Papers by Lin Sun
De-biasing Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Causal Intervention (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Named entity recognition (NER) rely on labeled data, which is labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to de-biase DS-NER models by a structural Causal Model . they propose to use a causal invariance regularizer to make them more robust . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves DS-NER models on four datasets and three DS NER models. |
Recyclable Tuning for Continual Pre-training (2023.findings-acl)
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Yujia Qin, Cheng Qian, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Continual pre-training is the paradigm where pre-trained language models acquire fresh knowledge and gradually get upgraded. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adapted weights to recycle old PLMs for continual pre-training . they propose to combine initialization and distillation methods to achieve better performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the convergence and performance of the upgraded PLM. |
ScaleBox: Enabling High-Fidelity and Scalable Code Verification for Large Language Models (2026.acl-demo)
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Jiasheng Zheng, Xin Zheng, Boxi Cao, Pengbo Wang, Zhengzhao Ma, Qiming Zhu, Jiazhen Jiang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing code sandboxes fail to provide accurate verification and efficiency under high-concurrency workloads. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-fidelity code verification system that provides sandbox feedback for RL training and evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms heuristic-matching baselines on LiveCodeBench and training stability on high-concurrency workloads. |
ReFSQL: A Retrieval-Augmentation Framework for Text-to-SQL Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Kun Zhang, Xiexiong Lin, Yuanzhuo Wang, Xin Zhang, Fei Sun, Cen Jianhe, Hexiang Tan, Xuhui Jiang, Huawei Shen
| Challenge: | Existing methods that align natural language with SQL Language underestimate inherent structural characteristics of SQL and lead to structure errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-argument framework that aligns natural language with SQL Language and trains one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and robustness of text-to-SQL generation on five datasets. |
ARise: Towards Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning via Risk-Adaptive Search (2025.acl-long)
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Yize Zhang, Tianshu Wang, Sirui Chen, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Chaochao Lu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but their application in open-ended, knowledge-intensive, complex reasoning scenarios is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates risk assessment of intermediate reasoning states with dynamic retrieval-augmented generation within a Monte Carlo tree search paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art KAR methods by up to 23.10% and the latest RAG-equipped large reasoning models by upto 25.37%. |
Union-of-Experts: Neurons in Mixture-of-Experts are Secretly Routers (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on an external router to assign tokens to experts, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an MoE variant that performs "expert-autonomous routing" by pre-designating a fraction of neurons within each expert as "routing neurons" they pre-train UoE models with up to 3B parameters and show they outperform traditional MoEs with matched efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with 3B parameters and provides valuable insights into expert-autonomous selection and the broader routing mechanisms of MoE models. |
All Languages Matter: Understanding and Mitigating Language Bias in Multilingual RAG (2026.acl-long)
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Dan Wang, Guozhao Mo, Yafei Shi, Cheng Zhang, Bo Zheng, Boxi Cao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing mRAG systems suffer from a language bias during reranking, systematically favoring English and the query’s native language. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-agnostic utility-driven reranker alignment technique to mitigate language bias during re-ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates language bias and consistently improves mRAG performance across languages. |
MERaLiON-AudioLLM: Advancing Speech and Language Understanding for Singapore (2025.acl-demo)
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Yingxu He, Zhuohan Liu, Geyu Lin, Shuo Sun, Bin Wang, Wenyu Zhang, Xunlong Zou, Nancy F. Chen, AiTi Aw
| Challenge: | MERaLiON-AudioLLM is the first general-purpose audio-based large language model for multitask learning. |
| Approach: | They introduce MERaLiON-AudioLLM, a general-purpose audio-based large language model for multitask learning with a focus on Singlish understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits strong generalization across a diverse set of tasks . it is a leading solution for region-specific AI applications. |
APOLLO: An Optimized Training Approach for Long-form Numerical Reasoning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate reasoning programs that ignore the differences between facts treated all facts equally, leading to wrong punishment of programs that differed from the ground truth. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimized training framework for long-form numerical reasoning that incorporates a number-aware negative sampling strategy and consistency-based reinforcement learning to increase execution accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of long-form numerical reasoning on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboards. |
Flames: Benchmarking Value Alignment of LLMs in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)
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Kexin Huang, Xiangyang Liu, Qianyu Guo, Tianxiang Sun, Jiawei Sun, Yaru Wang, Zeyang Zhou, Yixu Wang, Yan Teng, Xipeng Qiu, Yingchun Wang, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) do not accurately uncover safety vulnerabilities in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a value alignment benchmark called Flames that encompasses both harmlessness principles and a unique morality dimension that integrates specific Chinese values such as harmony. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on Flames, particularly in safety and fairness dimensions. |
IEPile: Unearthing Large Scale Schema-Conditioned Information Extraction Corpus (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit a significant performance gap in Information Extraction (IE) high-quality instruction data is the vital key for enhancing LLMs' specific capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual (English and Chinese) IE instruction corpus that contains 0.32B tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of LLMs for IE with zero-shot generalization. |
Automatic Label Sequence Generation for Prompting Sequence-to-sequence Models (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Prompting has shown to be sample efficient compared to fine-tuning with pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automatic prompting method that uses natural language prompts on sequence-to-sequence models and a beam search method to generate a large amount of label sequence candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms other no-manual-design methods on single label words and generates large amount of label sequence candidates. |
Learning In-context Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jie Lou, Wei Jia, Dai Dai, Hua Wu, Boxi Cao, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods to recognize entities in text are limited by the diversity of entity types and the lack of high-quality annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context learning-based NER approach that can inject in-const NER ability into PLMs and recognize entities of novel types on-the-fly using only a few demonstrative instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the PLMs+fine-tuning counterparts on 4 few-shot NER datasets and significantly outperformed the Plms+initialized extractors. |
SHARP: Unlocking Interactive Hallucination via Stance Transfer in Role-Playing LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on social interactions neglect hallucination while struggling with poor generalizability and implicit character fidelity judgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable and explicit paradigm for uncovering interactive patterns of Large Language Models across diverse worldviews by defining interactive hallucination through stance transfer and SHARP, a benchmark built by extracting relations from commonsense knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm is generalizable and explicit and demonstrates its effectiveness and stability. |
Teach Small Models to Reason by Curriculum Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) show strong System-2-style reasoning, but at the cost of significant computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage curriculum distillation framework which builds a robust internal problem-solving student model and then teaches the student model to externalize this knowledge as explicit reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-stage baselines on mathematical benchmarks and significantly outperformed LRMs on complex tasks. |
Rationalizing Medical Relation Prediction from Corpus-level Statistics (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on predicting relations based on text corpus has focused on analyzing raw texts mentioning two entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can be used to rationalize medical relation prediction . they recall contexts associated with the target entities and recognize relational interactions between them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve competitive predictive performance against a comprehensive list of neural baseline models, and present rationales to justify its prediction. |
SafeAgent: Safeguarding LLM Agents via an Automated Risk Simulator (2026.acl-long)
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Xueyang Zhou, Weidong Wang, Lin Lu, Jiawen Shi, Guiyao Tie, Xu Yongtian, Lixing Chen, Pan Zhou, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Lichao Sun
| Challenge: | SafeAgent improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms closed-source models on two safety benchmarks and one real-world task. |
Denoising Distantly Supervised Open-Domain Question Answering (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing DS-QA models ignore rich information contained in other paragraphs and are noisy . Existing systems rely on pre-identified relevant texts, which do not always exist in real-world QA scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which uses a paragraph selector to filter out noisy paragraphs and a reader to extract the correct answer from denoised paragraphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture useful information from noisy data and achieve significant improvements on open domain question answering. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
Distilling Discrimination and Generalization Knowledge for Event Detection via Delta-Representation Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current neural event detection approaches focus on trigger-centric representations, which work well on distilling discrimination knowledge, but poorly on learning generalization knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Delta-learning approach to distill discrimination and generalization knowledge by incrementally learning and adaptively fusing event representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms previous approaches on unseen/sparse trigger words and achieves state-of-the-art performance on ACE2005 and KBP2017 datasets. |
Aegis:An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Aegis is an advanced LLM-based multi-agent for intelligent functional safety engineering that can perform all phases of a vehicle's lifecycle, including design, development, production, operation, and decommissioning. |
| Approach: | They introduce Aegis: An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution can perform Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), document Functional Safety Requirements (FSR), and plan test cases for Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems. |
Learning or Self-aligning? Rethinking Instruction Fine-tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) is a crucial phase in building large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge intervention framework to decouple the potential underlying factors of IFT and enable individual analysis of different factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples the potential underlying factors of IFT, enabling individual analysis of different factors. |
V-ALPHASOCIAL: Benchmark and Self-Reflective Chain-of-Thought Generation for Visual Social Commonsense Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Zongyu Lin, Zhikun Xu, Xiaohan Song, Yixin Wan, Xingcheng Yao, Tsung-Han Lin, Selina Song, Pranav Subbaraman, Ben Zhou, Kai-Wei Chang, Yizhou Sun
| Challenge: | Social commonsense reasoning is a multimodal task that requires both textual and visual cues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates visual cues into social commonsense reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves social commonsense reasoning on a multimodal foundation model. |
REInstruct: Building Instruction Data from Unlabeled Corpus (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for annotating instruction data are expensive and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically build instruction data from an unlabeled corpus without heavy reliance on proprietary LLMs and human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on AlpacaEval leaderboard and other open-source methods. |
MemSearcher: Iterative Memory Integration for Search Agent via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Debing Zhang, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based search agents often concatenate the full interaction history into the context, producing long and noisy inputs and increasing compute cost and memory overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent framework that maintains a compact memory during multi-turn interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong history-concatenation (ReAct-style) baselines on a range of public datasets while maintaining nearly constant token counts across multi-turn interactions. |
Q-TOD: A Query-driven Task-oriented Dialogue System (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelined task-oriented dialogue systems have difficulties adapting to unseen domains . end-to-end systems are plagued by large-scale knowledge bases in practice . |
| Approach: | They propose a query-driven task-oriented dialogue system that extracts dialogue context information into a natural language query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets. |
OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics (2025.findings-acl)
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Haote Yang, Xingjian Wei, Jiang Wu, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Győző Zijian Yang, Junyuan Gao, Jingchao Wang, Bowen Jiang, Shasha Wang, Nanjun Yu, Zihao Zhang, Shixin Hong, Hongwei Liu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Lijun Wu, Gábor Prószéky, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent significant strides toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). |
| Approach: | They introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. |
| Outcome: | The framework reveals intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of LLMs in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as an example. |
Modalities Should Be Appropriately Leveraged: Uncertainty Guidance for Multimodal Chinese Spelling Correction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese spelling correction (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates uncertainty into feature learning and correction stages . they propose to combine the uncertainty of multimodal features with model learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three public datasets. |
VALU: A Benchmark for Video Anomaly Temporal Localization and Understanding at Multiple Semantic Levels (2026.acl-long)
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Yixiao He, Menghao Zhang, Haifeng Sun, Jing Wang, Kangheng Lin, Jinghan Wang, Chenye Xu, Pengfei Ren, Qi Qi, Jingyu Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) enhance the ability of VAU models to describe and interpret anomalies. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that explicitly defines anomalies across five semantic levels and provides detailed temporal boundaries and detailed textual descriptions for each. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark defines anomalies across five semantic levels and provides detailed descriptions for each. |
RepoAgent: An LLM-Powered Open-Source Framework for Repository-level Code Documentation Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Qinyu Luo, Yining Ye, Shihao Liang, Zhong Zhang, Yujia Qin, Yaxi Lu, Yesai Wu, Xin Cong, Yankai Lin, Yingli Zhang, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Xia et al., 2018) demonstrate that a large language model can generate and maintain high-quality code documentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model powered open-source framework for generating, maintaining, and updating code documentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality documentation for the entire project. |
SingaKids: A Multilingual Multimodal Dialogic Tutor for Language Learning (2025.acl-industry)
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Zhengyuan Liu, Geyu Lin, Hui Li Tan, Huayun Zhang, Yanfeng Lu, Xiaoxue Gao, Stella Xin Yin, Sun He, Hock Huan Goh, Lung Hsiang Wong, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that SingaKids provides effective dialogic teaching, benefiting learners at different performance levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogic tutor designed to facilitate language learning through picture description tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies show that SingaKids provides effective dialogic teaching, benefiting learners at different performance levels. |
OD-RTE: A One-Stage Object Detection Framework for Relational Triple Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelines for relational triple extraction are underutilizing regional information of triple. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-stage Object Detection framework for Relational Triple Extraction . framework uses vertices-based bounding box detection and global relational triple region detection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework could extract all types of triples on two widely used datasets. |
CipherBank: Exploring the Boundary of LLM Reasoning Capabilities through Cryptography Challenge (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their capabilities in cryptographic decryption tasks remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
Coreferential Reasoning Learning for Language Representation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing language representation models cannot explicitly handle coreference, which is essential to the coherent understanding of the whole discourse. |
| Approach: | They propose a language representation model that captures coreferential relations in context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve significant improvements on downstream NLP tasks while maintaining comparable performance to baseline models on other common NLP task. |
On LLM-Based Scientific Inductive Reasoning Beyond Equations (2025.emnlp-main)
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Brian S. Lin, Jiaxin Yuan, Zihan Zhou, Shouli Wang, Shuo Wang, Cunliang Kong, Qi Shi, Yuxuan Li, Liner Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing research on inductive reasoning models emphasizes rule design without grounding them in specific scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to learn underlying patterns from limited examples in entirely new environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the inductive reasoning abilities of large language models in scientific settings. |
Exploring Mode Connectivity for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the prevalent application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in NLP. From the perspective of parameter space, PLMs provide generic initialization, starting from which high-performance minima could be found. |
| Approach: | They investigate the geometric connections of different minima through the lens of mode connectivity, which measures whether two minima can be connected with a low-loss path. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to find low-loss paths between two minima, and to understand how their mode connectivity affects their task knowledge. |
Packed Levitated Marker for Entity and Relation Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on entity and relation extraction ignores the interrelation between spans . a novel approach to extract better span representations from pre-trained languages is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a span representation approach that packs Levitated Markers to consider interrelation between spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines on six NER benchmarks and achieves a 4.1%-4.3% strict relation F1 improvement with higher speed over previous state-of-the-art models. |
Knowledge Inheritance for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
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Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Jing Yi, Jiajie Zhang, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Yusheng Su, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale pre-trained language models are mainly trained from scratch individually, ignoring that many well-taught PLMs are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training framework called knowledge inheritance and propose auxiliary supervision to efficiently learn larger PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to train large-scale language models with huge parameters and a large dataset can be adapted to domain adaptation and knowledge transfer. |
Executing Natural Language-Described Algorithms with Large Language Models: An Investigation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, creating new SOTAs and reaching human-level language understanding performance on a series of tasks and benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an algorithm test set sourced from Introduction to Algorithm to assess LLMs' code execution abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can execute programs described in natural language as long as no heavy numeric computation is involved. |
It’s Not Bragging If You Can Back It Up: Can LLMs Understand Braggings? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Bragging is a pervasive social-linguistic phenomenon that reflects complex human interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use bragging recognition, bragging explanation, and bragging generation tasks to examine bragging in large language models (LLMs) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can identify bragging intent, social appropriateness, and account for context sensitivity and provide new insights into how LLMs process bragging. |
Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can model different IE tasks, generate targeted structures, and learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. |
AudioBench: A Universal Benchmark for Audio Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Bin Wang, Xunlong Zou, Geyu Lin, Shuo Sun, Zhuohan Liu, Wenyu Zhang, Zhengyuan Liu, AiTi Aw, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation regimes for audio large language models do not cover the breadth of their possible use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AudioBench to evaluate audio large language models . they found that no single model excels consistently across all tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation targets speech understanding, audio scene understanding, and voice understanding (paralinguistic) . no single model excels consistently across all tasks, the paper found . |
DeepPresenter: Environment-Grounded Reflection for Agentic Presentation Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Zheng, Guozhao Mo, Xinru Yan, Qianhao Yuan, Wenkai Zhang, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing presentation agents rely on predefined workflows and fixed templates to generate presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic framework that adapts to diverse user intents and iterative refinement based on observation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to generate presentations with environmental observations. |
FPE2M2: Approaching Lossless and Efficient Quantization with Native Floating Point (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Yi, Jianwei Zhang, Zhiying Xu, Xinlong Yang, Yang Zhou, Minmin Sun, Zengke Liu, Tong Zhang, Junyang Lin, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Auto-regressive decoding is a memory-bound job, meaning decoding performance is limited by the bandwidth rather than the computational capabilities of the GPU. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that supports lossless weight-only quantization inference and validate it on Qwen and LLaMA Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest efficiency with lossless accuracy on Qwen and LLaMA Models across various modalities. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
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Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field. |
Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Bingxiang He, Zhong Zhuang, Jia Deng, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Jie Zhou, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current language model-driven agents lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to inspect users’ implicit intentions through explicit queries and a model expert as the upstream in agent design to enhance user-agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency. |
Joint Entity and Relation Extraction for Legal Documents with Legal Feature Enhancement (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction are based on pipelining to extract entities from unstructured judgment documents . a large number of judgment documents are released on China Judgments Online . |
| Approach: | They propose a legal triplet extraction system for drug-related criminal judgment documents . they annotate a dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction in Chinese legal domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system extracts entities and semantic relations jointly and benefits from the proposed legal lexicon feature and multi-task learning framework. |
Visual Spatial Description: Controlled Spatial-Oriented Image-to-Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Image-to-text tasks such as captioning and controllable image descriptions have received extensive attention for decades. |
| Approach: | They propose a new perspective for image-to-text to generate spatial descriptions by combining two objects in an image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is awe-inspiring and human-like, and the proposed end-to-end architecture is the better choice for their integration. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
LLM×MapReduce-V3: Enabling Interactive In-Depth Survey Generation through a MCP-Driven Hierarchically Modular Agent System (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Yu Chao, Siyu Lin, Xiaorong Wang, Zhu Zhang, Zihan Zhou, Haoyu Wang, Shuo Wang, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Generating high-quality long-form survey articles poses significant challenges to AI Agent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchically modular agent system for long-form survey generation . they use atomic models to implement skeleton initialization, digest construction, and skelet refinement . human evaluations demonstrate system surpasses representative baselines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system surpasses representative baselines in both content depth and length, highlighting the strength of MCP-based modular planning. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via Superposition Concept Discrimination (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify entities of target types with limited number of illustrative instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a superposition concept discriminator which solves the intrinsic generalization problem by an active learning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves few-shot named entity recognition (FS-NER) with minimal additional efforts. |
CogToM: A Comprehensive Theory of Mind Benchmark inspired by Human Cognition for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Haibo Tong, Zeyang Yue, Feifei Zhao, Erliang Lin, Lu Jia, Ruolin Chen, Yinqian Sun, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited to false belief tasks, highlighting bottlenecks in specific dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' Theory of Mind capabilities . they evaluate 8000 bilingual instances across 46 paradigms and validated by 49 human annotators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals performance heterogeneities and bottlenecks in 22 representative models. |
PaperRegister: Boosting Flexible-grained Paper Search via Hierarchical Register Indexing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing paper search systems lack detailed information to support finer-grained queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a paper-based index that transforms abstract-based corpus index into hierarchical index tree and offline can support paper search queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves the SOTA performance and excels in fine-grained scenarios. |
Virtual Context Enhancing Jailbreak Attacks with Special Token Injection (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak attacks target the two phases of user interaction: prompt input and model computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a new tool that leverages special tokens to improve jailbreak attacks . they found that the tool can increase success rates of existing jailbreak methods by 40% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution can improve success rates of four widely used jailbreak methods by approximately 40% across various LLMs. |
Adaptive Scaling for Sparse Detection in Information Extraction (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Detection problems involving positive instances are often deficient in information extraction tasks . a number of researches have employed neural network models to solve detection problems . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm which can handle positive sparsity problem and directly optimize over F-measure . they borrow the idea of marginal utility from economics and propose a theoretical framework for instance importance measuring . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on positive sparsity problem and over F-measure . it leads to more effective and stable training of neural network based detection models. |
Meta-Information Guided Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing meta-learning models rely on implicit instance statistics and are unreliability and weak interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-information guided meta-learning framework that uses semantics to guide meta- learning . experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can establish connections between instance-based information and semantic-based data, enabling faster initialization and adaptation. |
ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5 (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaming Zhou, Shiyao Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Jiabei He, Haoqin Sun, Hui Wang, Cheng Liu, Aobo Kong, Yujie Guo, Xi Yang, Yequan Wang, Yonghua Lin, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Automatic speech recognition systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mandarin speech datasets to analyze pronunciation and tone of children aged 3 to 5 and evaluate their models on speaker verification (SV) They find that the datasets are more robust than those used by adult speech recognition systems and are open-source and available for all academic purposes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. |
TACLR: A Scalable and Efficient Retrieval-based Method for Industrial Product Attribute Value Identification (2025.acl-long)
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Yindu Su, Huike Zou, Lin Sun, Ting Zhang, Haiyang Yang, Chen Li Yu, David Lo, Qingheng Zhang, Shuguang Han, Jufeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value identification face critical challenges . seller-provided attribute values are often incomplete or inaccurate . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based method that uses taxonomy-aware contrastive learning . they use product profiles and candidate values to encode and retrieve attributes based on similarity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a taxonomy-aware, hard negative sampling and adaptive inference with dynamic thresholds. |
LLM Reasoning as Trajectories: Step-Specific Representation Geometry and Correctness Signals (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models generate tokens by updating high-dimensional representations and decoding from them at each timestep. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows reasoning correction and length control based on derived ideal trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict correctness and length control based on ideal trajectories. |
An Auto-Encoder Matching Model for Learning Utterance-Level Semantic Dependency in Dialogue Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model can generate semantically coherent responses compared to baseline models. |
| Approach: | They propose an Auto-Encoder Matching model to learn utterance-level semantic dependency . their model contains two auto-encoders and one mapping module . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed model can generate high coherence and fluency compared to baseline models. |
Navigating the Infinite Dynamic Web Space: Effective In-Context Exploration via Cognitive Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.eacl-long)
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Guozhao Mo, Yanjiang Liu, Yafei Shi, Jiawei Chen, Yang Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Bo Zheng, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic web navigation rely on greedy strategies or value estimation, struggle to achieve effective backtracking and are heavily dependent on proprietary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive multi-agent collaboration framework that enhances cyberspace exploration capability through In-Context Exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the proprietary model Claude-3.5 Sonnet on the WebArena benchmark. |
Instance-level Randomization: Toward More Stable LLM Evaluations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Evaluations of large language models suffer from instability, where small changes of random factors can lead to drastic fluctuations of scores and even model rankings. |
| Approach: | They propose an instance-level randomization method to reduce variance and improve fairness in evaluations by randomizing all factors that affect evaluation scores for every single instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces variance and improves fairness in model comparisons by using instance-level randomization. |
s3: You Don’t Need That Much Data to Train a Search Agent via RL (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize retrieval using search-only metrics ignore downstream utility and fine-tune entire LLM to jointly reason and retrieve limit retrieval utility and compatibility with frozen or proprietary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight, model-agnostic framework that decouples the searcher from the generator and trains the search user using a Gain Beyond RAG reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines trained on over 70 more data with 2.4k training samples. |
Memorizing is Not Enough: Deep Knowledge Injection Through Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Ruoxi Xu, Yunjie Ji, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Yingfei Sun, Xiangang Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection frameworks focus on knowledge memorization and retrieval, but static nature of large language models leads to outdated information as the real world evolves or when adapting to domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a four-tier knowledge injection framework that defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association. |
A Rigorous Study on Named Entity Recognition: Can Fine-tuning Pretrained Model Lead to the Promised Land? (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task of information extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform randomization tests on standard NER benchmarks to examine name regularity, mention coverage and context diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on standard NER benchmarks than other models on open datasets. |
AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs. |
| Approach: | They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI. |
Less Noise, More Voice: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning via Instruction Purification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that LENS outperforms GRPO in delivering higher performance and faster convergence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that purifies prompts by identifying and removing interference tokens and then transfers successful rollouts to supervise policy optimization on original noisy prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GRPO in the real-world, with a 3.88% gain and speedup. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Self-describing Networks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot named entity recognition (NER) models capture information from limited instances while transferring useful knowledge from external resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-describing mechanism for few-shot NER which can universally describe mentions using concepts and automatically map novel entity types to concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can universally describe mentions using concepts and automatically map novel entity types to concepts and adaptively recognize entities on-demand. |
Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhiyuan Zeng, Qipeng Guo, Zhaoye Fei, Zhangyue Yin, Yunhua Zhou, Linyang Li, Tianxiang Sun, Hang Yan, Dahua Lin, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Top-k router suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to unbalanced routing . some experts are overflow, where exceeding tokens are dropped, while others are empty, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k router that is unbalanced and uses a multi-gPU system to handle dropped tokens and padding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the top-1 router by 4.7% in terms of performance . the top-k router suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs . |
ConsistentChat: Building Skeleton-Guided Consistent Multi-Turn Dialogues for Large Language Models from Scratch (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiawei Chen, Xinyan Guan, Qianhao Yuan, Mo Guozhao, Weixiang Zhou, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing instruction data synthesis methods focus on single-turn instructions and neglect cross-turn coherence, resulting in context drift and reduced task completion rates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constrains multi-turn instruction synthesis by explicitly modeling human conversational intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models trained on single-turn and multi-turn instruction datasets. |
Controllable Preference Optimization: Toward Controllable Multi-Objective Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yiju Guo, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Ning Ding, Zexu Sun, Bowen Sun, Huimin Chen, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for achieving optimal alignment are mostly unidirectional . a recent study suggests that large language models can be ground with evident preferences . |
| Approach: | They propose to ground large language models with evident preferences . they propose to use controllable preference optimization to specify different objectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can provide responses that match various preferences among the ”3H” desiderata. |
Critic-CoT: Boosting the Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Model via Chain-of-Thought Critic (2025.findings-acl)
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Xin Zheng, Jie Lou, Boxi Cao, Xueru Wen, Yuqiu Ji, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Debing Zhang, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the reasoning performance of large language models rely on intuitive instance-level feedback, which limits the reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that pushes LLMs toward System-2-like critic capability by using a step-wise CoT reasoning paradigm and automatic construction of weak-supervision data without human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves task-solving performance by filtering out invalid solutions or iterative refinement. |
Deconvolution-Based Global Decoding for Neural Machine Translation (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) use Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to generate translation word by word following a sequential order. |
| Approach: | They propose a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model that decodes the sequence with the guidance of its structural prediction of the target-side context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more competitive compared with the state-of-the-art methods and reduces repetition with the instruction from the target-side context for decoding. |
ChatGPT Is a Knowledgeable but Inexperienced Solver: An Investigation of Commonsense Problem in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | acquiring and representing commonsense in machines has posed a long-standing challenge (Li et al., 2021; Zhang e t al, 2022; Zhou e al. 2023) . |
| Approach: | They use a commonsense-based LLM to evaluate ChatGPT's commonsensing abilities by analyzing 11 datasets and generating knowledge descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve good QA accuracies while still struggling with certain domains of datasets. |
Bootstrapping LLM-based Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents via Self-Talk (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are powerful dialogue agents, but specializing them towards fulfilling a specific function can be prohibitive in terms of feasibility, time, and resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for training large language models by enabling "self-talk" they propose supervised fine-tuning of LLMs to improve quality of dialogues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates training data via "self-talk" of LLMs that can be refined and utilized for supervised fine-tuning. |
RMTBench: Benchmarking LLMs Through Multi-Turn User-Centric Role-Playing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Xiang, Tianyi Tang, Yang Su, Bowen Yu, An Yang, Fei Huang, Yichang Zhang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on character-centric approach and fail to reflect real-world applications. |
| Approach: | RMTBench is a user-centric bilingual role-playing benchmark featuring 80 diverse characters and over 8,000 dialogue rounds. |
| Outcome: | RMTBench features 80 diverse characters and over 8,000 dialogue rounds. |
Differentiable Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense reasoning models work by scoring a question-candidate pair, but new approaches are needed to answer multiple-choice questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a corpus of commonsense facts to answer a commonsensical question without any pre-defined choices as a resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods by a large margin in the open-ended commonsense reasoning task. |
Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained masked language models can be factual knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They conduct a rigorous study to explore the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs . they find that previous decent performance mainly owes to the biased prompts which overfit dataset artifacts a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on illustrative cases and external contexts . the results question the previous findings that MLMs can be reliable factual knowledge bases . |
Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification in Tweets (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect sarcasm target with text lacking context are not sufficient and complete. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal sarcasm target identification task that performs both textual and visual detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform textual target labeling and visual target detection. |
Prompt Tuning for Discriminative Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)
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Yuan Yao, Bowen Dong, Ao Zhang, Zhengyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Leyu Lin, Maosong Sun, Jianyong Wang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown promising results of prompt tuning in stimulating pre-trained language models (PLMs) for natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning framework that reformulates NLP tasks into a discriminative language modeling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on text classification and question answering tasks and prevents unstable tuning problems in low-resource settings. |
RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Following (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing datasets mostly contribute to controlling role style and knowledge boundaries, but overlook role-following in instruction-follower scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following composite benchmark, named RoleMRC, which includes multi-turn dialogues between ideal roles and humans, including free chats or discussions upon given passages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves instruction-following without compromising general role-playing and reasoning capabilities. |
GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Wang, Shuang Wu, Bixuan Wang, Lu Lin, Yuxin Chen, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Yufan Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) inherit contamination from training corpora, directional bias under social-desirability framing, and limited responsiveness to context beyond the item text. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
MMDialog: A Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-modal Open-domain Conversation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MMDialog is a dataset of 1.08 million real-world dialogues with 1.53 million unique images across 4,184 topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a curated set of 1.08 million dialogues with 1.53 million unique images to generalize the open domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can predict responses to multi-modal content with state-of-the-art techniques and measure their performance. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
A Middle Path for On-Premises LLM Deployment: Preserving Privacy Without Sacrificing Model Confidentiality (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Privacy-sensitive users require deploying large language models within their own infrastructure (on-premises) vulnerabilities in local environments can lead to unauthorized access and potential model theft. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that secures a few bottom layers in a secure environment . they propose metric to optimize trade-off between protection and customization flexibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on five models with 1.3B to 70B parameters. |
TR-BERT: Dynamic Token Reduction for Accelerating BERT Inference (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) are expensive in inference, making them impractical in resource-limited real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic token reduction approach to accelerate PLMs' inference by adapting the layer number of each token to avoid redundant calculation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach speeds up BERT by 2-5 times and improves performance in long-text tasks with less computation. |
AuriSRec: Adversarial User Intention Learning in Sequential Recommendation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on capturing user implicit preferences from historical interactions and matching them with the next behavior, instead of predicting user explicit intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial user intention learning approach for sequential recommendaiton . the approach explicitly predicts user current intentions by taking historical reviews as inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach explicitly predicts user intentions by inferring their decision-making process as explained in target reviews. |
Honey or Poison? Solving the Trigger Curse in Few-shot Event Detection via Causal Intervention (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent supervised ED approaches have achieved promising performance but require large number of manually annotated event data. |
| Approach: | They propose to overfit the trigger confounder of the context and the result . they propose to intervene on the context via backdoor adjustment during training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the FSED on ACE05 and MAVEN datasets. |
RSA-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Large Models in Real-World Acoustic Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Zhang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Shilinlu Yan, Jin Wang, Yaoqi Guo, Yitian Chen, Yalan Qin, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics that characterize authentic physical environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a robustness benchmark to stress-test Audio Large Models (ALLMs) using high-fidelity auditory scene simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on a wide range of tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech translation, and audio-based reasoning. |
Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge Memorizing Mechanism of Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Boxi Cao, Qiaoyu Tang, Hongyu Lin, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han, Jiawei Chen, Tianshu Wang, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memory formation, but vanilla networks without pre-training suffer catastrophic forgetting problem. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments to investigate the retentive-forgetful contradiction between vanilla and pre-trained language models by controlling the target knowledge types, learning strategies and learning schedules. |
| Outcome: | The results show that pre-trained language models are forgetful and pre-training leads to retentive models . |
CogEvolve: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating Relational Reasoning in Semantic Extension (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a gap exists between human embodied logic and machine statistical learning . authors: models internalize statistical patterns or mimic static recognition . |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive linguistic benchmark to test whether large language models internalize statistical logic or not . they find that models function as "Super-Associators" expert at static recognition yet fail at causal reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails at causal reasoning and has a high-fidelity concept representation but lacks transformational operators essential for true relational understanding. |
Not All Contexts Are Equal: Teaching LLMs Credibility-aware Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG paradigms suffer from the impact of flawed information introduced during the retrieval phrase, thereby diminishing the reliability and correctness of the generated output. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that empowers models to discern and process information based on its credibility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models with retrieval augmentation and exhibits robustness despite increasing noise in the context. |
GenRES: Rethinking Evaluation for Generative Relation Extraction in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods rely on exact matching with human-annotated reference relations, while GRE methods produce diverse and semantically accurate relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional assessment of relation extraction methods using human-annotated reference relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is consistent with human preferences for RE quality. |
LongAttn: Selecting Long-context Training Data via Token-level Attention (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis, which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level framework which quantifies long-range dependencies for LLMs by calculating token-based dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies long-range dependencies, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection. |
Stochastic Bridges as Effective Regularizers for Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for tuning pre-trained language models ignore the running cost and only optimize the terminal cost. |
| Approach: | They propose to use stochastic bridges to regularize intermediate states and use regularization as running cost of PETs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to tune large pre-trained language models . they can be compared to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a small number of parameters . |
AfriCLIRMatrix: Enabling Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval for African Languages (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for cross-lingual information retrieval are limited in many languages, especially those spoken in Africa. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a test collection for cross-lingual information retrieval in 15 diverse African languages. |
| Outcome: | AfriCLIRMatrix contains 6 million queries in English and 23 million relevance judgments automatically mined from Wikipedia inter-language links, covering many more African languages than any existing information retrieval test collection. |
Across Programming Language Silos: A Study on Cross-Lingual Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiming Zhu, Jialun Cao, Xuanang Chen, Weili Zhang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Shing-Chi Cheung
| Challenge: | Current research on large language models with retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) has focused on single-language settings, leaving their cross-lingual effectiveness underexplored. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset covering 13 PLs with nearly 14K instances to study cross-lingual code knowledge transfer in RACG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows unequal cross-lingual knowledge transfer even with direct injection and shows limited reliance on natural language information embedded in code when equipped with a code-specific retriever. |
Entrospect: Information-Theoretic Self-Reflection Elicits Better Response Refinement of Small Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-reflection fail to deliver robust response refinement for models with parameter sizes of 10 billion or smaller. |
| Approach: | They propose to redesign Self-Refine and introduce an information-theoretic framework based on Chain-of-Thought prompt engineering to improve self-reflection in Small Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency by up to 36.2% under identical model and data settings. |
On-Policy Self-Alignment with Fine-grained Knowledge Feedback for Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Xinyu Lu, Yuqiu Ji, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Debing Zhang, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit behavior that deviates from the boundaries of their knowledge during response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows large language models to explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals. |
AutoPKG: An Automated Framework for Dynamic E-commerce Product-Attribute Knowledge Graph Construction (2026.findings-acl)
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Pollawat Hongwimol, Haoning Shang, Chutong Wang, Zhichao Wan, Yi Gao, Yuanming Li, Lin Gui, Wenhao Sun, Cheng Yu
| Challenge: | Product attribute extraction in e-commerce is bottlenecked by ontologies that are inconsistent, incomplete, and costly to maintain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent Large Language Model framework that constructs a Product-attribute Knowledge Graph from multimodal product content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 0.953 WKE for product types, 0.724 WKEs for attribute keys, and 0.531 edge-level accuracy for value assertions after canonicalization on a large real-world marketplace catalog dataset from Lazada (Alibaba). |
STATE ToxiCN: A Benchmark for Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Chinese hate speech detection lack span-level fine-grained annotations. |
| Approach: | They construct a Span-level target-aware Toxicity Extraction dataset and evaluate existing models for Chinese hateful slang. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first span-level Chinese hate speech dataset and evaluates the ability of existing models to understand hate semantics. |
WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huawen Feng, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Qianli Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent code large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that learns from expert battles to address these limitations . they create an arena where leading LLMs challenge each other with evaluations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by leveraging expert battles . it achieves state-of-the-art performance even without relying on proprietary models . |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
Emergent Modularity in Pre-trained Transformers (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing studies on pre-trained Transformers show that they learn fine-grained neuron functions. |
| Approach: | They examine the presence of modularity in pre-trained Transformers . they focus on Mixture-of-Experts, a promising candidate for modularity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed structure stabilizes at the early stage, which is faster than neuron stabilization. |
Prototype Tuning: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (FSDLRE) aims to develop models capable of generalizing to new categories with minimal support examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-training approach to train Large Language Models to improve their ICL capabilities . they construct simulated episodes using relation types that do not overlap with test corpus . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline models on few-shot tasks. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
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Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
REFLEX: Self-Refining Explainable Fact-Checking via Verdict-Anchored Style Control (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automated fact-checking often overlook deceptive misinformation styles in generated explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly controls reasoning style by anchoring explanations to the predicted verdict. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art under LLaMA-series models with 465 samples. |
Beyond Full Fine-tuning: Harnessing the Power of LoRA for Multi-Task Instruction Tuning (2024.lrec-main)
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Chunlei Xin, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithm for large-scale language models. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic study of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on diverse tasks and rich resources with different learning capacities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve remarkable performance in high-resource and multi-task scenarios, even comparable to full fine-tuning. |
Does the Correctness of Factual Knowledge Matter for Factual Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models? (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work neither proves that pre-trained models successfully learn the injected factual knowledge nor proves there is a causal relation between injected knowledge and downstream performance improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual-based analysis framework to explore the causal effects of factual knowledge injection on the performance of language models within pretrain-finetune paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that factual knowledge injection is successful but correctness of injected knowledge only has limited effect on the models’ downstream performance. |
DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) do not sufficiently address the design of complex engineering solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation system that leverages tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications. |
Using Customer Service Dialogues for Satisfaction Analysis with Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning (D19-1)
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Kaisong Song, Lidong Bing, Wei Gao, Jun Lin, Lujun Zhao, Jiancheng Wang, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu, Qiong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies fail to provide comprehensive service satisfaction analysis . Existing models fail to include satisfaction polarity classification and sentimental utterance identification . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that predicts customer sentiments and aggregates them into service satisfaction polarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts customer sentiments and aggregates them into service satisfaction polarity and reasoning clues. |
Can Large Language Models Translate Unseen Languages in Underrepresented Scripts? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in machine translation, but struggle with unseen low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate translation for Mongolian and Yi using linguistic resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate Mongolian (in traditional script) and Yi with the help of linguistic resources, but is limited in its ability to handle these languages effectively. |
SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on noise lack quantitative analysis and rely on intuition and empirical observation, thus failing to understand practical robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for quantifying the impact of noise intensity on LALM inputs by using a structured activation subspace derived from the model's internal representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing denoising methods and demonstrates that noise is perceived more accurately than raw audio features. |
Thinking with Reasoning Skills: Fewer Tokens, More Accuracy (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning LLMs often spend tokens on long intermediate reasoning traces when solving new problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to store reusable reasoning skills distilled from extensive deliberation and trial-and-error exploration and retrieve these skills at inference time to guide future reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces reasoning tokens while improving overall performance on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks. |
Adversarial Multi-lingual Neural Relation Extraction (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models cannot capture consistency and diversity of relation patterns in different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial multi-lingual neural relation extraction model which considers consistency and diversity among languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on real-world datasets. |
UICOMPASS: UI Map Guided Mobile Task Automation via Adaptive Action Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Mobile task automation is an emerging technology that leverages AI to automatically execute routine tasks by users’ commands on mobile devices like Android. |
| Approach: | They propose a UI Map-guided LLM-based approach to automate mobile tasks using static analysis and LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a 15.87% higher task execution success rate than SOTA approaches even when only APK is available. |
When Models Outthink Their Safety: Unveiling and Mitigating Self-Jailbreak in Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingzhi Mao, Chunkang Zhang, Junxiang Wang, Xinyan Guan, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods often apply coarse-grained constraints over entire reasoning trajectories . Existing approaches often apply unsafe constraints, causing unsafe outputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a trajectory-level training framework that mitigates Self-Jailbreak . they propose 'chain-of-guardrail' to mitigate self-jailbreak by targeting step-level interventions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates Self-Jailbreak by targeting step-level interventions while maintaining reasoning ability. |
Incorporating Chinese Characters of Words for Lexical Sememe Prediction (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of lexical sememe prediction rely on external context information of words to represent meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a character-enhanced sememe prediction framework for Chinese language that takes advantage of internal character information and external context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a Chinese sememe knowledge base and maintains robust performance even for low-frequency words. |
Breaking the Boundaries: A Unified Framework for Chinese Named Entity Recognition Across Text and Speech (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks are limited by the complexity of the data and the potential connections between tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to break the boundaries between different modal NER tasks by using a unified data format for inputs from different modalités. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task breaks the boundaries between different modal NER tasks and is a unified implementation of them. |
Exploring the Impact of Model Scaling on Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yusheng Su, Chi-Min Chan, Jiali Cheng, Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Shengding Hu, Zonghan Yang, Ning Ding, Xingzhi Sun, Guotong Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods can drive large pre-trained language models by training only minimal parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient tuning method that is compatible with a tunable module and uses a random number generator to optimize fewer table parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with a tunable module and tested on 11 NLP tasks. |
Pre-training to Match for Unified Low-shot Relation Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-shot relation extraction (RE) aims to recognize novel relations with very few or even no samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages triplet paraphrase to pre-train zero-shot label matching ability and uses meta-learning paradigm to learn few-shot instance summarizing ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines and achieves the best performance on few-shot RE leaderboard. |
Over-Searching in Search-Augmented Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) excel at knowledge-intensive tasks by integrating external retrieval. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic evaluation of over-searching across multiple dimensions including query types, model categories, retrieval conditions, and multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves answer accuracy on answerable queries but harms abstention on unanswerable ones . |
Knowledge Extraction on Semi-Structured Content: Does It Remain Relevant for Question Answering in the Era of LLMs? (2026.eacl-long)
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Kai Sun, Yin Huang, Srishti Mehra, Mohammad Kachuee, Xilun Chen, Renjie Tao, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Jessee, Nirav Shah, Alex L Betty, Yue Liu, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on knowledge extraction for question answering questions whether it is still relevant for question answerrs. |
| Approach: | They extend an existing benchmark with knowledge extraction annotations and evaluate commercial and open-source LLMs of varying sizes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve high QA accuracy, but can still benefit from knowledge extraction through augmentation with extracted triples and multi-task learning. |
LLMs-as-Instructors: Learning from Errors Toward Automating Model Improvement (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using advanced Large Language Models, instructors can improve training of smaller models by analyzing their own model's errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages advanced Large Language Models to enhance training of smaller target models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ChatGPT on multiple benchmarks and shows that it improves on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. |
Cross-lingual Lexical Sememe Prediction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Sememes are defined as the minimum semantic units of human languages . but most languages do not have sememe-based linguistic knowledge bases . a new framework is proposed to predict sememes for words in other languages based on semems . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to model correlations between sememes and multi-lingual words in low-dimensional semantic space for sememe prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baseline methods on real-world datasets. |
Open Hierarchical Relation Extraction (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing OpenRE methods cast different relation types in isolation without considering their hierarchical dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to establish bidirectional connections between OpenRE and relation hierarchies by integrating hierarchy information into relation representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on relation clustering and hierarchy expansion. |
The Linguistic Connectivities Within Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Dan Wang, Boxi Cao, Ning Bian, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Le Sun, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Recent studies have discovered notable disparities in their performance across different languages. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic investigation into the behaviors of large language models across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios and reveals a Linguistic Map correlates with the richness of available resources and linguistic family relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model demonstrates that there are significant disparities in performance across languages across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios. |
On the Helpfulness of Document Context to Sentence Simplification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Text simplification is a hot issue in the field of natural language generation (NLG). |
| Approach: | They propose to use Wikipedia context to improve sentence simplification by using neural networks to learn the effects of preceding and following sentences on current sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best performing model on the baseline dataset by 2.46 (7.22%). |
EduBench: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Diverse Educational Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
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Bin Xu, Yu Bai, Huashan Sun, Yiguan Lin, Siming Liu, Xinyue Liang, Yaolin Li, Zhuangzhi Dong, Jingren Zhang, Yufan Deng, Xinyu Zou, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that focus on knowledge-intensive tasks do not reflect diverse educational scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates 9 major scenarios and 4,000 educational contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to state-of-the-art large models on the test set. |
Introducing Semantics into Speech Encoders (2023.acl-long)
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Derek Xu, Shuyan Dong, Changhan Wang, Suyoun Kim, Zhaojiang Lin, Bing Liu, Akshat Shrivastava, Shang-Wen Li, Liang-Hsuan Tseng, Guan-Ting Lin, Alexei Baevski, Hung-yi Lee, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing self-supervised speech encoders contain primarily acoustic rather than semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic unsupervised way to incorporate semantic information from large language model (LLM) systems into self-supervised speech encoders without labeled audio transcriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves spoken language understanding (SLU) performance by over 5% on intent classification (IC), with modest gains in named entity resolution (NER) and slot filling (SF), and spoken question answering (SQA) score by over 22%. |
READoc: A Unified Benchmark for Realistic Document Structured Extraction (2025.findings-acl)
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Zichao Li, Aizier Abulaiti, Yaojie Lu, Xuanang Chen, Jia Zheng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Document Structured Extraction (DSE) is a field of document structure analysis that aims to extract structured content from raw documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate document structured extraction systems by converting unstructured PDFs into semantically rich Markdown. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on 3,576 diverse and real-world documents from arXiv, GitHub, and Zenodo. |
CLARity: Reasoning Consistency Alone Can Teach Reinforced Experts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to supervise the reasoning process are prohibitively expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-effective reinforcement learning framework that enhances reasoning quality using a small, general-purpose LLM only. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CLARity improves reasoning quality by 16.5% over standard outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) human evaluations confirm substantial gains in factual correctness and reasoning coherence, leading to more trustworthy model outputs. |
MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in pre-trained Transformers are a key component, storing various linguistic and factual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert a model into its MoE version with the same parameters and build expert routers to decide which experts will be used for each input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can use 10% to 30% of FFN parameters while maintaining over 95% original performance. |
Global Encoding for Abstractive Summarization (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for abstractive summarization suffer from repetition and semantic irrelevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a global encoding framework which controls the information flow from the encoder to the decoder based on the global information of the source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the LCSTS and English Gigaword and can generate summary of higher quality and reduce repetition. |
Concept rather than Document: Context Compression via AMR-based Conceptual Entropy (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on lexical or token-level features that fragment semantic units and fail to capture conceptually essential content. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework leveraging Abstract Meaning Representation to preserve essential information while filtering irrelevant text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms RAG and existing baselines while preserving essential information while filtering irrelevant text. |
Element Intervention for Open Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current OpenRE models are often trained on the datasets generated from distant supervision, which often results in instability and makes the model easily collapsed. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a causal model to identify relation instances referring to the same relation . they propose to perform Element Interventions on context and entities respectively . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and is robust across datasets. |
Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract event records from text decompose complex structure prediction task into multiple subtasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can extract events from text . they propose unified event extraction, constrained decoding algorithm and curriculum learning algorithm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve competitive performance using record-level annotations in both supervised learning and transfer learning settings. |
Open Relation Extraction: Relational Knowledge Transfer from Supervised Data to Unsupervised Data (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relational facts from open domain corpora are time-consuming and human-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to learn similarity metrics of relations from labeled data . they propose to transfer relational knowledge to identify novel relations in unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two real-world datasets show that the proposed framework improves compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
WordArt Designer: User-Driven Artistic Typography Synthesis using Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-industry)
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Jun-Yan He, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Chenyang Li, Jingdong Sun, Wangmeng Xiang, Xianhui Lin, Xiaoyang Kang, Zengke Jin, Yusen Hu, Bin Luo, Yifeng Geng, Xuansong Xie
| Challenge: | Existing typography solutions lack adaptability, creativity, and computational efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a user-driven framework for artistic typography synthesis based on the Large Language Model (LLM) the LLM Engine interprets user inputs and generates actionable prompts for the other modules, transforming abstract concepts into tangible designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates four key modules: the LLM Engine, SemTypo, StyTyPo, and TexTyPO. |
TriPlay-RL: Tri-Role Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for LLM Safety Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Zhewen Tan, Wenhan Yu, Jianfeng Si, Tongxin Liu, Kaiqi Guan, Huiyan Jin, Jiawen Tao, Xiaokun Yuan, Xiangzheng Zhang, Duohe Ma, Tong Yang, Lin Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to safety alignment of large language models rely on costly manual annotations or human review. |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop reinforcement learning framework called TriPlay-RL that enables iterative collaboration among three roles with near-zero manual annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 20%–50% improvement in adversarial effectiveness while preserving high output diversity while achieving 10%–30% gains in safety performance without degrading general reasoning capability. |
A Graph-Based Neural Model for End-to-End Frame Semantic Parsing (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on frame semantic parsing as a graph construction problem. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural model to tackle frame semantic parsing jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is highly competitive and performs better than pipeline models on two benchmark datasets. |
Can Large Language Models Grasp Legal Theories? Enhance Legal Reasoning with Insights from Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Weikang Yuan, Junjie Cao, Zhuoren Jiang, Yangyang Kang, Jun Lin, Kaisong Song, Tianqianjin Lin, Pengwei Yan, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies have found that when LLMs are given criminal facts and legal rules, then asked whether cases constitute a certain charge, they struggle to understand legal theories and perform basic legal reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to assess LLMs' understanding of legal theories and reasoning capabilities by using a novel framework: Multi-Agent framework for improving complex legal reasoning capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLMs' understanding of legal theories and reasoning abilities in real-world scenarios. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agents have strong performance on held-in tasks, but their generalizability to unseen tasks remains poor. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based generalizable reward model to guide the policy model for effective test-time search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agentRM outperforms existing agents on held-in tasks by 8.8 points on average. |
XMC-Agent : Dynamic Navigation over Scalable Hierarchical Index for Incremental Extreme Multi-label Classification (2024.findings-acl)
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Yanjiang Liu, Tianyun Zhong, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for XMC struggle with the growing set of labels due to their static label assumptions, and embedding-based methods struggle with complex mapping relationships due to late interaction paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model (LLM) powered agent framework for extreme multi-label classification, XMC-Agent, which can effectively learn, manage and predict the extremely large and dynamically increasing set of labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn, manage and predict the extremely large and dynamically growing set of labels and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three standard datasets. |
Syntactic and Semantic-driven Learning for Open Information Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the supervised counterparts, and can even achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art (SoA) model. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactic and semantic-driven learning approach that can learn open IE models without human-labelled data by leveraging syntakic and semantic knowledge as noisier, higher-level supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms supervised counterparts and can achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art models. |
Meta-Cognitive Analysis: Evaluating Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Datasets and Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have push NLP into a new era, moving away from traditional task-specific pre-train finetuning paradigm. |
| Approach: | They provide a comprehensive analysis of declarative and procedural knowledge for large language models and evaluate their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform better with both kinds of knowledge, but at different speeds. |
AutoSearch: Adaptive Search Depth for Efficient Agentic RAG via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jingbo Sun, Wenyue Chong, Songjun Tu, Qichao Zhang, Yaocheng Zhang, Jiajun Chai, Xiaohan Wang, Wei Lin, Guojun Yin, Dongbin Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work limits search depth to reduce cost, but this often leads to underexploration of complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that evaluates each search step via self-generated intermediate answers. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that AutoSearch achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off, alleviating over-searching while preserving search quality. |
On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing (2022.naacl-main)
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Yusheng Su, Xiaozhi Wang, Yujia Qin, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Kaiyue Wen, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but require much more training time than fine-timing. |
| Approach: | They empirically investigate the transferability of soft prompts across different downstream tasks and PLMs to determine what decides prompt transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but requires much more training time than fine-timing. |
Does Acceleration Cause Hidden Instability in Vision Language Models? Uncovering Instance-Level Divergence Through a Large-Scale Empirical Study (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current acceleration evaluations focus on minimal overall performance degradation . however, accelerated models can exhibit significant changes in instance-level predictions . |
| Approach: | They investigate whether accelerated vision-Language Models can still give the same answers as before . they found that accelerated models changed original answers up to 20% of the time . |
| Outcome: | The results show that accelerated models changed their original answers up to 20% of the time. |
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Deming Ye, Chaojun Xiao, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection methods are not suitable for enhancing pre-trained language models with external knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play knowledge injection method where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a knowledge plugin. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of knowledge injection on knowledge-driven tasks while keeping model parameters frozen. |
Learning Logic Rules for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level relation extraction relied on implicitly powerful representations, which makes the model less transparent. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic model for document-level relation extraction by learning logic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in relation performance and logical consistency. |
Debiasing In-Context Learning by Instructing LLMs How to Follow Demonstrations (2024.findings-acl)
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Lvxue Li, Jiaqi Chen, Xinyu Lu, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose to de-biase demonstration bias in in-context learning by focusing on semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations and reducing the semantic hazard. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly improve performance on six datasets. |
Semantic Role Labeling for Learner Chinese: the Importance of Syntactic Parsing and L2-L1 Parallel Data (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a learner language (interlanguage) is an idiolect developed by a learning of a second or foreign language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use semantic role labeling as a case task to parse interlanguages . they then evaluate three off-the-shelf SRL systems to gauge how successful they are . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an F-score of 72.06, a 2.02 point improvement over the baseline. |
Match, Compare, or Select? An Investigation of Large Language Models for Entity Matching (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity matching (EM) is a critical step in entity resolution (ER). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates record interactions from different perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on 8 ER datasets and 10 LLMs and achieves higher efficiency and effectiveness. |
UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Qian Zhang, Zhibo Yang, Junyang Lin, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promising potential for performing end-to-end KIE directly from document images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) using a constrained-category KIE track and an open-categorical KIE Track. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 state-of-the-art LMMs show performance degradation under diverse schema definitions, long-tail key fields, and complex layouts, along with pronounced performance disparities across different document types and scenarios. |
Specificity-Driven Cascading Approach for Unsupervised Sentiment Modification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unsupervised sentiment modification lack specific information in text generated without parallel data . specificity-driven cascading approach can improve specificity of generated text and content preservation . |
| Approach: | They propose a specificity-driven cascading approach for unsupervised sentiment modification . the method performs target sentiment addition and content reconstruction independently . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms competitive systems by a large margin on Yelp and Amazon datasets. |
Mechanistic Insights into Deferred Semantic Drift in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) face a fundamental challenge with delayed disambiguation: how can a model update the meaning of an early, ambiguous token when clarifying context only appears later in the sequence? |
| Approach: | They propose a method to defer semantic re-evaluation to subsequent tokens in a process they call "Deferred Semantic Drift" they demonstrate this mechanism in metaphor comprehension and provide causal validation by steering model outputs towards literal or metaphorical meanings via targeted activation interventions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can update the meaning of an ambiguous word when clarifying context arrives only after it has been processed. |
RAP: Robustness-Aware Perturbations for Defending against Backdoor Attacks on NLP Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a serious threat to the safety of reusing deep neural networks (DNNs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient online defense mechanism based on robustness-aware perturbations to distinguish poisoned and clean samples to defend against backdoor attacks on natural language processing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better defending performance and lower computational costs than existing defense methods. |
A Simple but Effective Pluggable Entity Lookup Table for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models cannot recall factual knowledge of entities exhibited in large-scale corpora, especially those rare entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a pluggable Entity Lookup Table (PELT) on demand by aggregating the entity’s output representations of multiple occurrences in the corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can transfer entity knowledge from out-of-domain corpora into PLMs with different architectures. |
Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How? (2026.acl-long)
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Mengshi Chen, Yuxiang Sun, Tengchao Li, Jianwei Wang, Kai Wang, Xuemin Lin, Ying Zhang, Wenjie Zhang
| Challenge: | Tabular data preparation is a critical step in enhancing the usability of tabular data. |
| Approach: | They analyze how LMs can be combined with other components for different tabular data preparation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lack the ability to capture the relationships within tables and adapt to the tasks involved. |
Self-Steering Optimization: Autonomous Preference Optimization for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Xiang, Bowen Yu, Hongyu Lin, Keming Lu, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Le Sun, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Prior research focused on developing data generation methods, while insufficient attention has been paid to quality control mechanisms and often produces inaccurate and unhelpful data. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that automatically generates high-quality preference data, eliminating manual annotation requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms baselines in human preference alignment and reward optimization. |
XQA: A Cross-lingual Open-domain Question Answering Dataset (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering aims to answer questions through text retrieval and reading comprehension . but, the success of these models relies on a massive volume of training data, which is not available in other languages . a new dataset aims at investigating cross-lingual OpenQA . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset for cross-lingual OpenQA research to test models . they use XQA dataset to train models with large volumes of labeled data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves best results in almost all target languages while the performance is lower than that of English. |
An Exploratory Study on Model Compression for Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL translates user queries into SQL statements that can retrieve relevant answers from relational databases. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply model compression techniques to sketch-based and sequence-to-sequence Text-toSQL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models have higher inference efficiency and respond better to model compression than sequence-to-sequence models. |
Boosting Inference Efficiency: Unleashing the Power of Parameter-Shared Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-shared pre-trained language models (PLMs) have emerged as a successful approach in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the inference efficiency of parameter-shared PLMs by pre-training models that can achieve even greater acceleration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves inference efficiency on autoregressive and autoencoding models. |
Graph Neural Networks with Generated Parameters for Relation Extraction (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph neural networks can only process multi-hop relational reasoning on pre-defined graphs and cannot be directly applied in natural language relational reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural network with generated parameters using natural language sentences as inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process relational reasoning on graphs and in natural language processing tasks. |
Transferable Post-training via Inverse Value Learning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for post-training large datasets are requiring a large computational effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the changes at logits level during post-training using a separate neural network . they demonstrate that the value network can be seamlessly integrated with another pre-trained model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be integrated with another pre-trained model during inference, enabling similar capability enhancements. |
OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Yuxiang Zheng, Shichao Sun, Lin Qiu, Dongyu Ru, Cheng Jiayang, Xuefeng Li, Jifan Lin, Binjie Wang, Yun Luo, Renjie Pan, Yang Xu, Qingkai Min, Zizhao Zhang, Yiwen Wang, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Global scientific publications are growing annually by about 4%-5% (Pinedo et al., 2024). |
| Approach: | They introduce an AI-assisted platform that answers diverse questions from researchers using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) they develop various tools to understand queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine answers. |
| Outcome: | OpenResearcher is built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. |
Symbol-LLM: Towards Foundational Symbol-centric Interface For Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have limitations when it comes to comprehending and expressing world knowledge that extends beyond the boundaries of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates symbolic data into LLM training without loss of generality ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on symbol- and NL-centric tasks. |
LVPruning: An Effective yet Simple Language-Guided Vision Token Pruning Approach for Multi-modal Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) incur significant computational overhead due to the large number of vision tokens processed, limiting their practicality in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-guided vision token pruning method that can be integrated into existing MLLMs with minimal architectural changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces vision tokens by 90% and preserves model performance. |
GUICourse: From General Vision Language Model to Versatile GUI Agent (2025.acl-long)
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Wentong Chen, Junbo Cui, Jinyi Hu, Yujia Qin, Junjie Fang, Yue Zhao, Chongyi Wang, Jun Liu, Guirong Chen, Yupeng Huo, Yuan Yao, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are a pivotal medium for human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of datasets for training visual-based GUI agents using general VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUICourse datasets show that even a small-sized GUI agent performs better on GUI tasks. |
RIVA: A Pre-trained Tweet Multimodal Model Based on Text-image Relation for Multimodal NER (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (MNER) for tweets is a key task of many applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained multimodal named entity recognition model based on Relationship Inference and Visual Attention (RIVA) for tweets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) task on tweets with the aid of visual clues. |
F-Eval: Asssessing Fundamental Abilities with Refined Evaluation Methods (2024.acl-long)
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Yu Sun, Keyuchen Keyuchen, Shujie Wang, Peiji Li, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been evaluated for their instruction-following capabilities but lack references to their fundamental abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual evaluation benchmark to evaluate the fundamental abilities of large language models including expression, commonsense and logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation methods show higher correlation coefficients and larger distinction than other evaluators. |
Rule or Story, Which is a Better Commonsense Expression for Talking with Large Language Models? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that stories outperform rules as the expression for retrieving commonsense from LLMs, exhibiting higher generation confidence and commonsensense accuracy. |
| Approach: | They investigate the commonsense ability of large language models expressed through stories and rules to retrieve commonsensing knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The stories outperform rules as commonsense expressions on 28 commonsensense QA datasets, exhibiting higher generation confidence and commonsence accuracy. |
COUGH: A Challenge Dataset and Models for COVID-19 FAQ Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | 16K FAQ items scraped from 55 credible websites . 32 human-annotated FAQ items for each query. |
| Approach: | They present a large, challenging dataset for FAQ retrieval for COVID-19 . they use a FAQ bank, Query Bank and Relevance Set to evaluate the dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 48.8 under P@5 and is compared with other datasets. |
Instruction-tuned Language Models are Better Knowledge Learners (2024.acl-long)
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Zhengbao Jiang, Zhiqing Sun, Weijia Shi, Pedro Rodriguez, Chunting Zhou, Graham Neubig, Xi Lin, Wen-tau Yih, Srini Iyer
| Challenge: | Large language models store factual knowledge in parameters, but it can become outdated as the work evolves . pre-instruction-tuning improves ability of LLMs to absorb knowledge from new documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that instruction-tunes on questions prior to training on documents . they propose to use QA pairs to update factual knowledge of large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms instruction-tuning on documents by 17.8%. |
On the Editability of Delta Parameters in Post-Trained Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Several studies have explored delta parameter properties via pruning, quantization, low-rank approximation, and extrapolation, but what properties of delta parameters are essential for maintaining performance? |
| Approach: | They propose to examine delta parameter properties along magnitude and sign . they propose to use a loss-based local surrogate analysis to examine editing effects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that delta parameters can be edited while maintaining performance. |
AutoAlign: Get Your LLM Aligned with Minimal Annotations (2025.acl-demo)
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Xinyu Lu, Dong Xu, Chunkang Zhang, Xinyan Guan, Junxiang Wang, Qingyu Zhang, Pengbo Wang, Yingzhi Mao, Hao Xiang, Xueru Wen, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Automated Alignment (ALM) is a set of algorithms designed to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intentions and values while minimizing manual intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit that integrates mainstream automated algorithms through a consistent interface and an accessible workflow supporting one-click execution for prompt synthesis and automatic alignment signal construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables easy reproduction of existing results through extensive benchmarks and facilitates the development of novel approaches via modular components. |
Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed an explosion of Large Language Models (LLMs), with impressive performance on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image-based representations to compare LLMs' performance on table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking to determine their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on image-based representations than on text-based models. |
HAHE: Hierarchical Attention for Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs in Global and Local Level (2023.acl-long)
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Haoran Luo, Haihong E, Yuhao Yang, Yikai Guo, Mingzhi Sun, Tianyu Yao, Zichen Tang, Kaiyang Wan, Meina Song, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Existing research on HKGs rarely models the graphical and sequential structure of HKG, limiting their representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Attention model for HKG Embedding that includes global-level and local-level attention to model the graphical structure of HKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on HKG standard datasets and addresses the issue of HKG multi-position prediction for the first time. |
WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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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
| 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 . |
Two Languages Are Better than One: Bilingual Enhancement for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on internal features of Chinese named entity recognition, but neglect other lingual modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual enhancement module for Chinese Named Entity Recognition . they integrate rich English information into Chinese representation and use it to learn the interaction between bilinguals and dependent information within Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn the interaction of bilinguals and dependent information within Chinese. |
Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a study of sign language translation without gloss annotations focuses on the problem of gloss annotation . gloss annotation is hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, and limits the domain coverage of translation datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose a gloss-free end-to-end sign language translation framework to solve this problem . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves sign language translation performance on large-scale datasets . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities . |
Semantic-Unit-Based Dilated Convolution for Multi-Label Text Classification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel model for multi-label text classification is proposed for the task of assigning multiple labels for a given text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model for multi-label text classification based on sequence-to-sequence learning and a hybrid attention mechanism that extracts both the word-level and the semantic unit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is competitive to the baseline models and more robust to classifying low-frequency labels. |
Manual Evaluation Matters: Reviewing Test Protocols of Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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Tianyu Gao, Xu Han, Yuzhuo Bai, Keyue Qiu, Zhiyu Xie, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Distantly supervised relation extraction (RE) has attracted much attention in the past few years . previous methods to evaluate models manually or directly on autolabeled data have produced inaccurate evaluations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use distant supervision to generate large-scale autolabeled data . they build manually-annotated test sets for two DS-RE datasets and evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces 53% wrong labels at the entity pair level in the popular NYT10 dataset. |
Bag-of-Words as Target for Neural Machine Translation (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural machine translation models only use one correct sentence as the target, and the other correct sentences are punished as the incorrect ones. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that uses both the sentences and the bag-of-words as targets in the training stage to encourage the model to generate the potentially correct sentences that are not appeared in the train set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a Chinese-English translation dataset by the BLEU score of 4.55. |
HearSay Benchmark: Do Audio LLMs Leak What They Hear? (2026.findings-acl)
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Jin Wang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Weiliu Wang, Yitian Chen, Moayad Aloqaily, Xuehai Tang, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio large language models have led to their potential privacy implications unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to examine whether ALLMs leak user privacy through acoustic voiceprints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from over 22,000 real-world audio clips. |
Adaptive Helpfulness–Harmlessness Alignment with Preference Vectors (2026.eacl-long)
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Ren-Wei Liang, Chin Ting Hsu, Chan-Hung Yu, Saransh Agrawal, Shih-Cheng Huang, Chieh-Yen Lin, Shang-Tse Chen, Kuan-Hao Huang, Shao-Hua Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to balancing helpfulness and harmlessness suffer from performance conflicts, limited controllability, and poor extendability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to control their own preferences and dynamically merge them at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves helpfulness without conservatism and smooth control over preference trade-offs. |
A Unified Model for Extractive and Abstractive Summarization using Inconsistency Loss (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | extractive models can obtain sentence-level attention with high ROUGE scores but less readable. abstractive models generate novel words and phrases not copied from the source text. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine extractive and abstractive models to achieve a unified model that generates readable paragraphs with word-level attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ROUGE scores while being the most informative and readable summarization on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset in a solid human evaluation. |
Expanding the Boundaries of Vision Prior Knowledge in Multi-modal Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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Qiao Liang, Yanjiang Liu, Weixiang Zhou, Ben He, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Yingfei Sun
| Challenge: | Existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, but the impact of vision encoder’s prior knowledge is seldom investigated. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric to quantify the effect of prior knowledge on MLLM performance by integrating prior knowledge at the vision encoder level into a training framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level, and significantly boosts visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs. |
Rethinking Stealthiness of Backdoor Attack against NLP Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks are not stealthy to system deployers or users. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel backdoor attack method based on negative data augmentation and modifying word embeddings that is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoqin Sun, Jinghua Zhao, Xuechen Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Jiaming Zhou, Hui Wang, Xi Yang, Yequan Wang, Yonghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing datasets face issues such as low quality, limited scale, and incomplete modalities, hindering model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese multimodal datasets to capture authentic emotional interplay from 19 professional actors. |
| Outcome: | The EmotionTalk dataset spans 23.6 hours of dyadic conversations across diverse scenarios. |
STINMatch: Semi-Supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network for Financial Risk Detection via News Label Diffusion (2023.emnlp-main)
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Xurui Li, Yue Qin, Rui Zhu, Tianqianjin Lin, Yongming Fan, Yangyang Kang, Kaisong Song, Fubang Zhao, Changlong Sun, Haixu Tang, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Commercial news provides rich semantics and timely information for automated financial risk detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network, STINMatch, along with a news-enterprise knowledge graph to endorse the risk detection enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in terms of generalization and semantics and annotation. |
Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yichen Ouyang, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Chenghua Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Bochen Pang, Yaming Yang, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Weiwei Deng, Dongmei Zhang, Feng Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset. |
AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustrations via Reference-Guided Styling (2026.acl-demo)
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Zhen Lin, Qiujie Xie, Minjun Zhu, Shichen Li, QiYao Sun, Enhao Gu, Yiran Ding, Ke Sun, Fang Guo, Panzhong Lu, Zhiyuan Ning, Yixuan Weng, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing automated systems for scientific illustrations are limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific texts while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
PDAMeta: Meta-Learning Framework with Progressive Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text data augmentation methods can not ensure the diversity and quality of the generated data, which leads to sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework with progressive data augmentation for few-shot text classification using prompt-based data augmented by attention-based methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models and shows better robustness on four public few-shot text classification datasets. |
ICG: Improving Cover Image Generation via MLLM-based Prompting and Personalized Preference Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhipeng Bian, Jieming Zhu, Qijiong Liu, Wang Lin, Guohao Cai, Zhaocheng Du, Jiacheng Sun, Zhou Zhao, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models and diffusion models have opened new possibilities for AI-generated content . personalized cover image generation remains underexplored despite its critical role in boosting user engagement on digital platforms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates MLLM-based prompting with personalized preference alignment to generate high-quality, contextually relevant covers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves image quality, semantic fidelity, and personalization, leading to stronger user appeal and offline recommendation accuracy in downstream tasks. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Fang, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Unified Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, but a gap persists in their ability to translate internal knowledge into faithful and controllable synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that partitions a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on TIIF, DPG, CompBench and UniCycle benchmarks. |
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models . |
A Deep Reinforced Sequence-to-Set Model for Multi-Label Classification (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-label classification (MLC) aims to assign multiple labels to each sample. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-set model that is trained via reinforcement learning and rewards feedback independent of the label order. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and reduces sensitivity to label order. |
BertGCN: Transductive Text Classification by Combining GNN and BERT (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text classification is a core task in natural language processing (NLP) Graph neural networks (GNNs) serve as an effective approach for transductive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that combines large scale pretraining and transductive learning for text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance on a wide range of datasets. |
Variator: Accelerating Pre-trained Models with Plug-and-Play Compression Modules (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chaojun Xiao, Yuqi Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Pengle Zhang, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhengyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful on NLP tasks but require huge parameter sizes and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient acceleration method that enhances computational efficiency through plug-and-play compression plugins. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method saves 53% computational costs using only 0.9% additional parameters with a performance drop of less than 2%. |
Knowing When to Quit: Diagnosing and Training LLMs to Abort Futile Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate costly yet semantically void reasoning on beyond-capability tasks . the dominant failure mode is specious reasoning, superficially valid outputs with subtle hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a capability-aligned reinforcement learning approach that aligns model behavior with capability boundaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces futile reasoning while maintaining performance across tasks. |
Denoising Relation Extraction from Document-level Distant Supervision (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate auto-labeled sentences for relation extraction (RE) are difficult to extend to document-level relation extraction as noise from DS may be even multiplied in documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained model which de-emphasizes noisy DS data via multiple pre-training tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture useful information from noisy data and achieve promising results on the large-scale DocRE benchmark. |
Open Grounded Planning: Challenges and Benchmark Construction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on LLM-based planning uses language generation to produce free-style plans . however, these plans are not grounded in an executable set of actions . |
| Approach: | They propose a new task for open grounded planning that asks the model to generate an executable plan based on a variable action set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is open grounded planning, which is based on a set of variables. |
Grammar-Based Code Representation: Is It a Worthy Pursuit for LLMs? (2025.findings-acl)
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Qingyuan Liang, Zhao Zhang, Zeyu Sun, Zheng Lin, Qi Luo, Xiao Yueyi, Yizhou Chen, Yuqun Zhang, Haotian Zhang, Lu Zhang, Chenbin Chenbin, Yingfei Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing research demonstrates the effectiveness of grammar-based code representations in small-scale models, showing their ability to reduce syntax errors and enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They develop a series of billion-scale grammar-based code representations that incorporate grammar rules into the code generation process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that grammar-based representations reduce syntax errors and improve performance even in billion-scale models. |
PPTAgent: Generating and Evaluating Presentations Beyond Text-to-Slides (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hao Zheng, Xinyan Guan, Hao Kong, Wenkai Zhang, Jia Zheng, Weixiang Zhou, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating presentations from documents focus on improving and evaluating content quality in isolation, overlooking visual appeal and structural coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose an edit-based presentation generation system that analyzes and iterates on slides to create new slides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed presentation generation tool outperforms existing methods in three dimensions . it analyzes slides, iterates and generates edit actions based on selected slides . |
Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yaxi Lu, Haolun Li, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Fangming Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have facilitated the development of intelligent applications like automatic web search (Qin et al., 2023) Several methods exist for generating JSON strings from LLMs, including Prompting but often miss certain schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 40K different JSON schemas to assess models' ability to generate valid JSON outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves both in generating JSON outputs and downstream tasks. |
Diversity-Promoting GAN: A Cross-Entropy Based Generative Adversarial Network for Diversified Text Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing text generation methods tend to produce repeated and ”boring” expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that assigns low reward for repeatedly generated text and high reward for ”novel” and fluent text, and a novel language-model based discriminator which can distinguish novel text from repeated text without the saturation problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more diverse and informative text than existing baselines on review generation and dialogue generation tasks. |
Large Language Models Badly Generalize across Option Length, Problem Types, and Irrelevant Noun Replacements (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks have exposed patterns and may not truly assess generalization ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a “Generalization Stress Test” to assess Large Language Models’ generalization ability under slight and controlled perturbations, including option length, problem types, and irrelevant noun replacements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test shows that LLMs exhibit severe accuracy drops and unexpected biases when faced with minor but content-preserving modifications. |
Sheep’s Skin, Wolf’s Deeds: Are LLMs Ready for Metaphorical Implicit Hate Speech? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | specialized models fail to detect implicit hate speech due to its indirectly expressed hateful intent . advanced LLMs often misinterpret metaphorical implicit hate content, resulting in its propagation . |
| Approach: | They propose a Jailbreaking strategy and Energy-based Constrained Decoding techniques to detect implicit hate speech in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate metaphorical implicit hate speech, but it fails to detect it effectively. |
LOCR: Location-Guided Transformer for Optical Character Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Academic documents are packed with texts, equations, tables, and figures, posing challenges for accurate OCR results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates location guiding into the transformer architecture during autoregression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on an original large-scale dataset comprising 53M text-location pairs from 89K academic document pages. |
From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) are fine-tuned and released for research and deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a PLM reuse paradigm that merges teacher-PLM knowledge into a student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can reduce the computational cost and environmental side-effects of retraining the PLM from scratch. |
Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) however, the reasoning chains of demonstrations are observed to be prone to errors, which can lead to incorrect reasoning during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative bootstrapping technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) by generating a series of reasoning steps to obtain the answer, and using the reasoning chains as exemplars to demonstrate the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of Large language models (LLMs) on three reasoning tasks on ten datasets. |
Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zichao Li, Shaojie He, Meng Liao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Yanxiong Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Document logical structuring is crucial for document intelligence due to the complexity of text segment dependencies in the document. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end, generation-based method for document logical structuring that generates the action sequence via a global context-aware generative model and updates its global context and current logical structure based on the generated actions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ChCatExt and HierDoc datasets show that Seg2Act performs better than previous methods in both supervised and transfer learning settings. |
ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
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Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Heng Ji, Minlie Huang, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text . Experimental results show that ERICA can improve typical PLMs on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of entities and relations in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve PLMs on several language understanding tasks, especially under low-resource settings. |
CodRED: A Cross-Document Relation Extraction Dataset for Acquiring Knowledge in the Wild (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting relational facts between entity pairs within single sentences or documents. |
| Approach: | They present a problem of cross-document relation extraction (CRE) using human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first human-annotated cross-document RE dataset . it shows that it is challenging to existing RE methods including strong BERT-based models. |
CKDST: Comprehensively and Effectively Distill Knowledge from Machine Translation to End-to-End Speech Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) data are limited due to the limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework for speech translation that integrates knowledge from machine translation and decouples knowledge from non-target class knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on a benchmark dataset. |
CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a communication inference attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents’ reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC up to 0.99, revealing the privacy risk in MAS. |
Can Prompt Probe Pretrained Language Models? Understanding the Invisible Risks from a Causal View (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found prompt-based probing evaluations inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct debiasing via causal intervention to uncover biases in probing evaluations . authors argue that prompt-based probing is inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable . |
| Outcome: | This paper examines the effectiveness of prompt-based probing in pretrained language models . it highlights critical biases which could induce biased results and conclusions . authors suggest rethinking criteria for evaluating better pretrained models based on such evaluations . |
Sequence-to-Nuggets: Nested Entity Mention Detection via Anchor-Region Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) approaches restrict each word belonging to at most one entity mention. |
| Approach: | They propose to model and leverage the head-driven phrase structures of entity mentions to solve this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art on three standard nested entity mention detection benchmarks. |
Text-to-ES Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Converting Natural Language to Elasticsearch Query (2025.acl-long)
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DonggeXue DonggeXue, Zhili Pu, Zhentao Xia, Hongli Sun, Ruihui Hou, Guangya Yu, Yupian Lin, Yongqi Fan, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Recent research on text-to-Query has explored using large language models to convert user query intent to executable code. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel semantic parsing task that leverages large language models to generate domain-specific language and post-processing code to support multi-index Elasticsearch queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms DeepSeek-R1 on the large Elasticsearch Dataset (LED) and BirdES datasets. |
Fine-grained Entity Typing via Label Reasoning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine-grained entity typing are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-granular entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a label reasoning network that exploits label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network can model, learn and reason complex labels in a sequence-to-set, end-to end manner. |
DebugBench: Evaluating Debugging Capability of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Runchu Tian, Yining Ye, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Yankai Lin, Yinxu Pan, Yesai Wu, Hui Haotian, Liu Weichuan, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional coding capabilities, but their debugging capabilities remain relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a debugging benchmark consisting of 4,253 LLMs with four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. |
MEDEC: A Benchmark for Medical Error Detection and Correction in Clinical Notes (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Several studies have shown that large language models can answer medical questions correctly, outperforming the average human score in some medical exams. |
| Approach: | They introduce MEDEC, the first publicly available benchmark for medical error detection and correction in clinical notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms medical doctors in errors detection and correction tasks. |
From Discourse to Narrative: Knowledge Projection for Event Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing event-centric knowledge graphs rely on explicit connectives to extract relations between events. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge projection paradigm for event relation extraction using commonalities between events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and extrinsic results verify the extracted event relations. |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
Chinese SimpleQA: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Yingshui Tan, Weixun Wang, Hui Huang, Xingyuan Bu, Hangyu Guo, Chengwei Hu, Boren Zheng, Zhuoran Lin, Dekai Sun, Zhicheng Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Current frontier models sometimes generate false outputs or answers that are not substantiated by evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose Chinese SimpleQA, a Chinese benchmark to evaluate LLMs' factuality . they focus on Chinese language over 6 major topics with 99 diverse subtopics . |
| Outcome: | The Chinese SimpleQA benchmark evaluates the factuality ability of LLMs . the questions and answers are short and easy-to-evaluate . |
WebDP: Understanding Discourse Structures in Semi-Structured Web Documents (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Web documents are one of the most primary and biggest data resources in current era, and understanding their discourse structure will benefit various downstream document processing applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a web document discourse structure representation schema by extending classical discourse theories and adding special features to well represent discourse characteristics of web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is feasible but challenging for current models. |
Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch (2025.acl-long)
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Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, XingYu XingYu, Yuqiu Ji, Guohai Xu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Debing Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese resources are small in scale and limited to specific domains, making them insufficient for LLM post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-annotated reward model and a preference dataset to address this gap . they evaluate Chinese RMs on CheemsBench and construct an RM that captures human preferences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed RM achieves state-of-the-art performance on CheemsBench and CheeMePreference. |
Language Modeling with Sparse Product of Sememe Experts (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing language modeling methods rely on large-scale text data to learn the sequential patterns of words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sememes to represent the implicit semantics behind words for language modeling . they propose to employ sememe-driven language models to fine-grained semem-level semantics . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on language modeling and the downstream application of headline generation show the effectiveness of SDLM. |
Chain-of-Rewrite: Aligning Question and Documents for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Chunlei Xin, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer open-domain question have encountered term mismatch and limited interaction between IR systems and large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which leverages the guidance and feedback gained from the analysis to provide faithful and consistent extensions for effective question answering. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four open-domain question answering datasets show the proposed method performs well under zero-shot settings. |
Contrastive Distant Supervision for Debiased and Denoised Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Distant supervision (DS) is a promising learning approach for machine reading comprehension (MRC) however, the annotated dataset will inevitably lead to mislabeled instances, resulting in answer bias and context noise problems. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that can learn to distinguish confusing and noisy instances via confidence-aware contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can learn to distinguish confusing and noisy instances via confidence-aware contrastive learning. |
Pruning Foundation Models for High Accuracy without Retraining (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Despite the superior performance of foundation models, it is challenging to deploy large language models in practical applications due to their massive parameters and computations. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning algorithm to prune LLMs in one-shot without retraining . they propose retrainable pruning algorithms to prune multiple weights in LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning methods perform better than baseline pruning methods on sparse and unstructured sparsity models. |
Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs that represent entities in different languages are not covered by existing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose two ways to embed entities from multilingual knowledge graphs into the same vector space, where equivalent entities are close to each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing systems on two benchmark datasets. |
When Good OCR Is Not Enough: Benchmarking OCR Robustness for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-industry)
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Lin Sun, null Wangdexian, Jingang Huang, Linglin Zhang, Change Jia, Zhengwei Cheng, Xiangzheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing OCR benchmarks rely on character-level metrics to measure downstream performance . high OCR accuracy does not translate into strong downstream performance, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose an OCR benchmark for industrial RAG systems that measures character-level metrics . they find that high OCR accuracy does not translate into strong downstream RAG performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that high OCR accuracy does not translate into strong downstream performance . structural and semantic errors can cause substantial retrieval failures even when WER/CER remains low. |
PEMT: Multi-Task Correlation Guided Mixture-of-Experts Enables Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an effective method for adapting pre-trained language models to various tasks efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework that captures transferable knowledge as a weighted combination of adapters trained on source tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields stable improvements over full fine-tuning and knowledge transferring methods on a broad range of tasks over 17 datasets. |
Continual Relation Learning via Episodic Memory Activation and Reconsolidation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn incessantly emerging novel relations are overfitting the few memorized examples of old relations, causing confusion among existing relations. |
| Approach: | They introduce episodic memory activation and reconsolidation (EMAR) to continual relation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in catastrophic forgetting old relations. |
OpenKE: An Open Toolkit for Knowledge Embedding (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge embedding tools are available for embeddable knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework and various fundamental models to embed knowledge graphs into a continuous low-dimensional space. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit and pre-trained embeddings are available on http://openke.thunlp.org/. |
Autoencoder as Assistant Supervisor: Improving Text Representation for Chinese Social Media Text Summarization (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing abstractive text summarization models learn a semantic representation of the source text and the summaries from it. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the model on a popular Chinese social media dataset and compare it to other models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on a popular Chinese social media dataset. |
Simple and Effective Unsupervised Redundancy Elimination to Compress Dense Vectors for Passage Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dense passage retrieval improves ranking accuracy in open-domain question answering but at the cost of large space and memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple unsupervised pipeline that includes principal component analysis (PCA), product quantization, and hybrid search to improve space efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves good accuracy–space trade-offs, for example, 48 compression with less than 3% drop in top-100 retrieval accuracy on average or 96 compression without drop in space requirements. |
Learning Relation Alignment for Calibrated Cross-modal Retrieval (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in multimodal pre-training, cross-modal retrieval remains challenging . lack of relation consistency impairs contextualized representation of image-text pairs . |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin. |
A Multi-answer Multi-task Framework for Real-world Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of machine reading comprehension (MRC) are based on cloze style questions or crowdworkers given a short passage from well-edited sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-answer multi-task framework that uses multiple reference answers for multiple questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases the ROUGE-L score on the DuReader dataset from 44.18, the previous state-of-the-art, to 51.09 . |
Cost-sensitive Regularization for Label Confusion-aware Event Detection (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in event detection focus on wordwise classification with one NIL class for tokens do not trigger any event. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-sensitive regularization method which penalizes more on mislabeling . they propose two estimators which can effectively measure such label confusion based on instance-level statistics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve the performance of different models in English and Chinese event detection. |
Different Tunes Played with Equal Skill: Exploring a Unified Optimization Subspace for Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing delta tuning algorithms freeze most of the parameters and only optimize minimal adaptive parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose DETs into a unified optimization subspace and conduct optimization within the subspace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed DETs achieve comparable performance to the original DET and can be transferred to another DET with non-trivial performance. |
BeamLoRA: Beam-Constraint Low-Rank Adaptation (2025.acl-long)
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Naibin Gu, Zhenyu Zhang, Xiyu Liu, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Weiping Wang, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most efficient parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to conceptualize each LoRA module as a beam where each rank corresponds to a potential sub-solution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on three base models and 12 datasets. |
Gazetteer-Enhanced Attentive Neural Networks for Named Entity Recognition (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental NLP task. |
| Approach: | They propose a gazetteer-based attentive neural network which can enhance region-based NER . they first model the mention-context association and then an auxiliary gazetteers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art on ACE2005 named entity recognition benchmark. |
Decoding at the Speed of Thought: Harnessing Parallel Decoding of Lexical Units for LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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Chenxi Sun, Hongzhi Zhang, Zijia Lin, Jingyuan Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Bin Chen, Chengru Song, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in natural language understanding and generation, but their generation speed is limited by the inherently sequential nature of their decoding process. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that accelerates decoding process without sacrificing quality . they propose lexical unit decoding, which can be integrated with other methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces decoding time while maintaining quality while maintaining output quality. |
Nugget Proposal Networks for Chinese Event Detection (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Nugget Proposal Networks (NPNs) can solve word-trigger mismatch problem . word-wise event detection models suffer from word-tree mismatch because of multiple triggers . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel way to detect event triggers in a character-wise paradigm . they propose entire trigger nuggets centered at each character regardless of word boundaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two datasets. |
ELLE: Efficient Lifelong Pre-training for Emerging Data (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are typically trained with static data, ignoring that streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. |
| Approach: | They propose to use function preserved model expansion to expand existing PLM's width and depth to improve efficiency of knowledge acquisition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves pre-training efficiency and performance over existing models on BERT and GPT. |
PsyQA: A Chinese Dataset for Generating Long Counseling Text for Mental Health Support (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on text-based mental health counseling is limited due to the lack of relevant corpora in Chinese language. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese dataset of psychological health support in the form of question and answer pair that is crawled from a mental health service platform and contains 22K questions and 56K long and wellstructured answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 22K questions and 56K long and wellstructured answers. |
Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets may leak shallow heuristics via entity mentions, thus contributing to the high performance on RE benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-masked contrastive framework for relation extraction to gain a deeper understanding on textual context and type information while avoiding rote memorization of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the effectiveness and robustness of neural models in different RE scenarios. |
CRUXEVAL-X: A Benchmark for Multilingual Code Reasoning, Understanding and Execution (2025.acl-long)
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Ruiyang Xu, Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Ming Wen, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Shing-Chi Cheung, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing code benchmarks focus on code generation, while those for code reasoning are insufficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-lingual code reasoning benchmark that contains 19 programming languages and at least 600 subjects for each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model trains on Python and achieves 34.4% Pass@1 in other languages, revealing the cross-language generalization of LLMs. |
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiangyang Li, Zhonghua Li, Zhao Cao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios. |
Better Pre-Training by Reducing Representation Confusion (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve pre-trained language models address information confusion in position encoding and model representations. |
| Approach: | They propose two techniques to improve pre-trained language models by decoupling directions and auxiliary regularizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques can improve pre-trained language models on GLUE benchmarks. |
Contextualized Sequence Likelihood: Enhanced Confidence Scores for Natural Language Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, the most commonly used confidence score is the likelihood of the generated sequence . different tokens should be weighted differently depending on the context. |
| Approach: | They propose to assign different weights to various tokens using attention values elicited from the base LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the confidence of the predicted sequence probability by assigning weights to tokens based on attention values elicited from the base model. |
StructEval: Deepen and Broaden Large Language Model Assessment via Structured Evaluation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current evaluations for large language models use a single-item assessment paradigm . current evaluations struggle to discern whether a model possesses the required capabilities or merely memorizes/guesses the answers to specific questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate large language models using atomic test objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework resists data contamination and reduces interference of potential biases, and sheds light on the design of future principled and trustworthy LLM evaluation protocols. |
Learning When to Concentrate or Divert Attention: Self-Adaptive Attention Temperature for Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation models treat decoding at each time step equally with the same matrix . conventional methods treat decoder outputs at all time steps with the identical weight matrix causing inaccuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a mechanism to control the softness of attention by means of an attention temperature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on Chinese-English and English-Vietnamese translations. |
TOI-CNN: a Solution of Information Extraction on Chinese Insurance Policy (N19-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Element Tagging on insurance policies can be used to streamline manual review of hundreds of contracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-of-interest convolutional neural network (TOI-CNN) to replace traditional pooling layer for processing nested phrasal or clausal elements in insurance policies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can automatically convert a massive amount of insurance policies into structural archives for management and comparison. |
Sparse Latents Steer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Xuanang Chen, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | In this study, we uncover interpretable latents that govern RAG behavior in large language models . Sparse Autoencoders are used to control large language model (LLM) behavior . |
| Approach: | They leverage Sparse Autoencoders within the LLaMA Scope to uncover latents that govern RAG behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to control large language models without architectural modifications. |
ECO v1: Towards Event-Centric Opinion Mining (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on event-centric opinion mining focus on entity-centric opinions . entity-centered opinions focus on sentimental polarity of events, while event-centered ones focus on content . |
| Approach: | They propose to perform event-centric opinion mining on event-argument structure and expression categorizing theory and benchmark it against a pioneer corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is feasible and challenging, and the results are beneficial for future studies. |
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision. |
Improved Sparse Upcycling for Instruction Tuning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sparse upcycling lead to performance degradation in instruction tuning scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-based approach to convert dense language models into sparsely activated ones by initializing router weights from language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves model capabilities and routing consistency across multiple benchmarks. |
Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)
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Bohan Lyu, Xin Cong, Heyang Yu, Pan Yang, Cheng Qian, Zihe Wang, Yujia Qin, Yining Ye, Yaxi Lu, Chen Qian, Zhong Zhang, Yukun Yan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark. |
Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods conduct knowledge distillation statically, e.g., student model aligns output distribution to teacher model on pre-defined training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic knowledge distillation that empowers the student to adjust the learning procedure according to its competency . they find it is promising and provide discussions on potential future directions towards more efficient methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost student model performance while accelerating training . the proposed method reduces memory usage and accelerates model inference . |
Chain-of-Thought Matters: Improving Long-Context Language Models with Reasoning Path Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Zhu, Xiyu Wei, Guangxiang Zhao, Wenhao Wu, Haosheng Zou, Junfeng Ran, null XWang, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought framework that teaches models to generate high-quality reasoning paths for enhanced long-context performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes across most long-context scenarios and amplifys with increasing context length. |
Confusion is the Final Barrier: Rethinking Jailbreak Evaluation and Investigating the Real Misuse Threat of LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yu Yan, Sheng Sun, Zhe Wang, Yijun Lin, Zenghao Duan, Zhifei Zheng, Min Liu, Zhiyi Yin, Jianping Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have been developed to deal with real-world crimes, but it remains unclear whether they internalize authentic knowledge or are forced to simulate toxic language patterns. |
| Approach: | They construct knowledge-intensive Q&A to investigate misuse threats of Large Language Models in terms of dangerous knowledge possession, harmful task planning utility, and harmfulness judgment robustness. |
| Outcome: | The findings raise concerns that jailbreak success is often attributable to a hallucination loop between jailbroken LLM and judger LLM . |
CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which emits predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing methods on six classification tasks yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions. |
CuBridge: An LLM-Based Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing High-Performance Attention Kernels (2026.acl-long)
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Xing Ma, Yangjie Zhou, Wu Sun, Zihan Liu, Jingwen Leng, Yun Lin, Shixuan Sun, Minyi Guo, Jin Song Dong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to support diverse attention variants trade performance for flexibility . expert-written kernels achieve high efficiency but are difficult to adapt . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adapts expert-written attention kernels to GPUs . they use a structured lift–transfer–lower workflow to make execution explicit . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and compilers on diverse variants and GPU platforms. |
Imitation Learning for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive translation models lack parallel decoding, which is a bottleneck for NMT decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for non-autoregressive machine translation that emulates the autoregressive model by sampling sentence length in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 31.85 BLEU on WMT16 RoEn and 30.68 BLUE on IWSLT16 EnDe on the IWSLD16, WMT14 and WMT15 datasets. |
DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset (P19-1)
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Yuan Yao, Deming Ye, Peng Li, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lixin Huang, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation extraction dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features . document-level relation extraction is a task to identify relational facts between entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text. |
Ensuring Safe and High-Quality Outputs: A Guideline Library Approach for Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Yi Luo, Zhenghao Lin, YuHao Zhang, Jiashuo Sun, Chen Lin, Chengjin Xu, Xiangdong Su, Yelong Shen, Jian Guo, Yeyun Gong
| Challenge: | Guide-Align is a guideline-oriented approach to augment the safety and quality of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a guideline-oriented method to augment the safety and quality of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three benchmarks and shows significant improvements in security and quality. |
SoFA: Shielded On-the-fly Alignment via Priority Rule Following (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods fail to adapt to the diversity of preferences and regulatory standards. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for prioritizing rules over user instructions to minimize misalignments in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes misalignments and adapts smoothly to various unseen rules, ensuring they are shielded from hijacking and that the model responds appropriately. |