning steps to bridge this gap by generating insights between the next reasoning steps.
Outcome:	Experiments on mathematical datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed reasoning framework on complex problems.

Enhancing Answer Boundary Detection for Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)

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Fei Yuan, Linjun Shou, Xuanyu Bai, Ming Gong, Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yan Fu, Daxin Jiang

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Existing approaches to improve machine reading comprehension performance on low resource languages are limited due to the lack of sufficient training data.
Approach:	They propose to use a mixed MRC task to translate the question to other languages and build cross-lingual question-passage pairs.
Outcome:	The proposed task improves on two cross-lingual MRC datasets.

Relation Discovery with Out-of-Relation Knowledge Base as Supervision (N19-1)

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Yan Liang, Xin Liu, Jianwen Zhang, Yangqiu Song

RSA-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Large Models in Real-World Acoustic Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods to extract relations from text corpus without annotated data are violated by up to 31%.
Approach:	They propose to use out-of-relation knowledge bases to supervise the discovery of unseen relations where relations to discover from the text corpus and those in knowledge bases are not overlapped.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art relation discovery performance by a large margin.

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Yibo Zhang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Shilinlu Yan, Jin Wang, Yaoqi Guo, Yitian Chen, Yalan Qin, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun

TS-SQL: Test-driven Self-refinement for Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing evaluations rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics that characterize authentic physical environments.
Approach:	They propose a robustness benchmark to stress-test Audio Large Models (ALLMs) using high-fidelity auditory scene simulations.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs well on a wide range of tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech translation, and audio-based reasoning.

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Wenbo Xu, Haifeng Zhu, Liang Yan, Chuanyi Liu, Peiyi Han, Shaoming Duan, Jeff Z. Pan

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	null
Approach:	null
Outcome:	null

Low-code LLM: Graphical User Interface over Large Language Models (2024.naacl-demo)

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Yuzhe Cai, Shaoguang Mao, Wenshan Wu, Zehua Wang, Yaobo Liang, Tao Ge, Chenfei Wu, WangYou WangYou, Ting Song, Yan Xia, Nan Duan, Furu Wei

SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Low-code LLM is a visual programming interface that allows users to incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts.
Approach:	They propose a human-LLM interaction framework that incorporates low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses.
Outcome:	The proposed framework enables users to incorporate ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts.

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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

Speech & Audio in NLP

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.

LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Zhendong Chu, Shen Wang, Jian Xie, Tinghui Zhu, Yibo Yan, Jingheng Ye, Aoxiao Zhong, Xuming Hu, Jing Liang, Philip S. Yu, Qingsong Wen

Identifying Cellular Niches in Spatial Transcriptomics: An Investigation into the Capabilities of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Model (LLM) agents are transforming education by automating complex tasks and enhancing both teaching and learning processes.
Approach:	This survey analyzes recent advances in applying Large Language Model agents to educational settings . it highlights ethical issues, hallucination and overreliance, and integration with existing ecosystems .
Outcome:	The authors analyze the technologies enabling LLM agents and highlight key challenges in deploying them in educational settings.

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Huanhuan Wei, Xiao Luo, Hongyi Yu, Jinping Liang, Luning Yang, Lixing Lin, Alexandra Popa, Xiting Yan

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Spatial transcriptomic technologies allow measuring gene expression profile and spatial information of cells in tissues simultaneously.
Approach:	They propose a spatial transcriptomic approach to identify spatial niches using a zero-shot large language models by transforming spatial transcriptomics data into spatial context prompts.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves performance by leveraging gene expression of neighboring cells/spots, cell type composition, tissue information, and external knowledge.

Semantic Relation-aware Difference Representation Learning for Change Captioning (2021.findings-acl)

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Yunbin Tu, Tingting Yao, Liang Li, Jiedong Lou, Shengxiang Gao, Zhengtao Yu, Chenggang Yan

From Redundancy to Relevance: Information Flow in LVLMs Across Reasoning Tasks (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to describe semantic change in images with distractors are difficult to learn .
Approach:	They propose a semantic relation-aware difference representation learning network to explicitly learn the difference representation in the existence of distractors.
Outcome:	The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR-Change and Spot-the -Diff datasets.

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Xiaofeng Zhang, Yihao Quan, Chen Shen, Xiaosong Yuan, Shaotian Yan, Liang Xie, Wenxiao Wang, Chaochen Gu, Hao Tang, Jieping Ye

UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) are a powerful visual-language reasoning tool.
Approach:	They propose to integrate attention analysis with LLaVA-CAM to determine interactions between visual representations.
Outcome:	The proposed approach can be used to determine interactions between visual representations.

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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang

SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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.

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Yuanhe Zhang, Jiayu Tian, Yibo Zhang, Shilinlu Yan, Liang Lin, Zhenhong Zhou, Li Sun, Sen Su

What If Consensus Lies? Selective-Complementary Reinforcement Learning at Test Time (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing studies on noise lack quantitative analysis and rely on intuition and empirical observation, thus failing to understand practical robustness.
Approach:	They propose a method for quantifying the impact of noise intensity on LALM inputs by using a structured activation subspace derived from the model's internal representations.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing denoising methods and demonstrates that noise is perceived more accurately than raw audio features.

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Dong Yan, Jian Liang, Yanbo Wang, Shuo Lu, Ran He, Tieniu Tan

Qsnail: A Questionnaire Dataset for Sequential Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing TTRL methods rely on positive pseudo-labeling strategies to enhance reasoning capabilities.
Approach:	They propose a test-time reinforcement learning framework that mitigates label noise amplification by deriving pseudo-rewards from majority voting consensus.
Outcome:	The proposed framework mitigates label noise amplification by implementing selective positive pseudo-labeling and entropy-gated negative p-labeled pruning.

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Yan Lei, Liang Pang, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng

Landmark-Guided Cross-Speaker Lip Reading with Mutual Information Regularization (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Questionnaires are a professional research methodology used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of human opinions, preferences, and behaviors.
Approach:	They propose a questionnaire-based dataset that consists of 13,168 human-written questionnaires.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset contains 13,168 human-written questionnaires gathered from online platforms.

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Linzhi Wu, Xingyu Zhang, Yakun Zhang, Changyan Zheng, Tiejun Liu, Liang Xie, Ye Yan, Erwei Yin

TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Lip reading is a process of interpreting silent speech from visual lip movements . but lip reading in cross-speaker scenarios poses a challenging problem due to inter-speech variability .
Approach:	They propose to exploit lip landmark-guided visual clues instead of mouth-cropped images as input features.
Outcome:	Experimental results show that the proposed approach reduces speaker-specific appearance characteristics in cross-speaker scenarios.

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Liang Zhang, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Ming Yan, Yichen Xu, Qin Jin, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang

DSQG-Syn: Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing by Domain Specific Question Generation (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Recent studies have shown that multimodal large language models can be useful for chart understanding, but their size limits their use in resource-constrained environments.
Approach:	They propose an efficient multimodal large language model with only 3B parameters for chart understanding.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms several chart-understanding MLLMs with up to 13B parameters on ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart to Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX.

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Shaoming Duan, Youxuan Wu, Chuanyi Liu, Yuhao Zhang, Zirui Wang, Peiyi Han, Shengyuan Yu, Liang Yan, Yingwei Liang

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for generating SQL queries using natural language questions produce inconsistent NLQ-SQL pairs.
Approach:	They propose a text-to-SQL data synthesis framework that generates domain-relevant questions . they synthesize NLQ-SqL pairs that are domain-specific and intent-consistent .
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms closed-source LLMs on the Text-to-SQL task.

BAR: A Backward Reasoning based Agent for Complex Minecraft Tasks (2025.findings-acl)

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Weihong Du, Wenrui Liao, Binyu Yan, Hongru Liang, Anthony G Cohn, Wenqiang Lei

Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on forward reasoning based planning, but this paradigm doesn't work well for complex tasks.
Approach:	They propose to decompose a task into easily executed steps by planning and use a backward reasoning based agent to make the planning starting from the terminal state.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing methods and the proposed modules in a virtual environment that simulates complex tasks based on real-world scenarios.

KERS: A Knowledge-Enhanced Framework for Recommendation Dialog Systems with Multiple Subgoals (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Jun Zhang, Yan Yang, Chencai Chen, Liang He, Zhou Yu

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Existing frameworks for multi-subgoal dialogs require a system to build a social bond with users to gain trust and develop affinity.
Approach:	They propose a framework for common knowledge-based multi-subgoal dialogs that divides up conversations with multiple subgoals and propose mechanisms to filter noisy knowledge and to include cleaned knowledge in the dialog response generation process.
Outcome:	The proposed framework obtains state-of-the-art results on a DuRecDial dataset in both automatic and human evaluation.

Beyond Cross-Modal Alignment: Measuring and Leveraging Modality Gap in Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Hanqi Yan, Xiangxiang Cui, Lu Yin, Jindong Gu, Paul Pu Liang, Yulan He, Yifei Wang

LexicalAT: Lexical-Based Adversarial Reinforcement Training for Robust Sentiment Classification (D19-1)

Challenge:	a recent study shows that vision-language models have modality gaps that persist even in well-aligned models.
Approach:	They propose a modality-dominance score to measure and leverage modality gaps . they propose automatic interpretability metrics to evaluate these features in a scalable manner .
Outcome:	The proposed framework allows for training-free probing and editing methods for understanding model perception across genders and generating adversarial examples.

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Jingjing Xu, Liang Zhao, Hanqi Yan, Qi Zeng, Yun Liang, Xu Sun

CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing text classification models are fragile and sensitive to simple perturbations.
Approach:	They propose a generator-classifier adversarial training approach to improve classification models . they use a large-scale lexical knowledge base to generate attacking examples .
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines and reduces test errors on neural networks.

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Tao Zhang, ChengLIn Zhu, Yanjun Shen, Wenjing Luo, Yan Zhang, Hao Liang, Tao Zhang, Fan Yang, Mingan Lin, Yujing Qiao, Weipeng Chen, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Zenan Zhou

Context-aware Difference Distilling for Multi-change Captioning (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user’s perspective.
Approach:	They propose a Chinese Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs that compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs a systematic framework for constraint types.
Outcome:	The proposed framework integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment.

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Yunbin Tu, Liang Li, Li Su, Zheng-Jun Zha, Chenggang Yan, Qingming Huang

WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for multi-change captioning are difficult because it requires a higher level of cognition to reason an arbitrary number of changes.
Approach:	They propose a context-aware difference distilling network to capture all genuine changes for yielding sentences.
Outcome:	The proposed network captures all genuine changes for yielding sentences on three public datasets.

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Yujia Qin, Zihan Cai, Dian Jin, Lan Yan, Shihao Liang, Kunlun Zhu, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Ning Ding, Huadong Wang, Ruobing Xie, Fanchao Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Long-form question answering requires two procedures: information retrieval and information synthesis.
Approach:	They propose a Chinese long-form question answering dataset called WebCPM . the dataset is based on a web search interface that engages with a search engine in real time .
Outcome:	The proposed dataset generates answers that are no worse than human-written ones . the dataset is the first Chinese LFQA dataset .

Rˆ3Net:Relation-embedded Representation Reconstruction Network for Change Captioning (2021.emnlp-main)

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Yunbin Tu, Liang Li, Chenggang Yan, Shengxiang Gao, Zhengtao Yu

ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing work on change captioning uses a natural language sentence to describe disagreement between two images.
Approach:	They propose a Relation-embedded Representation Reconstruction Network to distinguish real change from clutter and irrelevant changes.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on two public datasets.

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Haiquan Zhao, Lingyu Li, Shisong Chen, Shuqi Kong, Jiaan Wang, Kexin Huang, Tianle Gu, Yixu Wang, Jian Wang, Liang Dandan, Zhixu Li, Yan Teng, Yanghua Xiao, Yingchun Wang

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application for reducing stress and providing emotional guidance.
Approach:	They re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards to define roles of role-players . they train a specific role- playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4 .
Outcome:	The proposed model behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4, and the model performs better than GPLs.

Can Multimodal LLMs See Materials Clearly? A Multimodal Benchmark on Materials Characterization (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Zhengzhao Lai, Youbin Zheng, Zhenyang Cai, Haonan Lyu, Jingpu Yang, Hong-Qing Liang, Yan Hu, Benyou Wang

Projecting Out the Malice: A Global Subspace Approach to LLM Detoxification (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	characterization imaging data is fundamental to acquiring materials information.
Approach:	a team of researchers develop a benchmark for materials characterization imaging data . the goal is to bridge this gap by addressing 1,500 questions that require expert-level expertise.
Outcome:	a new benchmark for materials characterization imaging data is presented . the benchmark reveals that MLLMs perform poorly when addressing higher-level questions .

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Zenghao Duan, Zhiyi Yin, Zhichao Shi, Liang Pang, Shaoling Jing, Zihe Huang, Jiayi Wu, Yu Yan, Jingcheng Deng, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance but pose inherent risks of generating toxic content.
Approach:	They propose a method that removes toxic subspaces from FFN parameters . they propose to use a lightweight method to eliminate toxic subespaces .
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves SOTA detoxification while preserving general capabilities without large-scale retraining.

Do Large Language Models have Problem-Solving Capability under Incomplete Information Scenarios? (2024.findings-acl)

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Yuyan Chen, Yueze Li, Songzhou Yan, Sijia Liu, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao

Enhancing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Critical Representation Fine-tuning (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing games such as "Who is undercover" are subjective and difficult to evaluate .
Approach:	They propose a game called BrainKing that evaluates LLMs' problem-solving capability under incomplete information scenarios.
Outcome:	The proposed game requires LLMs to identify target entities with limited yes-or-no questions and potential misleading answers.

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Chenxi Huang, Shaotian Yan, Liang Xie, Binbin Lin, Sinan Fan, Yue Xin, Deng Cai, Chen Shen, Jieping Ye

A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT) is a proposed method for improving parameter efficiency . however, it yields suboptimal performance, as fixed-position representations have uncertain impact on outputs .
Approach:	They propose a method that fine-tunes critical representations in a low-rank linear subspace while freezing the base model.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves accuracy of LLaMA-2-7B and ReFT by 18.2 and 3.8 on GSM8K.

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Kedi Chen, Dezhao Ruan, Yuhao Dan, Yaoting Wang, Siyu Yan, Xuecheng Wu, Yinqi Zhang, Qin Chen, Jie Zhou, Liang He, Biqing Qi, Linyang Li, Qipeng Guo, Xiaoming Shi, Wei Zhang

X-ray Made Simple: Lay Radiology Report Generation and Robust Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Inductive reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs).
Approach:	They propose a survey of inductive reasoning for large language models . they categorize methods into three main areas: post-training enhancement, test-time exploration, and data augmentation.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves inductive reasoning in large language models.

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Kun Zhao, Chenghao Xiao, Sixing Yan, Haoteng Tang, William K. Cheung, Noura Al Moubayed, Liang Zhan, Chenghua Lin

SAS: Dialogue State Tracking via Slot Attention and Slot Information Sharing (2020.acl-main)

Challenge:	Technical language and templated nature of professional reports hinder patient comprehension and allow models to artificially boost lexical metrics such as BLEU by reproducing common report patterns.
Approach:	They propose a layman's RRG framework that leverages layperson-friendly language to enhance patient accessibility and promote robust evaluation and report generation by encouraging models to focus on semantic accuracy over rigid templates.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves model performance with more layman-style data, compared to templated professional language and inflated lexical scores.

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Jiaying Hu, Yan Yang, Chencai Chen, Liang He, Zhou Yu

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Existing models with excessive information are inefficient and costly .
Approach:	They propose to integrate a Dialogue State Tracker with Slot Attention and Slot Information Sharing to reduce redundant information’s interference and improve long dialogue context tracking.
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly outperforms existing models on the MultiWOZ dataset.

AdaTag: Multi-Attribute Value Extraction from Product Profiles with Adaptive Decoding (2021.acl-long)

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Jun Yan, Nasser Zalmout, Yan Liang, Christan Grant, Xiang Ren, Xin Luna Dong

Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to extract product attribute values are limited by knowledge sharing across different attributes.
Approach:	They propose to use adaptive decoding to handle extraction of product attribute values by parameterizing the decoder with pretrained attribute embeddings, through a hypernetwork and a Mixture-of-Experts module.
Outcome:	The proposed model is able to handle multiple attributes without sharing the entire network parameters across all attributes.

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Tian Liang, Zhiwei He, Wenxiang Jiao, Xing Wang, Yan Wang, Rui Wang, Yujiu Yang, Shuming Shi, Zhaopeng Tu

Self-supervised Product Title Rewrite for Product Listing Ads (2022.naacl-industry)

Challenge:	Modern large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but struggle on complex reasoning tasks.
Approach:	They propose a multi-agent debate framework that encourages divergent thinking in LLMs . they propose to break debate and use a judge to obtain a final solution .
Outcome:	The proposed framework encourages divergent thinking in large language models . it is able to generate novel thoughts even if initial stance is incorrect .

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Xue Zhao, Dayiheng Liu, Junwei Ding, Liang Yao, Mahone Yan, Huibo Wang, Wenqing Yao

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing work has investigated the title optimization for Product Listing Ads (PLAs) however, little work has examined the effectiveness of this method.
Approach:	They propose a method to rewrite product listing ads titles without considering the fluency and information priority.
Outcome:	The proposed solution reduces the cost and improves CTR in the offline test and real-world online test by a large amount.

An Empirical Study of LLM Reasoning Ability Under Strict Output Length Constraint (2025.emnlp-main)

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Yi Sun, Han Wang, Jiaqiang Li, Jiacheng Liu, Xiangyu Li, Hao Wen, Yizhen Yuan, Huiwen Zheng, Yan Liang, Yuanchun Li, Yunxin Liu

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful tool for test-time scaling, but they are often used under time constraints.
Approach:	They propose to use LLMs to make models think before answering questions . they also use self-correction and best-of-N decoding to encourage deeper thinking .
Outcome:	The proposed models are able to achieve higher inference accuracy with extra inference computation under time constraints.

StyleDubber: Towards Multi-Scale Style Learning for Movie Dubbing (2024.findings-acl)

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Gaoxiang Cong, Yuankai Qi, Liang Li, Amin Beheshti, Zhedong Zhang, Anton Hengel, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Chenggang Yan, Qingming Huang

CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for movie dubbing break phonemes in scripts, resulting in incomplete phoneme pronunciation and poor identity stability.
Approach:	They propose a method that switches dubbing learning from frame level to phoneme level . it uses a multimodal style adaptor to learn pronunciation style from audio .
Outcome:	The proposed method improves on two benchmarks, V2C and Grid, and is available on github.

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Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen

Challenge:	a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages.
Approach:	They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling.

Concise and Organized Perception Facilitates Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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Junjie Liu, Shaotian Yan, Chen Shen, Zhengdong Xiao, Liang Xie, Wenxiao Wang, Jieping Ye

MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Extensive experimental results on several popular logical benchmarks (ProofWriter, PrOntoQA, PrONtoQA-OOD, and FOLIO) and mathematical benchmark (DI-GSM) show that COP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
Approach:	They propose a reasoning approach called Concise and Organized Perception (COP) that carefully analyzes the given statements to identify the most pertinent information while eliminating redundancy efficiently.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several popular logical benchmarks and mathematical benchmarks.

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Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model.

BioT5+: Towards Generalized Biological Understanding with IUPAC Integration and Multi-task Tuning (2024.findings-acl)

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Qizhi Pei, Lijun Wu, Kaiyuan Gao, Xiaozhuan Liang, Yin Fang, Jinhua Zhu, Shufang Xie, Tao Qin, Rui Yan

Enhancing Agentic Textual Graph Retrieval with Synthetic Stepwise Supervision (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	BioT5+ is an extension of the BioT5, but lacked a nuanced understanding of molecular structures.
Approach:	They propose a new bio-entity modeling framework, BioT5+, which integrates IUPAC names and molecule data.
Outcome:	The proposed model bridges the gap between molecular representations and textual descriptions and improves the grounded reasoning of bio-text and bio-sequences.

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Ge Chang, Jinbo Su, Jiacheng Liu, Pengfei Yang, Yuhao Shang, Huiwen Zheng, Hongli Ma, Yan Liang, Yuanchun Li, Yunxin Liu