Papers by Lin Yan

RealFin: How Well Do LLMs Reason About Finance When Users Leave Things Unsaid? (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for large reasoning models have improved efficiency but still face limitations such as conflicting objectives and limited adaptability.
Approach:	They propose an adaptive reasoning framework that applies a uniform, computation-intensive deep reasoning strategy to all problems.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces the average response length of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B by 54.9% while improving accuracy by up to 4.8% on five mathematical datasets.

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Yuyang Dai, Yan Lin, Zhuohan Xie, Yuxia Wang

Identifying Semantic Induction Heads to Understand In-Context Learning (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	General-purpose models tend to over-commit and guess, while most finance-specialized models fail to clearly identify missing premises.
Approach:	They propose a bilingual benchmark that removes premises from exam-style questions while keeping them linguistically plausible.
Outcome:	The proposed model overcommits and guesses while most finance-specialized models fail to clearly identify missing premises.

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Jie Ren, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Dongrui Liu, Quanshi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Dahua Lin

Masked Thought: Simply Masking Partial Reasoning Steps Can Improve Mathematical Reasoning Learning of Language Models (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, but lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness.
Approach:	They conduct a detailed analysis of the operations of attention heads to understand their in-context learning of LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed analysis of attention heads reveals that they increase the output logits of object tokens and recall objects . the proposed model is a novel approach to understand the in-context learning of large language models.

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Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Ting-En Lin, Ang Lv, Yuchuan Wu, Xin Gao, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan, Yongbin Li

Union-of-Experts: Neurons in Mixture-of-Experts are Secretly Routers (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Despite the advances in large language models, they still face difficulties with multi-step reasoning tasks.
Approach:	They propose a method that randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought to improve model accuracy by 5% over standard supervised fine-tuning.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy by 5% over standard fine-tuning with a few codes modified.

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Songhao Wu, Ang Lv, Ruobing Xie, Samm Sun, Di Wang, Rui Yan, Yankai Lin

Flames: Benchmarking Value Alignment of LLMs in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)

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.

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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

A Generative Pre-Trained Language Model for Channel Prediction in Wireless Communications Systems (2025.emnlp-main)

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.

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Bo Lin, Huanming Zhang, Yuhua Jiang, Yucong Wang, Tengyu Zhang, Shaoqiang Yan, Hongyao Li, Yihong Liu, Feifei Gao

Decouple knowledge from paramters for plug-and-play language modeling (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing model-based channel prediction methods suffer from limited accuracy due to imperfect temporal modeling, while existing AI-based methods suffers from limited generalization due to inadequate training strategies.
Approach:	They propose a generative pre-trained language model for channel prediction based on channel correlation and train it based upon transformer decoder architecture.
Outcome:	The proposed model can learn various channel characteristics and perform impressive tasks across multiple dimensions.

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Xin Cheng, Yankai Lin, Xiuying Chen, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan

CodeScope: An Execution-based Multilingual Multitask Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Code Understanding and Generation (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have made impressive results in a wide range of NLP tasks.
Approach:	They propose a pre-training model with editable and scalable key-value memory and leverage knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the pasted macro ‘MEMORY’.
Outcome:	The proposed model decouples the knowledge storage from model parameters with an editable and scalable key-value memory and leverages knowledge in an explainable manner by knowledge retrieval in the pasted macro ‘MEMORY’.

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Weixiang Yan, Haitian Liu, Yunkun Wang, Yunzhe Li, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Tingyu Lin, Weishan Zhao, Li Zhu, Hari Sundaram, Shuiguang Deng

Balanced Data Sampling for Language Model Training with Clustering (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks for evaluating the code understanding and generation capacities of Large Language Models are insufficient . existing benchmarks focus on a narrow range of popular programming languages and specific tasks .
Approach:	They propose an execution-based, multilingual, multitask evaluation benchmark for LLMs . they evaluate coding performance from three dimensions: length, difficulty, efficiency .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark covers 43 programming languages and eight coding tasks.

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Yunfan Shao, Linyang Li, Zhaoye Fei, Hang Yan, Dahua Lin, Xipeng Qiu

RockNER: A Simple Method to Create Adversarial Examples for Evaluating the Robustness of Named Entity Recognition Models (2021.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) are a fundamental part of the training process.
Approach:	They propose to use clustering to balance the text distribution of training data for better model training.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of ClusterClip Sampling under various training datasets and large language models.

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Bill Yuchen Lin, Wenyang Gao, Jun Yan, Ryan Moreno, Xiang Ren

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

Challenge:	Recent named entity recognition models have great performance on many conventional benchmarks, but it is not reliable in realistic applications.
Approach:	They propose a method to create natural adversarial examples using Wikidata and pre-trained language models.
Outcome:	The proposed method produces natural adversarial examples with a shifted distribution from training data.

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

From Synthesis to Clinical Assistance: A Strategy-Aware Agent Framework for Autism Intervention based on Real Clinical Dataset (2026.acl-long)

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

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Junhong Lai, Shuzhong Lai, Yanhao Yu, Wanlin Chen, Chenyu Yan, Haifeng Li, Lin Yao, Yueming Wang

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the gold standard for clinical intervention, but large language models struggle to adhere to its standardized procedures.
Approach:	They propose a strategy-aware framework to unify high-fidelity intervention dialogue synthesis and clinical decision support.
Outcome:	Experiments show that ASDAgent achieves nearly 80% strategic consistency with human experts.

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation (2026.findings-acl)

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Xiaowen Ma, Yunpu Ma, Chenyang Lin, Sikuan Yan, Jinhe Bi, Zixuan Cao, Yijun Tian, Volker Tresp, Hinrich Schuetze

Unified Demonstration Retriever for In-Context Learning (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations.
Approach:	They propose a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture.
Outcome:	The proposed framework surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.

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Xiaonan Li, Kai Lv, Hang Yan, Tianyang Lin, Wei Zhu, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Xiaoling Wang, Xipeng Qiu

On the Robustness of Reading Comprehension Models to Entity Renaming (2022.naacl-main)

Challenge:	In-context learning is a new learning paradigm where a language model conditions on a few input-output pairs (demonstrations) and a test input, and directly outputs the prediction.
Approach:	They propose a single model to retrieve demonstrations for a wide range of tasks by combining training signals from various tasks into a unified list-wise ranking formulation by language model’s feedback.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baselines on 30+ tasks across 13 task families and multiple data domains.

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Jun Yan, Yang Xiao, Sagnik Mukherjee, Bill Yuchen Lin, Robin Jia, Xiang Ren

DeepPresenter: Environment-Grounded Reflection for Agentic Presentation Generation (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	SpanBERT model is more robust than RoBERTa, despite having similar accuracy on unperturbed test data.
Approach:	They propose a pipeline to replace entity names with names from a variety of sources.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs worse when entities are renamed, the authors show . SpanBERT, which is pretrained with span-level masking, is more robust than RoBERTa .

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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.

CodeJudge-Eval: Can Large Language Models be Good Judges in Code Understanding? (2025.coling-main)

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Yuwei Zhao, Ziyang Luo, Yuchen Tian, Hongzhan Lin, Weixiang Yan, Annan Li, Jing Ma

Beyond Static Testbeds: An Interaction-Centric Agent Simulation Platform for Dynamic Recommender Systems (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have showcased impressive code generation capabilities, primarily evaluated through language-to-code benchmarks.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs’ code understanding abilities from the perspective of code judging rather than code generation.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark evaluates 12 well-known large language models to determine the correctness of provided code solutions.

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Song Jin, Juntian Zhang, Yuhan Liu, Xun Zhang, Yufei Zhang, Guojun Yin, Fei Jiang, Wei Lin, Rui Yan

Challenge:	Existing platforms lack a mechanism for user actions to dynamically reshape the environment.
Approach:	They propose a novel agent-based simulation platform for recommender systems with a robust interaction mechanism.
Outcome:	The proposed platform improves the credibility of the simulation and replicates the Matthew Effect and Brand Loyalty.

Flaming-hot Initiation with Regular Execution Sampling for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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Weizhe Chen, Zhicheng Zhang, Guanlin Liu, Renjie Zheng, Wenlei Shi, Chen Dun, Zheng Wu, Xing Jin, Lin Yan

MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains since the release of ChatGPT . a key challenge in developing these general capabilities is efficiently sourcing diverse, high-quality data.
Approach:	They introduce Flaming-hot Initiation with Regular Execution (FIRE) sampling to efficiently find good responses by promoting diversity.
Outcome:	The proposed method enhances inference-time generation quality and benefits training in the alignment stage.

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Binxu Li, Tiankai Yan, Yuanting Pan, Jie Luo, Ruiyang Ji, Jiayuan Ding, Zhe Xu, Shilong Liu, Haoyu Dong, Zihao Lin, Yixin Wang

The Mystery of In-Context Learning: A Comprehensive Survey on Interpretation and Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit limited generality and often fall short when compared to specialized models.
Approach:	They propose a multi-modal medical agent that picks the most suitable medical tools based on user inputs.
Outcome:	The proposed agent performs better than open-source models and the closed-source model, GPT-4o.

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Yuxiang Zhou, Jiazheng Li, Yanzheng Xiang, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui, Yulan He

2INER: Instructive and In-Context Learning on Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	In-context learning (ICL) is a capability that enables large language models to excel in proficiency through demonstration examples.
Approach:	They present a survey on the interpretation and analysis of in-context learning . they focus on theoretical and empirical perspectives on the concept .
Outcome:	The proposed model can perform tasks with minimal examples without re-training and has demonstrated proficiency across various tasks with a minimal set of task-oriented examples.

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Jiasheng Zhang, Xikai Liu, Xinyi Lai, Yan Gao, Shusen Wang, Yao Hu, Yiqing Lin

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks are a fundamental task of natural language processing (NLP).
Approach:	They propose a text-to-text framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) that employs instruction finetuning and auxiliary tasks to enhance the model's understanding of entity types in the overall semantic context of a sentence.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing Few-Shot NER methods and remains competitive with state-of-the-art NER algorithms.

CoMoL: Efficient Mixture of LoRA Experts via Dynamic Core Space Merging (2026.findings-acl)

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Jie Cao, Zhenxuan Fan, Zhuonan Wang, Tianwei Lin, Ziyuan Zhao, Rolan Yan, Wenqiao Zhang, Feifei Shao, Hongwei Wang, Jun Xiao, Siliang Tang

Code Needs Comments: Enhancing Code LLMs with Comment Augmentation (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing PEFT methods suffer from limited parameter efficiency and coarse-grained adaptation due to proliferation of LoRA experts and instance-level routing.
Approach:	They propose a new MoE-LoRA framework that incorporates expert diversity, parameter efficiency, and fine-grained adaptation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multiple tasks while maintaining parameter efficiency.

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Demin Song, Honglin Guo, Yunhua Zhou, Shuhao Xing, Yudong Wang, Zifan Song, Wenwei Zhang, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu, Dahua Lin

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) require a deep understanding of programming languages and their correlation with natural languages (NLs).
Approach:	They propose a data augmentation method that generates comments for existing code and a filtering strategy that filters out code data poorly correlated with natural language.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the model trained on the augmented data and the model further trained on data without augmentation on two widely-used programming skill benchmarks.

Reasoning Like Program Executors (2022.emnlp-main)

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Xinyu Pi, Qian Liu, Bei Chen, Morteza Ziyadi, Zeqi Lin, Qiang Fu, Yan Gao, Jian-Guang Lou, Weizhu Chen

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

Challenge:	Existing language models are inadequate in reasoning, according to studies . a new reasoning pre-training paradigm is based on pretraining language models with programs .
Approach:	They propose a reasoning pre-training paradigm that empowers language models to harvest reasoning knowledge possessed by program executors.
Outcome:	The proposed reasoning pre-training paradigm can boost models' reasoning skills . it can be instantiated by different kinds of program executors and run on a single database .

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

Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE (2024.emnlp-main)

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

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Zhiyuan Zeng, Qipeng Guo, Zhaoye Fei, Zhangyue Yin, Yunhua Zhou, Linyang Li, Tianxiang Sun, Hang Yan, Dahua Lin, Xipeng Qiu

Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling (2024.acl-long)

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 .

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Zekun Li, Zhiyu Chen, Mike Ross, Patrick Huber, Seungwhan Moon, Zhaojiang Lin, Xin Dong, Adithya Sagar, Xifeng Yan, Paul Crook

Leveraging Generative Large Language Models with Visual Instruction and Demonstration Retrieval for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (2024.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts.
Approach:	They propose a method for solving dialogue state tracking (DST) with large language models through function calling.
Outcome:	The proposed approach improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning.

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Binghao Tang, Boda Lin, Haolong Yan, Si Li

Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases (2021.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for multimodal sarcasm detection do not fully utilize cross-modal features, limiting their performance on in-domain datasets.
Approach:	They propose a multimodal sarcasm detection model with a designed instruction template and a demonstration retrieval module.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing methods on in-domain datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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Boxi Cao, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Lingyong Yan, Meng Liao, Tong Xue, Jin Xu

Tracking Brand-Associated Polarity-Bearing Topics in User Reviews (2023.tacl-1)

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 .

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Runcong Zhao, Lin Gui, Hanqi Yan, Yulan He

Challenge:	Existing models that infer brand polarity scores from reviews are not able to infer polarities directly.
Approach:	They propose a dynamic Brand-Topic Model which detects and tracks brand-associated sentiment scores and polarity-bearing topics from product reviews organized in temporally ordered time intervals.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms competitive models on a MakeupAlley and hotel review datasets.

Text-Guided Multi-Scale Frequency Representation Adaptation (2026.acl-long)

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Weicai Yan, Xinhua Ma, Wang Lin, Tao Jin

Scalable Multi-Hop Relational Reasoning for Knowledge-Aware Question Answering (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for fine-tuning visual signals are limited by their size and complexity.
Approach:	They propose a multi-scale frequency-based fine-tuning method that integrates textual information and performs multi-level fine- tuning of visual signals in the frequency domain.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments on multimodal models, including CLIP and LLaVA, demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves performance and efficiency with minimal cost and fast convergence within one epoch.

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Yanlin Feng, Xinyue Chen, Bill Yuchen Lin, Peifeng Wang, Jun Yan, Xiang Ren

Question Answering

Challenge:	Existing work on augmenting question answering models with external knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs) lacks transparency into the model’s prediction rationale.
Approach:	They propose a knowledge-aware approach that equips pre-trained language models with a multi-hop relational reasoning module that performs multi-relational reasoning over subgraphs extracted from external knowledge graphs.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs multi-hop, multi-relational reasoning over subgraphs extracted from external knowledge graphs.

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

LongWanjuan: Towards Systematic Measurement for Long Text Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)

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

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Xiaoran Liu, Kai Lv, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Conghui He, Xipeng Qiu, Dahua Lin

Harnessing Consistency for Robust Test-Time LLM Ensemble (2026.findings-eacl)

Challenge:	Existing efforts to improve data quality have focused on deduplication and the evaluation of data diversity and difficulty.
Approach:	They propose a set of metrics to evaluate the quality of long texts by evaluating three fundamental linguistic dimensions: coherence, cohesion, and complexity.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on long-text tasks with over 160B tokens and categorizes long texts into holistic, aggregated, and chaotic types.

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Zhichen Zeng, Qi Yu, Xiao Lin, Ruizhong Qiu, Xuying Ning, Tianxin Wei, Yuchen Yan, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong

TCP: a Benchmark for Temporal Constraint-Based Planning (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing efforts to improve LLM ensemble quality have focused on model consistency, but failures are often due to heterogeneous tokenization schemes and varying model expertise.
Approach:	They propose a plug-and-play technique that harnesses model consistency for robust LLM ensemble.
Outcome:	The proposed technique improves ensemble performance and robustness against erroneous signals.

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Zifeng Ding, Sikuan Yan, Moy Yuan, Xianglong Hu, Fangru Lin, Andreas Vlachos

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks evaluate temporal reasoning and planning in isolation and under limited forms of complexity.
Approach:	They propose a temporal constraint-based planning benchmark that assesses temporal reasoning and planning capabilities in large language models.
Outcome:	The proposed model fails to perform well under limited constraints and lacks temporal grounding.

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

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

MoA: Heterogeneous Mixture of Adapters for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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

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Jie Cao, Tianwei Lin, Bo Yuan, Rolan Yan, Hongyang He, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Dongping Zhang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang

Entrospect: Information-Theoretic Self-Reflection Elicits Better Response Refinement of Small Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) are limited by computational costs and performance degradation.
Approach:	They propose a method that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) they propose combining expert load imbalance and representation collapse to improve LLM performance .
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms homogeneous MoE-LoRA architectures in performance and parameter efficiency.

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Tianqiang Yan, Ziqiao Lin, Lin Zhang, Zhenglong Sun, Yuan Gao

Disentangle-based Continual Graph Representation Learning (2020.emnlp-main)

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.

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Xiaoyu Kou, Yankai Lin, Shaobo Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Yan Zhang

Position Bias Mitigation: A Knowledge-Aware Graph Model for Emotion Cause Extraction (2021.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing graph embedding methods overlook streaming nature of incoming data in real-world applications.
Approach:	They propose a disentangle-based continual graph representation learning framework inspired by the human’s ability to learn procedural knowledge.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art continual graph representation learning framework and alleviate catastrophic forgetting problem.

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Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui, Gabriele Pergola, Yulan He

MUR: Momentum Uncertainty guided Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models for ECE tend to explore relative position information and suffer from the dataset bias.
Approach:	They propose to generate adversarial examples where relative position is no longer indicative feature of cause clauses to address the dataset bias.
Outcome:	The proposed method performs on par with existing state-of-the-art methods on the original ECE dataset and is more robust against adversarial attacks compared to existing models.

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Hang Yan, Fangzhi Xu, Rongman Xu, Yifei Li, Jian Zhang, Haoran Luo, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu, Haiteng Zhao, Qika Lin, Jun Liu

RAM-SD: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-agent framework for Sarcasm Detection (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for optimizing reasoning quality are limited by overthinking.
Approach:	They propose a method that allocates thinking budgets to critical reasoning steps by tracking and aggregating step-wise uncertainty over time.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces computation by over 45% on average while improving accuracy by 0.33–3.46%.

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Ziyang Zhou, Ziqi Liu, Yan Wang, Yiming Lin, Yangbin Chen

Train a Unified Multimodal Data Quality Classifier with Synthetic Data (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to sarcastic detection use a uniform reasoning strategy . existing approaches lack a framework to deal with the diverse analytical demands of sarcasm .
Approach:	They propose a Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent framework for Sarcasm Detection . the framework provides transparent and interpretable reasoning traces .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four benchmarks and outperformed the strong GPT-4o+CoC baseline.

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Weizhi Wang, Rongmei Lin, Shiyang Li, Colin Lockard, Ritesh Sarkhel, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Jingbo Shang, Xifeng Yan, Nasser Zalmout, Xian Li

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

Challenge:	Multimodal Large Language Models are pre-trained on image-text caption data and interleaved document data.
Approach:	They propose to train an efficient MLLM as a Unified Mulitmodal Data Quality Classifier to filter image-text caption and interleaved data.
Outcome:	The proposed method enables efficient creation of sample-score pairs for caption and interleaved data to train UniFilter.

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

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

Challenge:	Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information.
Approach:	They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots.

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

DANCER: Entity Description Augmented Named Entity Corrector for Automatic Speech Recognition (2024.lrec-main)

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

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Yi-Cheng Wang, Hsin-Wei Wang, Bi-Cheng Yan, Chi-Han Lin, Berlin Chen

DetectBench: Can Large Language Model Detect and Piece Together Implicit Evidence? (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems suffer from mistranscription of domain-specific phrases, such as named entities.
Approach:	They propose a named entity correction model that leverages phonetic con-fusion to mitigate phonetic confusion.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms the existing model on AISHELL-1 and Homophone datasets.

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Zhouhong Gu, Lin Zhang, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Jiangjie Chen, Wenhao Huang, Yikai Zhang, Shusen Wang, Zheyu Ye, Yan Gao, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao

Multi-task Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Model with Few-shot Queries (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing LLMs' abilities to detect evidence in long contexts are far inferior to humans.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' abilities in evidence and multi-step commonsense reasoning within a long context.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the performance of LLMs in evidence detection and commonsense reasoning.

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Wenqiang Wang, Yan Xiao, Hao Lin, Yangshijie Zhang, Xiaochun Cao

CATE: A Contrastive Pre-trained Model for Metaphor Detection with Semi-supervised Learning (2021.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing adversarial text attacks rely on abundant access to shared internal features and numerous queries, limited to a single task type.
Approach:	They propose a black-box attack that exploits the transferability of adversarial texts . they use a deep-level substitute model trained in a plug-and-play manner for text classification .
Outcome:	The proposed attack can target multiple tasks with minimal perturbations . it can target commercial APIs, large language models, and image-generation models .

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Zhenxi Lin, Qianli Ma, Jiangyue Yan, Jieyu Chen

Beyond Prompting: An Efficient Embedding Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models for metaphor detection require a large amount of labeled data and are not linguistically-based.
Approach:	They propose a ContrAstive pre-Trained modEl (CATE) for metaphor detection with semi-supervised learning using a pre-trained model to obtain a contextual representation of target words.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models on several benchmark datasets and achieves better performance against state-of-the-art models.

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Zhanghao Hu, Hanqi Yan, Qinglin Zhu, Zhenyi Shen, Yulan He, Lin Gui

LLMs-as-Instructors: Learning from Errors Toward Automating Model Improvement (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have recently pushed open-domain question answering (ODQA) to new heights.
Approach:	They propose an embedding-level framework that enhances both the retriever and the reader by reordering query representations via lightweight linear layers under an unsupervised contrastive learning objective.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines in accuracy and efficiency across three open-source LLMs, three retrieval methods, and four ODQA benchmarks.

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Jiahao Ying, Mingbao Lin, Yixin Cao, Wei Tang, Bo Wang, Qianru Sun, Xuanjing Huang, Shuicheng Yan

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.

Efficient and Accurate Prompt Optimization: the Benefit of Memory in Exemplar-Guided Reflection (2025.acl-long)

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Cilin Yan, Jingyun Wang, Lin Zhang, Ruihui Zhao, Xiaopu Wu, Kai Xiong, Qingsong Liu, Guoliang Kang, Yangyang Kang

Fortify the Shortest Stave in Attention: Enhancing Context Awareness of Large Language Models for Effective Tool Use (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent work utilizes feedbacks generated from erroneous cases to guide prompt optimization . previous methods rely on computational resources and powerful GPUs .
Approach:	They propose an automatic prompt engineering method that leverages feedbacks from erroneous cases to guide prompt optimization.
Outcome:	The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods with less steps and lower computational resources.

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Yuhan Chen, Ang Lv, Ting-En Lin, Changyu Chen, Yuchuan Wu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Rui Yan

A Span-based Dynamic Local Attention Model for Sequential Sentence Classification (2021.acl-short)

Challenge:	In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness.
Approach:	They propose a method that compensates an attention trough with an attention peak by a process to enhance the model's awareness to various contextual positions.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the performance of a 7B model on the largest tool-use benchmark, comparable to that of GPT-4.

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Xichen Shang, Qianli Ma, Zhenxi Lin, Jiangyue Yan, Zipeng Chen

Information Extraction & Text Mining

Challenge:	Existing methods for sentence classification ignore latent segment structure of document, in which contiguous sentences have coherent semantics.
Approach:	They propose a span-based dynamic local attention model that captures structural information by supervised dynamic local focus.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets.

Element Intervention for Open Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)

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Fangchao Liu, Lingyong Yan, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Information Extraction & Text Mining

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.

Just Ask One More Time! Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios (2024.findings-acl)

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Lei Lin, Jiayi Fu, Pengli Liu, Qingyang Li, Yan Gong, Junchen Wan, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai

Visual Enhanced Entity-Level Interaction Network for Multimodal Summarization (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective on complex reasoning tasks, but the naive greedy decoding used in CoT prompting causes the repetitiveness and local optimality.
Approach:	They propose a generalizable ensemble-optimization method that uses a set of reasoning paths to prompt a language model one more time to determine the optimal answer.
Outcome:	The proposed method can be generalized to almost all scenarios where the type of input questions and answer format of reasoning paths may be unknown.

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Haolong Yan, Binghao Tang, Boda Lin, Gang Zhao, Si Li

Learning Like Humans: Advancing LLM Reasoning Capabilities via Adaptive Difficulty Curriculum Learning and Expert-Guided Self-Reformulation (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to generate concise summarizations rely on coarse-grained textual and visual information, but they are underutilized.
Approach:	They propose a Visual Enhanced Entity-Level Interaction Network to address underutilization of multimodal inputs at a fine-grained level.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models on two MMS datasets and proposes new metrics to measure factual consistency of entities in the output.

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Enci Zhang, Xingang Yan, Wei Lin, Tianxiang. Zhang, Lu Qianchun

What are the Essential Factors in Crafting Effective Long Context Multi-Hop Instruction Datasets? Insights and Best Practices (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Extensive experiments on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that these human-inspired strategies synergistically and significantly enhance performance.
Approach:	They propose to use Adaptive Difficulty Curriculum Learning and Expert-Guided Self-Reformulation to improve model performance.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed strategies synergistically and significantly improve performance over the baseline model.

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Zhi Chen, Qiguang Chen, Libo Qin, Qipeng Guo, Haijun Lv, Yicheng Zou, Hang Yan, Kai Chen, Dahua Lin

Challenge:	Existing methods to generate long-context instruction-tuning data are limited by poor quality and fewer than 35% of samples are multi-hop .
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates a quality verification agent, a single-hop question generation agent, and a multi-hop questions merger agent to enhance model performance.
Outcome:	The proposed framework significantly improves data quality with high-quality, multi-hop, and diverse data.

Keywords and Instances: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework Unifying Hybrid Granularities for Text Generation (2022.acl-long)

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Mingzhe Li, XieXiong Lin, Xiuying Chen, Jinxiong Chang, Qishen Zhang, Feng Wang, Taifeng Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Wei Chu, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan

Can Large Language Models Grasp Legal Theories? Enhance Legal Reasoning with Insights from Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on contrastive learning on the instance level without discriminating the contribution of each word.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning mechanism which can unify semantic meaning in the input text.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baselines on storytelling, paraphrasing, dialogue generation, and storytelling tasks.

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Weikang Yuan, Junjie Cao, Zhuoren Jiang, Yangyang Kang, Jun Lin, Kaisong Song, Tianqianjin Lin, Pengwei Yan, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu

Audio-Reasoner: Improving Reasoning Capability in Large Audio Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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.

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Xie Zhifei, Mingbao Lin, Zihang Liu, Pengcheng Wu, Shuicheng Yan, Chunyan Miao

Prompting Few-shot Multi-hop Question Generation via Comprehending Type-aware Semantics (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in multimodal reasoning overlook the audio modality.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale audio language model for deep reasoning that leverages a multitask audio dataset.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs well across key benchmarks including MMAU-mini, AIR-Bench chat/foundation, and MELD.

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Zefeng Lin, Weidong Chen, Yan Song, Yongdong Zhang

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing approaches for multi-hop question generation rely on large annotated data . supervised approaches rely only on large labeled data, making it hard to perform tasks.
Approach:	They propose a type-aware semantics extraction-based chain-of-thought method for multi-hop question generation for documents . they first extract question types and essential semantic phrases from the given documents and the answer .
Outcome:	The proposed approach extracts question types and essential semantic phrases from documents and the answer.

MLLM-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs with Per-sample Criteria (2025.naacl-long)

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Wentao Ge, Shunian Chen, Hardy Chen, Nuo Chen, Junying Chen, Zhihong Chen, Wenya Xie, Shuo Yan, ChenghaoZhu ChenghaoZhu, Ziyue Lin, Dingjie Song, Xidong Wang, Anningzhe Gao, Zhang Zhiyi, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang

AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation methodologies for multimodal large language models are limited in evaluating objective queries without considering real-world user experiences.
Approach:	They propose to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria using potent MLLM as the judge.
Outcome:	The proposed evaluation paradigm shows that it can be used to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria.

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Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Encourage or Inhibit Monosemanticity? Revisit Monosemanticity from a Feature Decorrelation Perspective (2024.emnlp-main)

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.

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Hanqi Yan, Yanzheng Xiang, Guangyi Chen, Yifei Wang, Lin Gui, Yulan He

Challenge:	Recent studies focus on monosemanticity on its basic units.
Approach:	They propose to revisit monosemanticity from the feature decorrelation perspective and advocate for its encouragement.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves representation diversity and activation sparsity and improves preference alignment performance.

ASD-iLLM:An Intervention Large Language Model for Autistic Children based on Real Clinical Dialogue Intervention Dataset (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Shuzhong Lai, Chenxi Li, Junhong Lai, Yucun Zhong, Chenyu Yan, Xiang Li, Haifeng Li, Gang Pan, Lin Yao, Yueming Wang

MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Currently, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for autism intervention is a significant yet challenging task, especially when directly employing LLMs as an intervention doctor.
Approach:	They propose a framework for training LLMs to conduct dialogue interventions in accordance with the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) they also propose 'role-play' strategy in which LLM act as autistic children to comprehensively evaluate the doctor model's capabilities at the dialogue level.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing models in both automatic and human evaluation, with intervention strategies and dialogue style more closely resembling those of clinical intervention doctors.

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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie

Improving Factual Consistency of News Summarization by Contrastive Preference Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models.
Approach:	They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts.
Outcome:	The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings .

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Huawen Feng, Yan Fan, Xiong Liu, Ting-En Lin, Zekun Yao, Yuchuan Wu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Qianli Ma

Text Generation

Challenge:	Recent advances in news summarization have created problems with “hallucinations” that are factually inconsistent with the source text.
Approach:	They propose to disentangle LLMs’ propensities to generate faithful and fake content by adopting a probing-based specific training method to improve their capacity of distinguishing two types of propensity.
Outcome:	The proposed method disentangles LLMs’ propensities to generate faithful and fake content and improves their ability to distinguish between two types of propensity.

GraphMind: Interactive Novelty Assessment System for Accelerating Scientific Discovery (2025.emnlp-demos)

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Italo Luis da Silva, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui, Yulan He

The World is Not Binary: Learning to Rank with Grayscale Data for Dialogue Response Selection (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to literature analysis lack transparency and information retrieval module.
Approach:	GraphMind is an easy-to-use interactive web tool designed to assist users in evaluating novelty of scientific papers or drafted ideas.
Outcome:	GraphMind enables users to capture the main structure of a scientific paper, explore related ideas through various perspectives, and assess novelty via providing verifiable contextual insights.

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Zibo Lin, Deng Cai, Yan Wang, Xiaojiang Liu, Haitao Zheng, Shuming Shi

Weak Reward Model Transforms Generative Models into Robust Causal Event Extraction Systems (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to learning-to-rank response selection are suboptimal due to ignorance of diversity of response quality.
Approach:	They propose to use off-the-shelf response retrieval models as automatic grayscale data generators to train response selection models.
Outcome:	The proposed approach can be automated without human effort on grayscale data.

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Italo Silva, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui, Yulan He

Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation metrics that reflect the performance of causal event extraction tasks are poorly reflecting the inherent ambiguity of cause and effect boundaries.
Approach:	They propose to use a weak-to-strong supervision method to train an evaluation model while still achieving high performance in training an RL model.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves high agreement with human-annotated data while still achieving high performance in training an RL model.

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Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang, Ji-Rong Wen

F-Eval: Asssessing Fundamental Abilities with Refined Evaluation Methods (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks.
Approach:	They propose a Continual pre-training method that can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed method can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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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

MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

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 .

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Jiahang Lin, Kai Hu, Binghai Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Shichun Liu, Junzhe Wang, Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Hang Yan, Zhenhua Han, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing work on long document visual question answering is based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where textual or visual content is encoded into embeddings and relevance is determined by similarity scores with respect to the original query.
Approach:	They propose a framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing RL systems by 10.4% on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark and demonstrates superior training performance over GRPO.

MathFusion: Enhancing Mathematical Problem-solving of LLM through Instruction Fusion (2025.acl-long)

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Qizhi Pei, Lijun Wu, Zhuoshi Pan, Yu Li, Honglin Lin, Chenlin Ming, Xin Gao, Conghui He, Rui Yan

A Sentiment-Controllable Topic-to-Essay Generator with Topic Knowledge Graph (2020.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive progress in mathematical problem-solving . current approaches to enhance mathematical reasoning focus on instance-level modifications .
Approach:	They propose a framework that enhances mathematical reasoning through cross-problem instruction synthesis.
Outcome:	The proposed framework boosts mathematical reasoning by 18.0 points while maintaining high data efficiency.

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Lin Qiao, Jianhao Yan, Fandong Meng, Zhendong Yang, Jie Zhou

Addressing Order Sensitivity of In-Context Demonstration Examples in Causal Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Topic-to-essay generation is a promising task for natural language generation.
Approach:	They propose a Sentiment Controllable topic-to- essay generator with a Topic Knowledge Graph enhanced decoder to generate essays with only several given topic words.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on automatic and human evaluation.

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Yanzheng Xiang, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui, Yulan He

Half-S: Halving the Scale for Near-Lossless 4-Bit LLM Training (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	In-context learning is a popular paradigm in natural language processing, but its performance can be significantly influenced by the order of in-concept demonstration examples.
Approach:	They propose an unsupervised fine-tuning method to reduce the sensitivity of causal language models to the order of in-context demonstration examples.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces the sensitivity of CausalLMs to the order of in-context examples and exhibits robust generalizability.

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Jinyang Du, Ruihao Gong, Linghan Ai, Zining Wang, Yunke Peng, Yao Wang, Lei Yan, null Wxuefei, Yaoyuan Wang, Jinyang Guo, Dahua Lin, Xianglong Liu

Mirror: Multiple-perspective Self-Reflection Method for Knowledge-rich Reasoning (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing 4-bit training pipelines rely on max-scaling, which causes representation collapse . despite this, there are limitations in the accuracy of 4-bit LLM training .
Approach:	They propose a scaling strategy that uses half-scaling as a hardware-friendly default . they propose fp4 support that allows for a faster scaling of large language models .
Outcome:	The proposed scaling strategy narrows the gap between theoretical optimum and BF16 while maintaining the efficiency benefits of 4-bit training.

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Hanqi Yan, Qinglin Zhu, Xinyu Wang, Lin Gui, Yulan He

Judging with Many Minds: Do More Perspectives Mean Less Prejudice? On Bias Amplification and Resistance in Multi-Agent Based LLM-as-Judge (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) struggle with knowledge-rich problems without external resources.
Approach:	They propose a Multiple-perspective self-reflection method that allows LLMs to reflect from multiple-perceptive clues, achieved through a heuristic interaction between a Navigator and a Reasoner.
Outcome:	The proposed method is superior to other self-reflection methods on five reasoning datasets.

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Chiyu Ma, Enpei Zhang, Yilun Zhao, Wenjun Liu, Yaning Jia, Peijun Qing, Lin Shi, Arman Cohan, Yujun Yan, Soroush Vosoughi

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

Challenge:	LLM-as-Judge frameworks provide scalable alternative to human evaluation . but the question of how intrinsic biases manifest in these settings remains unexplored .
Approach:	They conduct systematic analysis of four bias types in multi-agent LLM-as-Judge frameworks . they find debate framework amplifies biases sharply after initial debate .
Outcome:	The proposed frameworks amplify biases after debate and show they are stronger in meta-judge scenarios.

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

A Knowledge Regularized Hierarchical Approach for Emotion Cause Analysis (D19-1)

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

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Chuang Fan, Hongyu Yan, Jiachen Du, Lin Gui, Lidong Bing, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu, Ruibin Mao

Sentiment Analysis

Challenge:	Emotion cause analysis aims to identify the reasons behind emotions . previous models focus on learning architecture with local textual information .
Approach:	They propose a method to extract emotion cause with hierarchical neural model and knowledge-based regularizations by sentiment lexicon and common knowledge.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms baselines on two public datasets in different languages and outperformed competitive baselines by 2.08%.

NeuronBlocks: Building Your NLP DNN Models Like Playing Lego (D19-3)

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Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Wutao Lin, Zhijie Sang, Quanjia Yan, Ze Yang, Feixiang Cheng, Daxin Jiang

Challenge:	Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have been widely employed in industry to address various natural language processing tasks.
Approach:	They propose an NLP toolkit that encapsulates neural network modules as building blocks to construct various DNN models with complex architecture.
Outcome:	The proposed toolkit can build, train, and test various DNN models with complex architecture.

MODE-LSTM: A Parameter-efficient Recurrent Network with Multi-Scale for Sentence Classification (2020.emnlp-main)

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Qianli Ma, Zhenxi Lin, Jiangyue Yan, Zipeng Chen, Liuhong Yu

Lost in the Context: Insufficient and Distracted Attention to Contexts in Preference Modeling (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models for sentence classification use linear convolution, which may not be sufficient to model the non-consecutive dependency of the phrase and may overfit the sequential information.
Approach:	They propose a model that extracts multi-scale n-gram features for understanding the semantic meaning of sentences by some key-phrases located at different positions.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models on eight benchmark datasets and is competitive against state-of-the-art models.

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Shihan Dou, Jiayi Chen, Chenhao Huang, Feng Chen, Wei Chengzhi, Huiyuan Zheng, Shichun Liu, Yan Liu, Chenxiao Liu, Chao Xin, Lin Yan, Zongzhang Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Challenge:	Existing reward models concatenate contexts and responses, but they often ignore crucial segments of the context that are important for evaluating the response quality.
Approach:	They propose a reward model that evaluates the response quality based on a given context and assigns a rewards reward.
Outcome:	The proposed framework significantly improves preference modeling by increasing attention to relevant information within the context and achieves better generalizability.

Generalized Category Discovery with Large Language Models in the Loop (2024.findings-acl)

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Wenbin An, Wenkai Shi, Feng Tian, Haonan Lin, QianYing Wang, Yaqiang Wu, Mingxiang Cai, Luyan Wang, Yan Chen, Haiping Zhu, Ping Chen

Efficient Prompting for Continual Adaptation to Missing Modalities (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a crucial task that aims to recognize both known and novel categories from a set of unlabeled data.
Approach:	They propose a framework that introduces Large Language Models into the training loop to generate category names without human effort.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms SOTA models on three benchmark datasets and generates accurate category names for the discovered clusters.

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Zirun Guo, Shulei Wang, Wang Lin, Weicai Yan, Yangyang Wu, Tao Jin

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

Challenge:	Existing methods combine various missing cases to train recovery modules or align multimodal features, resulting in suboptimal performance, high computational costs, and catastrophic forgetting.
Approach:	They propose a continual multimodal missing modality task that uses prompts to learn modalities . existing methods often aggregate various missing cases to train recovery modules . authors conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets .
Outcome:	The proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets.

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

Language Modeling with Sparse Product of Sememe Experts (D18-1)

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

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Yihong Gu, Jun Yan, Hao Zhu, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Maosong Sun, Fen Lin, Leyu Lin

Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning (2021.acl-long)

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.

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Yixuan Su, Deng Cai, Qingyu Zhou, Zibo Lin, Simon Baker, Yunbo Cao, Shuming Shi, Nigel Collier, Yan Wang

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Empirical studies on three benchmark datasets with three state-of-the-art matching models demonstrate that the proposed learning framework significantly improves the model performance across various evaluation metrics.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical curriculum learning framework that trains matching models in an “easy-to-difficult” scheme.
Outcome:	The proposed framework significantly improves the model performance across evaluation metrics on three benchmark datasets with three state-of-the-art matching models.

Distinguishability Calibration to In-Context Learning (2023.findings-eacl)

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Hongjing Li, Hanqi Yan, Yanran Li, Li Qian, Yulan He, Lin Gui

𝜙-Decoding: Adaptive Foresight Sampling for Balanced Inference-Time Exploration and Exploitation (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent studies have shown that pre-trained language models generate similar output embeddings which makes it difficult to discriminate for the prompt-based classifier.
Approach:	They propose a calibration method which rotates the embedding feature into a new metric space and adapts the ratio of each dimension to a uniform distribution.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the distinguishability of learning embeddings on three datasets under various settings.

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Fangzhi Xu, Hang Yan, Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Jun Liu, Qika Lin, Zhiyong Wu

Tab2Text - A framework for deep learning with tabular data (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing inference-time optimization strategies address the shortsightedness of auto-regressive generation, but the vast search space leads to excessive exploration and insufficient exploitation.
Approach:	They propose a decoding strategy that approximates two distributions via foresight and clustering to provide an efficient estimation of step value.
Outcome:	The proposed decoding strategy outperforms strong baselines in performance and efficiency.

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Tong Lin, Jason Yan, David Jurgens, Sabina Tomkins

HoH: A Dynamic Benchmark for Evaluating the Impact of Outdated Information on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Tabular data is a foundational part of social sciences and is used to fit supervised learning models.
Approach:	They propose a technique for transforming tabular data to text data to improve deep learning models for tabular datasets.
Outcome:	The proposed technique improves performance of deep learning models for tabular data.

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Jie Ouyang, Tingyue Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Ruiran Yan, Yucong Luo, Jiaying Lin, Qi Liu

DiningBench: A Hierarchical Multi-view Benchmark for Perception and Reasoning in the Dietary Domain (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Current approaches to addressing knowledge outdating in LLMs struggle with retrieval and generation aspects when handling outdated information.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate the impact of outdated information on RAG . they use token-level diff algorithms and LLM pipelines to create a large-scale QA dataset .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark analyzes the impact of outdated information on RAG performance.

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Song Jin, Juntian Zhang, Xun Zhang, Zeying Tian, Fei Jiang, Guojun Yin, Wei Lin, Yong Liu, Rui Yan

Learning Knowledge Bases with Parameters for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2020.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing vision-language models lack fine-grained classification, single-view imagery, and inaccurate metadata.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical, multi-view benchmark to evaluate VLMs across three levels of cognitive complexity.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark evaluates vision-language models across three levels of complexity . it systematically identifies five primary failure modes . the proposed benchmarks are available on https://github.com/meituan/DiningBench.

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Andrea Madotto, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Indra Winata, Yan Xu, Zihan Liu, Zhaojiang Lin, Pascale Fung

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	End-to-end systems rely on dialogue state tracking and annotations to fulfill user requests . modularized systems require multiple steps, including a direct interaction with the KB .
Approach:	They propose a method to embed the KB directly into the model parameters . they evaluate five task-oriented dialogue datasets with small, medium, and large KBs .
Outcome:	The proposed model can embed the KB directly into the model parameters without any DST or template responses, nor the kb as input.

Relation Extraction with Temporal Reasoning Based on Memory Augmented Distant Supervision (N19-1)

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Jianhao Yan, Lin He, Ruqin Huang, Jian Li, Ying Liu

Information Extraction & Text Mining

Challenge:	Distant supervision is an important paradigm for automatically extracting relations . but the examples collected can be noisy and pose significant challenge for labeling .
Approach:	They propose a method to predict whether two entities participate in a relation at a given time spot.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs better in WIKI-TIME and NYT-10 datasets compared with the best existing models . the proposed model is based on a dataset with a valid period of a certain relation of two entities in the knowledge base .

Case2Code: Scalable Synthetic Data for Code Generation (2025.coling-main)

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Yunfan Shao, Linyang Li, Yichuan Ma, Peiji Li, Demin Song, Qinyuan Cheng, Shimin Li, Xiaonan Li, Pengyu Wang, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Dahua Lin

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown outstanding breakthroughs in code generation.
Approach:	They propose a case-to-code induction task that exploits the expressiveness and correctness of programs by incorporating LLMs into their training.
Outcome:	The proposed task improves distribution case-to-code induction and various coding generation tasks.

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

CodeM: Less Data Yields More Versatility via Ability Matrix (2024.findings-acl)

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.

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Daoguang Zan, Ailun Yu, Wei Liu, Bo Shen, Shaoxin Lin, Yongshun Gong, Yafen Yao, Yan Liu, Bei Guan, Weihua Luo, Yongji Wang, Qianxiang Wang, Lizhen Cui

Challenge:	Recent efforts to train code large language models have been booming recently . however, this will incur significant costs in constructing data and training model considering the countless downstream scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a data construction strategy which decouples code LLMs’ abilities into two dimensions and constructs a lightweight training corpus that only covers a subset of target scenarios.
Outcome:	The proposed model can train a multilingual multitasking model using less data and training data.

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