Papers by Lin Yang
Progra: Progress-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Function Calling (2026.findings-acl)
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Huacan Chai, Zijie Cao, Maolin Ran, Yingxuan Yang, Jianghao Lin, Xin Peng, Hairui Wang, Renjie Ding, Ziyu Wan, Muning Wen, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Fei Huang, Ying Wen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-turn function calling are limited by redundancy and lack explicit integration of progress awareness into training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly integrates progress awareness into LLM training for multi-turn function calling. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that Progra outperforms existing methods on two public benchmarks. |
Rethinking Data Selection at Scale: Random Selection is Almost All You Need (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection techniques are designed for small data pools, a study finds . filtering data by token length is an efficient method for improving results . |
| Approach: | They use self-scoring methods that do not rely on external help to perform fine-tuning . they also find that filtering data by token length offers a stable and efficient method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform random selection on large datasets on large data pools. |
Reinforcement Tuning for Detecting Stances and Debunking Rumors Jointly with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Social media has become a fertile ground for nurturing rumors and misinformation due to its lack of systematic moderation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance the joint predictive capabilities of LLMs for stance detection and rumor verification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and generalizes to non-LLMs accommodated as task models. |
OmniCharacter: Towards Immersive Role-Playing Agents with Seamless Speech-Language Personality Interaction (2025.acl-long)
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Haonan Zhang, Run Luo, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Ting-En Lin, Pengpeng Zeng, Qiang Qu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on replicating dialogues in textual form, neglecting the role’s voice traits as a crucial effect in interaction, which tends to be more immersive experiences in realistic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a first seamless speech-language personality interaction model to achieve immersive RPAs with low latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits role-specific personality traits and vocal traits throughout the interaction, enabling a mixture of speech and language responses. |
Thread: A Logic-Based Data Organization Paradigm for How-To Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kaikai An, Fangkai Yang, Liqun Li, Junting Lu, Sitao Cheng, Shuzheng Si, Lu Wang, Pu Zhao, Lele Cao, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have substantially improved question-answering systems, particularly for factoid ‘5Ws’ questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a data organization paradigm where large language models transform documents into more structured and loosely interconnected LUs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments in open-domain and industrial settings show that the proposed paradigm outperforms existing paradigms and shows high adaptability across diverse document formats. |
Are U a Joke Master? Pun Generation via Multi-Stage Curriculum Learning towards a Humor LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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Yang Chen, Chong Yang, Tu Hu, Xinhao Chen, Man Lan, Li Cai, Xinlin Zhuang, Xuan Lin, Xin Lu, Aimin Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing research has demonstrated that the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate humorous sentences is limited to producing 25 unique jokes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage curriculum preference learning framework to optimize both pun structure preferences and humor preferences by a Chinese Pun dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baseline models on Chinese and English benchmark datasets. |
RecLM: Recommendation Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Modern recommender systems aim to understand user-item relationships through past interactions, but their effectiveness is limited when handling sparse data or zero-shot scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic recommendation instruction-tuning paradigm that integrates large language models with collaborative filtering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic recommendation instruction-tuning paradigm improves performance across various settings and plug-and-play compatibility with state-of-the-art recommender systems. |
CriticBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Critique-Correct Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | CriticBench is a benchmark designed to assess LLMs’ abilities to critique and refine their reasoning across a variety of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' ability to critique and correct reasoning across a variety of tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the performance of 17 large language models in generation, critique, and correction reasoning. |
Human-Inspired Obfuscation for Model Unlearning: Local and Global Strategies with Hyperbolic Representations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models struggle to balance effective forgetting with maintaining model utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-inspired unlearning framework that simulates forgetting on fuzzy data and represents them in hyperbolic and Euclidean spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to forget sensitive content while maintaining the model’s language understanding, fluency, and benchmark performance. |
JointCL: A Joint Contrastive Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Stance Detection (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods achieve promising performance in in-target stance detection when trained and tested on the same datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint contrastive learning framework to generalize stance features for unseen targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
Innovative Image Fraud Detection with Cross-Sample Anomaly Analysis: The Power of LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document image fraud detection lack visual clues on tampered regions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for detecting logical inconsistencies in document images by leveraging LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art fraud detection methods by 79.6% on CrossCred and industrial solutions by 21.7% on business data. |
Neuron-Level Differentiation of Memorization and Generalization in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ko-Wei Huang, Yi-Fu Fu, Ching-Yu Tsai, Yu-Chieh Tu, Tzu-ling Cheng, Cheng-Yu Lin, Yi-Ting Yang, Heng-Yi Liu, Keng-Te Liao, Da-Cheng Juan, Shou-De Lin
| Challenge: | Existing models exhibit memorization and generalization behaviors in ways that are not easily interpretable or controllable. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a GPT-2 and LLaMA-3.2 model to identify distinct neuron subsets responsible for each behavior to steer the model toward memorization or generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that inference-time interventions on these neurons can steer the model’s behavior toward memorization or generalization. |
Exploring the Capability of Multimodal LLMs with Yonkoma Manga: The YManga Dataset and Its Challenging Tasks (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | YManga dataset is the first specifically designed for yonkoma manga understanding . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 1,015 yonkoma strips with 10,150 human annotations to define three tasks for panel sequence detection, intent generation and description generation for masked panels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 1,015 high-quality yonkoma strips with 10,150 human annotations. |
Sarcasm-R1: Enhancing Sarcasm Detection through Focused Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sarcasm detection are limited by supervised learning or prompt engineering . a new approach decomposes sarcasm detection into three dimensions: language, context, and emotion . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decomposes sarcasm detection into three dimensions: language, context, and emotion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in most cases. |
LLMEmbed: Rethinking Lightweight LLM’s Genuine Function in Text Classification (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent attempts to improve text classification performance are based on heuristic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) LLMEmbed is a simple and effective transfer learning strategy that can be used to improve the performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple transfer learning strategy to improve text classification using heuristic Chain-of-Thought. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strong performance on publicly available datasets while using low training overhead. |
RoadMapper: A Multi-Agent System for Roadmap Generation of Solving Complex Research Problems (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiacheng Liu, Zichen Tang, Zhongjun Yang, Xinyi Hu, Xueyuan Lin, Linwei Jia, Ruofei Bai, Rongjin Li, Shiyao Peng, Haocheng Gao, Haihong E
| Challenge: | Existing tools to generate structured content for research tasks are limited in their ability to generate high-quality roadmaps. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality roadmaps for solving complex research problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can improve LLMs’ ability for roadmap generation while saving 84% of the time required by human experts. |
LLMLingua: Compressing Prompts for Accelerated Inference of Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly lengthy and require longer prompts . this paper presents a coarse-to-fine prompt compression method to reduce cost and increase performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine prompt compression method that maintains semantic integrity under high compression ratios and a token-level iterative compression algorithm to better model the interdependence between compressed contents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields state-of-the-art performance and allows for up to 20x compression with little performance loss over four datasets from different scenarios. |
Dual Hierarchical Dialogue Policy Learning for Legal Inquisitive Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for conversational AI are user-driven, but in many real-world situations, they do not extract information to achieve its own objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose an inquisitive conversational agent that learns when and how to ask probing questions . they also propose a framework for a conversational ICA specifically tailored to the court . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms single-agent RL baselines on a U.S. Supreme Court dataset. |
Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogues in Latent Space with Next Sentence Prediction and Mutual Information (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for open-domain dialogues are difficult due to the one-to-many issue of the open- domain dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-based automatic evaluation metric which can robustly evaluate open-domain dialogues by augmenting CVAEs with a Next Sentence Prediction objective and employing Mutual Information to model the semantic similarity of text in the latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can evaluate open-domain dialogues on two open- domain dialogue datasets. |
Multi-modal Stance Detection: New Datasets and Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection for pure texts have limited results to multi-modal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal stance detection framework that leverages target information to learn multi-modal stance features from textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal stance detection on five datasets based on Twitter . |
HERB: Measuring Hierarchical Regional Bias in Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-aacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods do not examine social groups categorised by geographical information, leaving the region-related biases in pre-trained LMs unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical regional bias evaluation method to quantify regional bias in pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates regional bias with regard to comprehensive topics and measures potential regional bias that can be propagated to downstream tasks. |
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. |
MetaVL: Transferring In-Context Learning Ability From Language Models to Vision-Language Models (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained vision-language models do not possess the ability to conduct in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to meta-train a language model to perform in-context learning on NLP tasks and then transfer this model to VL tasks by attaching a visual encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on VQA, OK-VQA, and GQA while having 20 times fewer parameters. |
From Facts to Insights: A Study on the Generation and Evaluation of Analytical Reports for Deciphering Earnings Calls (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the generation and evaluation of analytical reports derived from Earnings Calls (ECs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to generate and evaluate analytical reports derived from Earnings Calls (ECs) they propose to introduce specialized agents that introduce diverse viewpoints and desirable topics into the report generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the quality of reports in different settings, while human-written reports remain preferred in the majority of cases. |
MultiCMET: A Novel Chinese Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Metaphor (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on multimodal metaphors does not address categorizing the source and target domains in metaphors beyond the English language. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cascading Domain Knowledge Integration benchmark to detect metaphors by introducing domain-specific lexical features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 13,820 text-image pairs of advertisements with manual annotations of the occurrence of metaphors, domain categories, and sentiments metaphors convey. |
Omni-Chart-600K: A Comprehensive Dataset of Chart Types for Chart Understanding (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shulei Wang, Shuai Yang, Wang Lin, Zirun Guo, Sihang Cai, Hai Huang, Ye Wang, Jingyuan Chen, Tao Jin
| Challenge: | Existing chart-related training methods lack capabilities in information extraction, mathematical reasoning, and understanding of multiple chart types. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage training strategy and method for jointly training a vision encoder tailored for multi-type charts to address the deficiencies in chart types and limited scope of chart tasks in existing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 21 diverse chart types and tasks, including data retrieval and mathematical reasoning. |
CodeArena: Evaluating and Aligning CodeLLMs on Human Preference (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jian Yang, Jiaxi Yang, Wei Zhang, Jin Ke, Yibo Miao, Lei Zhang, Liqun Yang, Zeyu Cui, Yichang Zhang, Zhoujun Li, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Code large language models (codeLLMs) focus on synthesizing the correct code snippet, ignoring the alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark code-based on 40 categories and 44 programming languages to emulate real-world coding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that open-source code LLMs perform better than open-sourced ones. |
Neural Retrieval for Question Answering with Cross-Attention Supervised Data Augmentation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Early fusion models with cross-attention have shown better-than-human performance on some question answer benchmarks, while it is a poor fit for retrieval since it prevents pre-computation of the answer representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised data mining method to train an efficient late fusion retrieval model by using cross-attention models with cross-references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms retrieval models trained with gold annotations on Precision at N (P@N) and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). |
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. |
S+PAGE: A Speaker and Position-Aware Graph Neural Network Model for Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a task arousing increasing interest in many fields. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel GNN-based ERC model that captures speaker and position information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures speaker and position-aware conversation structure information. |
ROSE: A Reward-Oriented Data Selection Framework for LLM Task-Specific Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yang Wu, Huayi Zhang, Yizheng Jiao, Lin Ma, Xiaozhong Liu, Jinhong Yu, Dongyu Zhang, Dezhi Yu, Wei Xu
| Challenge: | Prevailing methods for task-specific instruction tuning use similarity metrics to select training data . but instruction tuning loss often fails to exhibit a monotonic relationship with actual task performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a task-specific instruction tuning method that leverages pairwise preference loss as a reward signal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods for task-specific instruction tuning. |
mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Xin Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Wen Xie, Ziqi Dai, Jialong Tang, Huan Lin, Baosong Yang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Meishan Zhang, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for text retrieval are based on a multi-stage process that involves retrieving documents from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual text representation model and a cross-encoder reranker from scratch for text retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on long-context retrieval benchmarks. |
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. |
Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on table-based reasoning distillation has focused on smaller models with limited performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based reasoning distillation approach to distill LLMs into smaller models . their results show that a 220 million parameter model fine-tuned using distilled data improves performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a scientific table-to-text generation dataset and surpasses specific LLMs. |
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. |
Turning the Tide: Repository-based Code Reflection (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) enhance programming by understanding and generating code across languages. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates code understanding and generation in repositories using code large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves code understanding and generation in repositories by evaluating 1,888 test cases across 6 programming languages. |
CmdCaliper: A Semantic-Aware Command-Line Embedding Model and Dataset for Security Research (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, command-line embeddings are limited due to the lack of comprehensive datasets for the field due to privacy and regulation concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a command-line embedding model called CmdCaliper for training and unbiased evaluation using a set of large language models comprising 28,520 similar command- line pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model suppresses state-of-the-art sentences with ten times more parameters across various tasks. |
Skeleton-Guided-Translation: A Benchmarking Framework for Code Repository Translation with Fine-Grained Quality Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xing Zhang, Jiaheng Wen, Fangkai Yang, Yu Kang, Pu Zhao, Junhao Wang, Maoquan Wang, Yufan Huang, Shengyu Fu, Elsie Nallipogu, Qingwei Lin, Yingnong Dang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing code translation benchmarks focus on individual functions, overlooking repository-level challenges like intermodule coherence and dependency management. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for benchmarking Java-to-C# translation at the repository level . it uses a translation framework guided by skeletons and fine-grained quality evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Java-to-C# translation quality at the repository level. |
PTD-SQL: Partitioning and Targeted Drilling with LLMs in Text-to-SQL (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools for Text-to-SQL tasks . SQL solutions have a relatively fixed pattern, allowing for categorical thinking . |
| Approach: | They propose that query group partitioning allows LLMs to focus on learning the thought processes specific to a single problem type, thus enhancing their reasoning abilities across diverse difficulty levels and problem categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the Spider and BIRD datasets. |
Direct Behavior Optimization: Unlocking the Potential of Lightweight LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt optimization methods rely on extensive manual effort or meta-cognitive abilities, making them less effective for LwLLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a direct behavior optimization parameter that transforms the optimization of complex prompts into discrete, quantifiable execution sequences using a gradient-free Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current prompt optimization methods on seven challenging tasks where state-of-the-art LLMs excel but LwLLMs generally underperform. |
TableDreamer: Progressive and Weakness-guided Data Synthesis from Scratch for Table Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table instruction tuning are limited due to limited data diversity and lack of data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakness-guided data synthesis framework for table instruction tuning that explores the vast input space of table understanding tasks and then iterates through the input space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the average accuracy of Llama3.1-8B-instruct by 11.62% with 27K GPT-4o synthetic data and outperforms state-of-the-art data synthesis baselines which use more training data. |
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. |
ToolRM: Towards Agentic Tool-Use Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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Renhao Li, Jianhong Tu, Yang Su, Yantao Liu, Fei Huang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Derek F. Wong, Junyang Lin, Min Yang
| Challenge: | lack of reliable reward models for tool-use tasks has limited progress toward agentic AI . recent advances in agentic artificial intelligence are driven by tool-using capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that constructs pairwise preference data using rule-based scoring and multidimensional sampling to build lightweight reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on tool calling tasks with higher accuracy. |
ToolBeHonest: A Multi-level Hallucination Diagnostic Benchmark for Tool-Augmented Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuxiang Zhang, Jing Chen, Junjie Wang, Yaxin Liu, Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Xinyu Zhu, Zihao Lin, Hanwen Wan, Yujiu Yang, Tetsuya Sakai, Tian Feng, Hayato Yamana
| Challenge: | Currently, tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) only achieve total scores of 45.3 and 37.0, respectively, on a scale of 100. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level diagnostic process to assess the LLM's hallucinations through two perspectives: depth and breadth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed diagnostic process assesses the hallucinations of large language models through two perspectives: depth and breadth. |
On the Robustness of Reading Comprehension Models to Entity Renaming (2022.naacl-main)
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| 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 . |
SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Gefei Yang, Akshat Pandey, Yajie Mao, Vladislav Belyaev, Madhuri Emmadi, Craig Murray, Ferhan Ture, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems require thousands of hours of manual annotation and heavyweight computation to perform inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a third-party ASR system as a weak supervision source and labeling functions derived from implicit user feedback to reduce human labor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves word-error rate and speed up 600% over third-party ASR. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
PclGPT: A Large Language Model for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Patronizing and condescending language is an essential branch of toxic language . pre-trained language models perform poorly in detecting PCL due to its implicit toxicity traits . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM benchmark for patronizing and condescending language . they use a dataset to analyze the toxicity of patronizing condescending languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect patronizing and condescending language (PCL) the model can be used to analyze the toxicity of the language and to improve the detection. |
Applying BERT to Document Retrieval with Birch (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Birch is an open-source document retrieval system that integrates with the Anserini information retrieval toolkit to demonstrate end-to-end search over large document collections. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Anserini with a BERT-based document ranking model that provides an end-to-end open-source search engine. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing approaches to document retrieval and question answering on standard newswire and social media test collections. |
Beta Distribution Guided Aspect-aware Graph for Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis with Affective Knowledge (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aspect category sentiment analysis do not necessarily occur in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Beta Distribution-guided aspect-aware graph construction based on external knowledge . they use aspect-related words as the pivots to derive aspect-relevant weights . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 6 benchmark datasets. |
Knowledge-Augmented Multimodal Clinical Rationale Generation for Disease Diagnosis with Small Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to balance predictive accuracy with human-understandable rationales. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance LLMs by leveraging rationale distillation and domain knowledge injection for trustworthy multimodal rationale generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on real-world medical datasets show that ClinRaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in disease diagnosis and rationale generation. |
TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition (2025.acl-long)
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Tianwei Lin, Jiang Liu, Wenqiao Zhang, Yang Dai, Haoyuan Li, Zhelun Yu, Wanggui He, Juncheng Li, Jiannan Guo, Hao Jiang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning are resource-efficient, but performance often falls short . a new approach, TeamLoRA, integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce task-specific LoRA as domain experts to improve learning efficiency . teamLoRA integrates collaborative and competition modules to improve model learning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TeamLoRA improves performance in multi-task learning . teamLorea integrates collaborative and competitive modules to improve performance . |
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. |
Prompt Space Optimizing Few-shot Reasoning Success with Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt engineering is an essential technique for enhancing the abilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing explicit and specific instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that uses text embeddings to obtain basis vectors by matrix decomposition and constructs a space for representing all prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompt paradigms on ten public reasoning benchmarks. |
NOVA-63: Native Omni-lingual Versatile Assessments of 63 Disciplines (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual benchmarks show severe drawbacks, such as overly translated content, the absence of difficulty control, and disciplinary imbalance, making the benchmarking process unreliable and showing low convincingness. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark that integrates LLM-assisted formatting, expert quality verification, and multi-level difficulty screening to provide a comprehensive, difficult multilingual assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features 93,536 questions sourced from native speakers across 14 languages and 63 academic disciplines. |
PV2TEA: Patching Visual Modality to Textual-Established Information Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show up to 11.74% absolute (20.97% relative) increase over unimodal baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to patch the visual modality to the textual-established attribute in- formation extractor. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show up to 11.74% absolute (29.9% relative) increase over unimodal baselines. |
A Shared-Private Representation Model with Coarse-to-Fine Extraction for Target Sentiment Analysis (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with span-based labeling have achieved promising results in sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a shared-private representation model with a coarse-to-fine extraction algorithm to solve this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on target phrases and extraction tasks. |
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. |
Emphasising Structured Information: Integrating Abstract Meaning Representation into LLMs for Enhanced Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics struggle to evaluate adversarial negative examples . existing metrics struggle in handling adversarials, resulting in low correlations with human judgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates AMR and domain-specific language models for automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework achieves strong correlations with human judgments across multiple datasets. |
Just Like a Human Would, Direct Access to Sarcasm Augmented with Potential Result and Reaction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | sarcasm is a form of irony conveying mockery and contempt . social media has become increasingly popular for identifying sarcasm . |
| Approach: | They develop a method to detect sarcasm from social media using augmented potentials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on benchmark datasets. |
Do VLMs Have a Moral Backbone? A Study on the Fragile Morality of Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhining Liu, Tianyi Wang, Xiao Lin, Penghao Ouyang, Gaotang Li, Ze Yang, Hui Liu, Sumit Keswani, Vishwa Pardeshi, Huijun Zhao, Wei Fan, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal learning, driving progress in cross-modal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine moral robustness of vision-language models by analyzing their moral stances under multimodal perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic multimodal perturbations expose VLMs to a variety of moral vulnerabilities, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion. |
Bridging the Gap between Relevance Matching and Semantic Matching for Short Text Similarity Modeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for relevance and semantic matching cannot be easily adapted to the other. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that incorporates a hybrid encoder module, a relevance matching module and co-attention mechanisms that capture context-aware semantic relatedness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates a hybrid encoder module, a relevance matching module and co-attention mechanisms that capture context-aware semantic relatedness. |
Robust Adaptation of Large Multimodal Models for Retrieval Augmented Hateful Meme Detection (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promise in hateful meme detection, but they face limitations like sub-optimal performance and limited out-of-domain generalization capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust adaptation framework for hateful meme detection that enhances in-domain accuracy and cross-domain generalization while preserving the general vision-language capabilities of LMMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms larger agentic systems in detecting hateful memes under adversarial attacks while maintaining the general vision-language capabilities of LMMs. |
Interactive Learning for LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent learning approaches foster collaboration among Large Language Models (LLMs) yet they still rely on re-executing the MAS during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-learning framework that integrates Dynamic Interaction and Perception Calibration to enhance LLMs' independent problem-solving ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates Dynamic Interaction and Perception Calibration to improve LLMs' independent problem-solving ability. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct (2025.findings-acl)
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Run Luo, Haonan Zhang, Longze Chen, Ting-En Lin, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Min Yang, Yongbin Li, Minzheng Wang, Pengpeng Zeng, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen, Yunshui Li, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Xiaobo Xia, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | a new framework for image-text instruction data evolution improves MLLM performance . lack of high-quality instruction data remains a major bottleneck in ML modeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal instruction data evolution framework that iteratively enhances data quality through fine-grained perception, cognitive reasoning, and interaction evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves MLLM performance in nine vision-language tasks while using significantly less data. |
AnnaAgent: Dynamic Evolution Agent System with Multi-Session Memory for Realistic Seeker Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Wang, Peidong Wang, Lin Wu, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yuxin Chen, Bixuan Wang, Yifei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models of seeker simulations are limited by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in mental health research. |
| Approach: | They propose an emotional and cognitive dynamic agent system equipped with tertiary memory to enable dynamic control of the simulator's configurations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves more realistic seeker simulation compared to baselines. |
Transition-based Directed Graph Construction for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract emotions and causes from unannotated text are pipelined, causing error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform a task into a procedure of parsing-like directed graph construction . they propose to generate a directed graph with labeled edges based on a sequence of actions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 6.71% (p0.01) in F1 measure. |
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. |
Call Me When Necessary: LLMs can Efficiently and Faithfully Reason over Structured Environments (2024.findings-acl)
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Sitao Cheng, Ziyuan Zhuang, Yong Xu, Fangkai Yang, Chaoyun Zhang, Xiaoting Qin, Xiang Huang, Ling Chen, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in reasoning over structured environments, e.g., knowledge graphs and tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows LLMs to efficiently and faithfully reason over structured environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art fine-tuned methods on three KGQA and two TableQA datasets and surpasse CWQ and WTQ methods. |
Can Large Language Models Always Solve Easy Problems if They Can Solve Harder Ones? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities, but still suffer from inconsistency issues. |
| Approach: | They develop a ConsisEval benchmark to evaluate LLMs' inconsistency . they find that LLM models can paradoxically fail at easier problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves highest consistency score but inconsistent to specific questions due to distraction by redundant information, misinterpretation of questions, etc. |
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. |
FACT-AUDIT: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Dynamic Fact-Checking Evaluation of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking evaluation methods rely on static datasets and classification metrics, which fail to evaluate justification production and uncover the nuanced limitations of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adaptively and dynamically assesses LLMs’ fact-checking capabilities by incorporating justification production alongside verdict prediction. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the framework differentiates among state-of-the-art LLMs, providing valuable insights into model strengths and limitations in model-centric fact-checking analysis. |
Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to attack transformer models are not effective at character level, but they are a natural attack scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a character-level adversarial attack method against transformer models . they use a gradient-based method to find the most vulnerable words in a sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on sentence-level and token-level tasks. |
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. |
Boosting Scientific Concepts Understanding: Can Analogy from Teacher Models Empower Student Models? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Analogical reasoning plays a critical role in human cognition, enabling us to understand new concepts by associating them with familiar ones. |
| Approach: | They propose to use free-form analogies to aid students in understanding scientific concepts . they also show that analogies generated by student LMs can improve their own performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can help students understand scientific concepts, the authors show . |
DeepMed: Building a Medical DeepResearch Agent via Multi-hop Med-Search Data and Turn-Controlled Agentic Training & Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihan Wang, Hao Wang, Shi Feng, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Yiqun Zhang, Jinghao Lin, Xiaozhong Ji, Haihua Yang
| Challenge: | Medical reasoning models are constrained by parametric knowledge and can induce hallucinations and spurious attributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a multi-hop med-search QA synthesis method to apply the DR paradigm in medical contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms larger medical reasoning models on medical benchmarks. |
OctoBench: Benchmarking Scaffold-Aware Instruction Following in Repository-Grounded Agentic Coding (2026.acl-long)
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Deming Ding, Shichun Liu, Enhui Yang, Jiahang Lin, Ziying Chen, Shihan Dou, Honglin Guo, Weiyu Cheng, Pengyu Zhao, Chengjun Xiao, Qunhong Zeng, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qidi Xu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | coding scaffolds that follow heterogeneous instructions remain under-examined in software engineering . coding models are capable software agents, but their ability to follow constraints remains under-explored . |
| Approach: | They introduce OctoBench, which benchmarks scaffold-aware instruction following in agentic coding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to accelerate the development of more scaffold-aware agents. |
AgentSense: Benchmarking Social Intelligence of Language Agents through Interactive Scenarios (2025.naacl-long)
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Xinyi Mou, Jingcong Liang, Jiayu Lin, Xinnong Zhang, Xiawei Liu, Shiyue Yang, Rong Ye, Lei Chen, Haoyu Kuang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Large language models are increasingly employed to empower autonomous agents to simulate human behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLM-driven agents through multi-turn interactions using a bottom-up approach to create diverse social scenarios constructed from extensive scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluates LLM-driven agents through multi-turn interactions emphasizing goal completion and implicit reasoning. |
Learning to Refine: Self-Refinement of Parallel Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Qibin Wang, Pu Zhao, Shaohan Huang, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Furu Wei, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to test-time scaling are limited due to the quality of candidate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to quantify the relative improvement of self-refinement beyond majority voting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmarks over other methods. |
MCS: An In-battle Commentary System for MOBA Games (2022.coling-1)
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Xiaofeng Qi, Chao Li, Zhongping Liang, Jigang Liu, Cheng Zhang, Yuanxin Wei, Lin Yuan, Guang Yang, Lanxiao Huang, Min Li
| Challenge: | In-battle commentary is an important component of live streaming of e-sports competitions and is applicable to a wide range of scenarios like combat information analysis and live streaming. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative system for in-battle real-time commentary in mobile MOBA games and propose 'transform' method to convert match statistics and utterances into consistent encoding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on real-time match statistics and events and can be used for live streaming, e-sports commentary and combat information analysis. |
Improving Multi-Criteria Chinese Word Segmentation through Learning Sentence Representation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent Chinese word segmentation models tend to learn the segmentation knowledge through in-vocabulary words rather than understanding the meaning of the entire context. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware approach that incorporates unsupervised sentence representation learning over different dropout masks into the multi-criteria training framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on six of the nine CWS benchmark datasets and out-of vocabulary (OOV) recalls for eight of nine. |
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)
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Shihan Dou, Jiazheng Zhang, Jianxiang Zang, Yunbo Tao, Weikang Zhou, Haoxiang Jia, Shichun Liu, Yuming Yang, Shenxi Wu, Zhiheng Xi, Muling Wu, Rui Zheng, Changze Lv, Limao Xiong, Shaoqing Zhang, Lin Zhang, Wenyu Zhan, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yueming Wu, Ming Wen, Yixin Cao, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs). |
Why Do More Experts Fail? A Theoretical Analysis of Model Merging (2026.acl-long)
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Zijing Wang, Xingle Xu, YongKang Liu, Yiqun Zhang, Peiqin Lin, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Existing methods for model merging struggle to maintain performance gains as the number of merged models increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reparameterized Heavy-Tailed method to extend the merged model’s coverage and enhance performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extends the merged model’s coverage and enhances performance on 19 benchmarks, including knowledge-intensive and general-purpose tasks. |
RiddleSense: Reasoning about Riddle Questions Featuring Linguistic Creativity and Commonsense Knowledge (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a riddle-style commonsense questions require complex commonsensense reasoning and figurative language skills . there is currently no dataset aimed at testing these abilities . authors propose a new multiple-choice question answering task . |
| Approach: | They propose a new multiple-choice question answering task that uses a large dataset for riddlestyle commonsense questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task comes with the first large dataset for answering riddlestyle commonsense questions. |
Leveraging Social Context for Humor Recognition and Sense of Humor Evaluation in Social Media with a New Chinese Humor Corpus - HumorWB (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing humor computing research focuses on content while neglecting interaction relationships in social media. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset which introduces social context information from social media . they propose 'humor recognition' task and 'horror evaluation task' |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates social context information from social media . it shows that it is efficient and can be used to evaluate humor in real life . |
Is LLM an Overconfident Judge? Unveiling the Capabilities of LLMs in Detecting Offensive Language with Annotation Disagreement (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models' ability to handle disagreement cases. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the performance of large language models in detecting offensive language at varying levels of agreement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves detection accuracy and model alignment with human judgment by using disagreement samples in training. |
RepoGenesis: Benchmarking End-to-End Microservice Generation from Readme to Repository (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyuan Peng, Xin Yin, Pu Zhao, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Ran Jia, Xu Chen, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated function/class-level generation, neglecting complete microservice repository generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark for repository-level end-to-end web microservice generation that reflects real-world development workflows. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark compared 106 repositories across 18 domains and 11 frameworks and 1,258 API endpoints and 2,335 test cases. |
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. |
AgentAsk: Multi-Agent Systems Need to Ask (2026.acl-long)
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Bohan Lin, Kuo Yang, Zelin Tan, Yingchuan Lai, Chen Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Miao Yu, Xu Wang, Yudong Zhang, Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems fail to consistently outperform strong single-a agent baselines due to error propagation at inter-aggent message handoffs. |
| Approach: | They propose an edge-level error taxonomy that identifies four main errors in multi-agent interactions as data gaps, signal corruption, referential drift and capacity gaps as primary sources of failure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module outperforms existing systems on five benchmarks and is architecture-agnostic. |
Language Scaling for Universal Suggested Replies Model (2021.naacl-industry)
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Qianlan Ying, Payal Bajaj, Budhaditya Deb, Yu Yang, Wei Wang, Bojia Lin, Milad Shokouhi, Xia Song, Yang Yang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | We consider scaling automated suggested replies (SR) to multiple languages for a commercial email application. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-lingual multi-task continual learning framework with auxiliary tasks and language adapters to train universal language representation across regions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces catastrophic forgetting and improves cross-lingual transfer across languages while reducing training costs. |
Confidence v.s. Critique: A Decomposition of Self-Correction Capability for LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve self-correction performance of Large Language Models are based on intrinsic selfcorrectione, which allows the model to check and revise its selfgenerated answers without external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the self-correction capability into confidence and critique capabilities and a metric for overall self-corretion capability evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms vanilla SFT and achieves much higher accuracy after self-correction. |
WR-One2Set: Towards Well-Calibrated Keyphrase Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that keyphrase generation has serious calibration errors . ONE2SET generates short phrases summarizing an input document . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for keyphrase generation that generates short phrases summarizing an input document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model over-estimates tokens and makes it well-calibrated on common datasets. |
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. |
Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual-language understanding lack unified tokenization for images and videos . lack of unified visual representations makes it difficult to learn multi-modal interactions from poor projection layers. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify visual representation into the language feature space to advance the foundational LLM towards a unified LVLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Video-ChatGPT on image benchmarks and on 9 image benchmark benchmarks. |
Act-Adaptive Margin: Dynamically Calibrating Reward Models for Subjective Ambiguity (2026.acl-long)
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Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu, Xiong Liu, Jing Ye, Ziqiang Liu, Haonan Zhang, Liang Zhu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reward modeling in reinforcement learning tasks are limited when dealing with ambiguous preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AAM to dynamically calibrate preference margins using the Bradley-Terry model's internal parameter knowledge to improve reward modeling in subjective tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. |
BC-Prover: Backward Chaining Prover for Formal Theorem Proving (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for interactive theorem proving in formal logic lack robustness and robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a backward chaining framework guided by pseudo steps for proofstep generation that prioritizes pseudo steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the miniF2F benchmark. |
CrowdSelect: SyntheticInstruction Data Selection with Multi-LLM Wisdom (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for capturing instruction-following complexity rely on single-dimensional signals, but they fail to capture complexity across diverse fields. |
| Approach: | They propose three foundational metrics that leverage Multi-LLMs wisdom to capture instruction-response pair characteristics and propose CrowdSelect, an integrated metric incorporating a clustering-based approach to maintain response diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics outperform existing models on MT-bench and Arena-hard and show improvements of 4.81% on full and LoRA fine-tuning. |
SrDetection: A Self-Referential Framework for Data Leakage Detection in Code Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Shuaimin Li, Liyang Fan, Zeyang li, Zhuoyue Wan, Yufang Lin, Shiwen Ni, Feiteng Fang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Yuanfeng Song, Kun Jing, Chen Jason Zhang, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating code large language models assume access to proprietary training corpora or use external reference sets with manually tuned, non-generalizable thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-referential leakage detection for gray-box and black-box settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves average F1 by 21.52 points in the gray-box setting and 14.46 points in black-box settings over strong baselines. |
Drivel-ology: Challenging LLMs with Interpreting Nonsense with Depth (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite excelling at many natural language processing tasks, large language models fail to grasp the layered semantics of Drivelological text. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark dataset of over 1,200+ carefully curated and diverse examples across English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean to examine their Drivelological characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models lack conceptual understanding and lack conceptual and semantic accuracy. |
LongFaith: Enhancing Long-Context Reasoning in LLMs with Faithful Synthetic Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long-context processing ability has emerged as a significant challenge for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for synthesizing faithful long-context reasoning instruction datasets . they integrate ground truth and citation-based reasoning prompts integrating them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline eliminates distractions and improves reasoning chains. |
Transfer Learning for Context-Aware Question Matching in Information-seeking Conversations in E-commerce (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Recent researches focus on deep learning and reinforcement learning for multi-turn information seeking conversation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and effective multi-turn conversation model based on convolutional neural networks and extend it to adapt the knowledge learned from a resource-rich domain to enhance the performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than the existing model on an industrial chatbot called AliMe Assist. |
WSDMS: Debunk Fake News via Weakly Supervised Detection of Misinforming Sentences with Contextualized Social Wisdom (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for debunking fake news rely on blending of authentic and fabricated content by creators. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that detects misinformation at sentence-level using social media conversations . they use a bag-level annotation system to train the model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three real-world benchmarks and outperformed existing state of the art models in debunking fake news at sentence and article levels. |
A Boundary Offset Prediction Network for Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing . span-based methods assign entity types to text spans, resulting in imbalanced sample space . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that predicts boundary offsets between candidate and nearest spans . the method integrates entity type and span representations to generate type-aware boundary offset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on eight widely-used NER datasets. |
A Semantic Mention Graph Augmented Model for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level Event Argument Extraction (DEAE) aims to identify arguments and their specific roles from unstructured document. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-prompt-based method for document-level event argument extraction that uses a semantic mention graph to capture relations between documents and prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on RAMS and WikiEvents datasets. |
SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenglong Wang, Canjia Li, Xingzhao Zhu, Yifu Huo, Huiyu Wang, Weixiong Lin, Yun Yang, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate relevance judgments are limited due to dynamic nature of query distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving relevance model approach to generalize queries to practical search scenarios . they use a multi-agent sample miner and a relevance annotator to generate reliable labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve significant performance gains on a large-scale industrial platform, validated by offline multilingual evaluations and online testing. |
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. |
Mitigate Position Bias in LLMs via Scaling a Single Hidden States Channel (2025.findings-acl)
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Yijiong Yu, Huiqiang Jiang, Xufang Luo, Qianhui Wu, Chin-Yew Lin, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang, Yongfeng Huang, Lili Qiu
| Challenge: | Long-context language models exhibit position bias, also known as "lost in the middle" research shows that even long-contemporary LLMs fail to utilize all context information effectively . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate position bias by scaling positional hidden states . they propose to use a channel of hidden states to modify positional Hidden states a LCLM's positional bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance by 15.2% in a "lost in the middle" benchmark. |
Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning for Low Resource Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relation facts from limited labeled corpora are laborintensive to obtain . Existing approaches use self-training to generate pseudo labels that will cause gradual drift problem or leverage meta-learning scheme which does not solicit feedback explicitly. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning method to encourage pseudo label data to imitate gradient descent direction on labeled data and bootstrap its optimization capability through trial and error. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method handles two major scenarios in low-resource relation extraction when no unlabeled data is available. |
A Diffusion Model for Event Skeleton Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event schema generation are noise-sensitive and error-accumulating, e.g., inability to correct errors while generating schema. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel diffusion event graph model that embeds and roundes event graphs into learnable latent representations and a denoising process to maintain the model's robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better results than existing state-of-the-art models on three IED bombing datasets. |
Joint Knowledge Base Completion and Question Answering by Combining Large Language Models and Small Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on the small language model (SLM) to enhance them jointly, and the large language model’s strong reasoning ability is ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which can make knowledge base completion and knowledge base question answering enhance each other in an iterative manner by combining the strengths of the small language model and the large language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines for both KBC and KBQA tasks over two public benchmark data sets. |
“Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text classification is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP), but deep neural networks are data-hungry and expensive to train. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric alternative to DNNs that uses a compressor like gzip and a k-nearest-neighbor classifier to achieve competitive results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms BERT on all five OOD datasets and outperformed other methods on the few-shot setting. |
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
| 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. |
Fourier Transformer: Fast Long Range Modeling by Removing Sequence Redundancy with FFT Operator (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing transformer models are computationally demanding and prohibitively costly for long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of its selfattention module. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based model that inherits weights from large pretrained models by removing redundancies in hidden sequences using the ready-made Fast Fourier Transform operator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the standard BART model on the long-range modeling benchmark LRA with significant improvements in speed and space. |
Dual-Feedback Knowledge Retrieval for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to task-oriented dialogue systems integrate knowledge retrieval and response generation, which poses scalability challenges when dealing with extensive knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a retriever-generator architecture that harnesses a retrieval and a generator to generate system responses by using feedback from the generator as pseudo-labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture shows superior performance on three benchmark datasets. |
Empathetic Dialogue Generation via Sensitive Emotion Recognition and Sensible Knowledge Selection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empathy is a key trait of everyday human conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a serial encoding and Emotion-Knowledge interaction method for empathetic dialogue generation which is more sensitive to emotion dynamics in conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline evaluations on the utterance-level annotated EMPATHETICDIALOGUES. |
Scaling Parameter-Constrained Language Models with Quality Data (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Ernie Chang, Matteo Paltenghi, Yang Li, Pin-Jie Lin, Changsheng Zhao, Patrick Huber, Zechun Liu, Rastislav Rabatin, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra
| Challenge: | Scaling laws in language modeling quantify training loss as a function of dataset size and model parameters, but neglect the critical role of data quality in model generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use effective training tokens as a combination of text diversity and syntheticity as measured by a teacher model to calculate scaling laws. |
| Outcome: | The proposed term effective training tokens is a combination of two readily-computed indicators of text diversity and syntheticity as measured by a teacher model. |
Zero-Shot Learners for Natural Language Understanding via a Unified Multiple Choice Perspective (2022.emnlp-main)
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Ping Yang, Junjie Wang, Ruyi Gan, Xinyu Zhu, Lin Zhang, Ziwei Wu, Xinyu Gao, Jiaxing Zhang, Tetsuya Sakai
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to zero-shot learning are format-agnostic and can address new learning tasks without additional training. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for zero-shot learning that is format agnostic and compatible with any format and applicable to a list of language tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and produces satisfactory results on tasks such as text classification and commonsense reasoning. |
Aligning Paralinguistic Understanding and Generation in Speech LLMs via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (2026.eacl-industry)
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Minseok Kim, Jingxiang Chen, Seong-Gyun Leem, Yin Huang, Rashi Rungta, Zhicheng Ouyang, Haibin Wu, Surya Teja Appini, Ankur Bansal, Yang Bai, Yue Liu, Florian Metze, Ahmed A Aly, Anuj Kumar, Ariya Rastrow, Zhaojiang Lin
| Challenge: | Using paralinguistic cues is challenging for speech large language models, authors say . limited training data, annotation difficulty, and models exploiting lexical shortcuts are challenges . a recent study shows that modeling paralinguistic reasoning with multitask RL improves paralinguistics understanding . |
| Approach: | They propose multi-task reinforcement learning with chain-of-thought prompting that elicits explicit affective reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves paralinguistics understanding over baselines and strong proprietary models by 8-12% on Expresso, IEMOCAP, and RAVDESS. |
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. |
Dual-Reasoner: Bridging Interleaved Atomicity and Streaming Latency via Thinking-while-Talking (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangzhuo Li, Shengpeng Ji, Yifu Chen, Tianle Liang, Haoyu Yang, null Junboli, Jun Fang, Lin Li, Qingyang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate Chain-of-Thought into spoken dialogue models incur prohibitive latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Streaming Masking Mechanism to ensure uninterrupted audio streaming . they use a quadruple-constraint system to reconstruct logical atomicity . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that Dual-Reasoner improves speech generation performance with low latency. |
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 . |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Dialectical Structured Reasoning for Explainable Multimodal Fake News Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruichao Yang, Yufan Bian, Wei Gao, Bo-Wen Zhang, Jing Ma, Hongzhan Lin, Ziyang Luo, Xiaobin Zhu, Xu-Cheng Yin
| Challenge: | Existing fake news detection models are opaque and lack deductive transparency . a framework for dialectical structured reasoning is proposed to address this limitation . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that model fake news detection as an explicit dialectical process over multimodal social context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art while producing transparent explanations that mirror human reasoning process. |
CINO: A Chinese Minority Pre-trained Language Model (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual pre-trained language models do not perform well on some low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual pre-trained language model for Chinese minority languages . they collect documents from Wikipedia and construct two classification datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on various classification tasks. |
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. |
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions? |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure. |
Enhancing Neural Topic Model with Multi-Level Supervisions from Seed Words (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic seed words are difficult to incorporate into topic models due to the semantic diversity of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural topic model enhanced with supervisions from seed words on word and document levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art seeded topic models in terms of topic quality and classification accuracy. |
Towards IP Intelligence: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Intellectual Property Knowledge and Practice (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiyao Wang, Guhong Chen, Hongbo Wang, Huaren Liu, Minghui Zhu, Zhifei Qin, Li Linwei, Yilin Yue, Shiqiang Wang, Jiayan Li, Wu Yihang, Ziqiang Liu, Longze Chen, Run Luo, Liyang Fan, Jiaming Li, Lei Zhang, Kan Xu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Chengming Li, Shiwen Ni, Yuan Lin, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets and benchmarks focus only on patents or cover limited aspects of the IP field, lacking alignment with real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual IP task taxonomy and a large-scale bilingual benchmark to evaluate LLMs in real-world IP practice. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 75.8% accuracy, indicating room for improvement . open-source IP and law-oriented models lag behind closed-source general-purpose models . |
SLIDE: A Framework Integrating Small and Large Language Models for Open-Domain Dialogues Evaluation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to evaluate open domain dialogues have a one-to-many problem . existing approaches lack commonsense reasoning biases and perform poorly in domain-specific scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages both a small, specialised model and LLMs for the evaluation of open-domain dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and evaluation tasks and exhibits better correlation with human judgements. |
ObfusLM: Privacy-preserving Language Model Service against Embedding Inversion Attacks (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Lin, Ruining Yang, Yunlong Mao, Qizhi Zhang, Jue Hong, Quanwei Cai, Ye Wu, Huiqi Liu, Zhiyu Chen, Bing Duan, Sheng Zhong
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that obfuscation techniques for MLaaS are susceptible to embedding inversion attacks (EIAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a model obfuscation framework that protects client inputs from embedding inversion attacks by obliviously obbing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing works in utility by 10% with a nearly 80% resistance rate against embedding inversion attacks. |
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. |
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. |
Speech-Text Pre-training for Spoken Dialog Understanding with Explicit Cross-Modal Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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Tianshu Yu, Haoyu Gao, Ting-En Lin, Min Yang, Yuchuan Wu, Wentao Ma, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing speech-text pre-training methods are limited to one or two specific tasks, despite their success in speech-language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal position prediction task to capture the speech-text alignment . they use a textual dialog pre-training task to generalize a response selection task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior in learning speech-text alignment and multi-turn dialog context. |
START: Self-taught Reasoner with Tools (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chengpeng Li, Mingfeng Xue, Zhenru Zhang, Jiaxi Yang, Beichen Zhang, Bowen Yu, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin, Xiang Wang, Dayiheng Liu
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning through long chain-of-thought, yet they struggle with precise computations and algorithmic operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that activates LRMs’ latent tool-use capabilities through artificial hints and a framework that enables models to learn effective tool utilization through diverse hint patterns and rejection-based data synthesis. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that START significantly improves state-of-the-art LRMs across challenging benchmarks, including competition-level mathematics (AMC23: 95.0%, AIME24: 75.6%) and graduate-level science questions (GPQA: 64.6%). |
Even the Simplest Baseline Needs Careful Re-investigation: A Case Study on XML-CNN (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | XML-CNN has been a popular research topic in NLP due to its superior performance . however, the increasing complexity brings difficulties to ensure the true architectural progress . |
| Approach: | They propose to re-examine an influential multi-label text classification method . they propose suitable baselines for multi-level text classification tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than the original model, the authors show . they show that the re-implementation reveals contradictory results to the original work . |
Cross-Domain Modeling of Sentence-Level Evidence for Document Retrieval (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing test collections provide only document-level relevance judgments, and documents exceed the length that BERT was designed to handle. |
| Approach: | They propose to aggregate sentence-level evidence to rank news articles using BERT . they also leverage passage-level relevance judgments available in other domains to fine-tune BERT models that capture cross-domain notions of relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model aggregates sentence-level evidence to rank documents on three standard test collections. |
ImpRIF: Stronger Implicit Reasoning Leads to Better Complex Instruction Following (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that enhancing implicit reasoning capabilities can significantly improve complex instruction following in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance LLMs’ understanding of implicit reasoning instructions by formalizing such instructions as verifiable reasoning graphs and fine-tuning with graph reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on five complex instruction following benchmarks and will be open-sourced in the near future. |
What the DAAM: Interpreting Stable Diffusion Using Cross Attention (2023.acl-long)
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Raphael Tang, Linqing Liu, Akshat Pandey, Zhiying Jiang, Gefei Yang, Karun Kumar, Pontus Stenetorp, Jimmy Lin, Ferhan Ture
| Challenge: | a new text-image attribution analysis model for text-to-image generation is understudied due to ethical constraints . corporators have restricted the general public from using the models and their weights . |
| Approach: | They perform a text-image attribution analysis on Stable Diffusion, a recently open-sourced model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a competitive 58.8-64.8 mIoU on noun segmentation and fair to good mean opinion scores on all parts of speech rated by humans . it also achieves good attribution quality on all part of speech, rated in humans - and the first to interpret large diffusion models from a visuolinguistic perspective. |
Consultant Decoding: Yet Another Synergistic Mechanism (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have attracted widespread attention and adoption across diverse domains due to their exceptional performance and robust generalization abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a synergetic mechanism for Consultant Decoding (CD) that achieves a 2.5-fold increase in inference speed compared to the target model while maintaining comparable generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism achieves 2.5-fold increase in inference speed while maintaining comparable generation quality (100% of the target model’s performance). |
Rethinking Token Reduction for State Space Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zheng Zhan, Yushu Wu, Zhenglun Kong, Changdi Yang, Yifan Gong, Xuan Shen, Xue Lin, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for token reduction for SSMs lead to performance drops . a recent study shows that Mamba-2 improves the accuracy of the model by 5.7% to 13.1% . |
| Approach: | They propose a token reduction method that integrates token importance and similarity into SSMs and takes advantage of pruning and merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy by 5.7% to 13.1% on six benchmarks with Mamba-2 compared to existing methods while reducing computational demands and memory requirements. |
AMA: Adaptive Memory via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.findings-acl)
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Weiquan Huang, Zixuan Wang, Hehai Lin, Sudong Wang, Bo Xu, Qian Li, Beier Zhu, Linyi Yang, Chengwei Qin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to longterm memory rely on rigid retrieval granularity, accumulation-heavy maintenance strategies, and coarse-grained update mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages coordinated agents to manage memory across multiple granularities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks while reducing token consumption by approximately 80%. |
Linguistic Rule Induction Improves Adversarial and OOD Robustness in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) do not perform satisfactorily in OOD and adversarial robustness evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use linguistic rule induction to fine-tune large language models with linguistic rules to achieve better adversarial and OOD robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or better results with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on various adversarial and OOD robustness evaluations. |
Layer-Level Self-Exposure and Patch: Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Attack Defense (2025.naacl-long)
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Yang Ouyang, Hengrui Gu, Shuhang Lin, Wenyue Hua, Jie Peng, Bhavya Kailkhura, Meijun Gao, Tianlong Chen, Kaixiong Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods to defend against jailbreak attacks exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to defend against jailbreak attacks by patching specific layers within large language models through self-augmented datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to previous methods. |
A Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation Neural Network for Explainable Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection focus on fact-checked reports, resulting in limited coverage and debunking delays. |
| Approach: | They propose a Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation neural network for explainable fake news detection based on raw reports . they use hierarchical encoders and cascaded selectors to select most explainable sentences for verdicts on top of selected top-K reports based upon raw reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline detection methods and generates high-quality explanations from diverse evaluation perspectives. |
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. |
ETRQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Event Temporal Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Event temporal reasoning (ETR) is a significant indicator that a large language model understands the physical world. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified taxonomy for event temporal questions and construct a benchmark based on this taxonomies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy inherits and expands existing datasets and contains multiple categories of compound questions. |
“Barking up the Right Tree”, a GAN-Based Pun Generation Model through Semantic Pruning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating humorous puns are limited and require a broad spectrum of commonsense and worldly skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a GAN-based approach that employs semantic pruning and contrastive learning to generate humorous puns using a model that captures the semantic nuances of puns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces semantically coherent and humorous puns while ensuring both correctness and humor. |
OpenS2S: Advancing Fully Open-Source End-to-End Empathetic Large Speech Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Chen Wang, Tianyu Peng, Wen Yang, YiNan Bai, Guangfu Wang, Jun Lin, Lanpeng Jia, Lingxiang Wu, Jinqiao Wang, Chengqing Zong, Jiajun Zhang
| Challenge: | Empathetic speech models are increasingly closed off, leaving details about the architecture, data and development opaque to researchers. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source empathetic speech-to-text model with a streaming interleaved decoding architecture and a data pipeline to enable end-to end training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is open-source and transparent, with no data or data required to build it. |
MultiMET: A Multimodal Dataset for Metaphor Understanding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Metaphor is a linguistic phenomenon and a cognitive phenomenon structuring human thought, authors say . previous studies focused on texts, partly due to the unavailability of ground truth labels of multimodal metaphor . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal metaphor dataset that integrates multimodal text and image . it contains 10,437 text-image pairs with multimodal annotations of occurrences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset examines multimodal cues and their interplay. |
Select2Reason: Efficient Instruction-Tuning Data Selection for Long-CoT Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models exhibit human-like behaviors such as exploration, verification, reflection, and correction. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised fine-tuning framework for long chain-of-thoughts reasoning . they leverage a difficulty-aware reward model to estimate the learning value of questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs fine-tuning on large reasoning models on 10% of the data selected. |
Trustworthy and Explainable Causal Representation Learning in Transformers (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to interpretable representation learning rely on masks that weight the significance of input features, but the origin of these masks is uncertain. |
| Approach: | They propose a causal framework that directly learns identifiable representations from attention weights rather than relying on importance masks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns identifiable and explainable representations from attention weights, rather than masks, and guarantees faithfulness on real-world datasets. |
PiKGL: Leveraging Pruned Knowledge Graphs for Explainable Stance Detection (2026.tacl-1)
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Bingbing Wang, Jingjie Lin, Zhixin Bai, Xintong Song, Qianlong Wang, Min Yang, Xi Zeng, Jing Li, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that a Pruned interpretable knowledge Graph Learning framework for explainable stance detection is state-of-the-art for social media stance prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pruned interpretable knowledge Graph Learning framework for explainable stance detection that incorporates commonsense knowledge and prunes redundant information to ensure precision and minimize noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on three public datasets. |
P-MMEval: A Parallel Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Consistent Evaluation of LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yidan Zhang, Yu Wan, Boyi Deng, Baosong Yang, Hao-Ran Wei, Fei Huang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models showcase varied multilingual capabilities across tasks . previous assessments focused on fundamental natural language processing (NLP) or isolated capability-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual multitask benchmark to assess multilingual capabilities . they use a large-scale benchmark covering fundamental and capability-specialized datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares models and tasks across languages and tasks and examines knowledge transfer from English to other languages. |
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. |
Distilling Rule-based Knowledge into Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have broadened their applicability across diverse realworld scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode rule-based knowledge into large language models by using strong in-context abilities to extract the knowledge from the textual rules and then explicitly encode it into the parameters of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm is much more efficient than example-based learning in both sample size and generalization ability. |
ECom-Bench: Can LLM Agent Resolve Real-World E-commerce Customer Support Issues? (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | ECom-Bench is a benchmark framework for evaluating LLM agent with multimodal capabilities in e-commerce customer support domain. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark framework for evaluating LLM agent with multimodal capabilities in the e-commerce customer support domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features dynamic user simulation based on persona information from real e-commerce customer interactions and a realistic task dataset derived from authentic ecommerce dialogues. |
Incorporating Contextual and Syntactic Structures Improves Semantic Similarity Modeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic similarity modeling is central to many NLP problems such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a pairwise word interaction model with syntactic structure priors to explore their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | Extensive evaluations on eight benchmark datasets show that incorporating structural information improves over strong baselines. |
Construction of a Chinese Corpus for the Analysis of the Emotionality of Metaphorical Expressions (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | a corpus of 5,605 manually annotated sentences in Chinese is described . emotion is an abstract and vague conception, which is often described by metaphor . |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a corpus of metaphors annotated with emotion in Chinese . they use an annotation scheme to include linguistic metaphors, emotional categories and intensity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus contains 5,605 manually annotated sentences in Chinese . the authors show that the corpus is large enough to analyze emotions . |
Arithmetic Control of LLMs for Diverse User Preferences: Directional Preference Alignment with Multi-Objective Rewards (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on scalar rewards to capture user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multi-objective reward modeling to represent diverse preference profiles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across reward objectives and targets. |
MorphoBench: A Benchmark with Difficulty Adaptive to Model Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xukai Wang, Xuanbo Liu, Mingrui Chen, Haitian Zhong, Xuanlin Yang, Bohan Zeng, Jinbo Hu, Hao Liang, Junbo Niu, Xuchen Li, Ruitao Wu, Ruichuan An, Yang Shi, Liu Liu, Qiang Liu, Zhouchen Lin, Xu-Yao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Dong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models are limited in scope and lack flexibility to adapt difficulty according to evolving reasoning capacities of models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
ICL-Bandit: Relevance Labeling in Advertisement Recommendation Systems via LLM (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lu Wang, Chiming Duan, Pu Zhao, Fangkai Yang, Yong Shi, Xuefeng Luo, Bingjing Xu, Weiwei Deng, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a common practice to enhance LLM performance on domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large language models to enhance query-ad relevance labeling . they identify and provide superior demonstrations for ICL, thereby improving labeling performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves query-ad relevance labeling performance by providing demonstrations. |
GAMEBoT: Transparent Assessment of LLM Reasoning in Games (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to create benchmarks that move beyond superficial pattern recognition to delve into the profound reasoning skills required for problemsolving face challenges such as insufficient interpretability, performance saturation or data contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose a gaming arena designed for rigorous assessment of LLM reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes complex reasoning into predefined modular subproblems and generates ground truth for these subproblem types. |
Retrieval-Augmented Defense: Adaptive and Controllable Jailbreak Prevention for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks due to evolving nature and diversity of attack strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for jailbreak detection that integrates a database of known attack examples into Retrieval-Augmented Generation to infer the underlying, malicious user query and jailbreak strategy used to attack the system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the effectiveness of strong jailbreak attacks while maintaining low rejection rates for benign queries. |
AutoEvolve: Automatically Evolving Queries for Applicable and Scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmarking (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ding-Chu Zhang, Xiaowen Zhang, Yue Fei, Renjun Hu, Xiao-Wen Yang, Zhi Zhou, Baixuan Li, Yu-Feng Li, Xing Shi, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Existing automated generation methods exhibit Weak Applicability and Weak Scalability . existing methods are limited by their reliance on metadata from specific corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to generate scalable RAG benchmarks using corpus-agnostic methods . they propose a difficulty-guided metric that directs query evolution process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach evolves queries significantly more challenging than existing methods . it is able to dynamically increase difficulty, limiting scalability of the query . |
Pruning Redundant Mappings in Transformer Models via Spectral-Normalized Identity Prior (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Spectral-normalized identity priors (SNIP) is a structured pruning approach for a Transformer model. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured pruning approach which penalizes an entire residual module toward an identity mapping. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on 5 GLUE benchmark tasks while maintaining comparable performance. |
EfficientRAG: Efficient Retriever for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ziyuan Zhuang, Zhiyang Zhang, Sitao Cheng, Fangkai Yang, Jia Liu, Shujian Huang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented generation methods rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs) Large-language models lack knowledge underrepresented in training data and still face hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient retriever for multi-hop question answering that generates new queries iteratively without the need for LLM calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on three open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets. |
Cogito: A Cognitive Agentic Framework Driven by Dynamic Graph of Thoughts for Financial Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to financial report generation are insufficient to handle dynamic uncertainties of real-world financial environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitively grounded agentic framework for professional financial report generation that is driven by Dynamic Graph of Thoughts and a social collaboration mechanism to facilitate coordinated agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a dynamic reasoning model and social collaboration mechanism. |
Learning to Detect Noisy Labels Using Model-Based Features (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zhihao Wang, Zongyu Lin, Junjie Wen, Xianxin Chen, Peiqi Liu, Guidong Zheng, Yujun Chen, Zhilin Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reduce label noise rely on heuristics and sample losses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transfers the noise distribution to a clean set and trains a model to distinguish noisy labels from clean ones using model-based features. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed approach improves over strong baselines on a wide range of tasks including text classification and speech recognition. |
A Text-Centered Shared-Private Framework via Cross-Modal Prediction for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies treat all three modal features equally and implicitly explore the interactions between different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-centered shared-private framework for multimodal fusion . they propose modalities that can provide shared and private semantics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the MOSEI and MOSI datasets. |
Sketch and Refine: Towards Faithful and Informative Table-to-Text Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation suffer from poor faithfulness and low coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines Autoregressive and Non-Autoregressive generation to generate a table-to-text from a key-value table using a skeleton and an edit-based non-autoregressively generation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on WikiPerson and WikiBio datasets on coverage and faithfulness. |
AutoRAG-HP: Automatic Online Hyper-Parameter Tuning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jia Fu, Xiaoting Qin, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Jue Zhang, Qingwei Lin, Yubo Chen, Dongmei Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have transformed ML/AI development . a reevaluation of AutoML principles for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems is needed. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for hyper-parameter tuning and a hierarchical MAB method for efficient exploration of large search spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in more challenging optimization scenarios. |
Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference (2025.coling-main)
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Lanrui Wang, Jiangnan Li, Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Hongyin Tang, Huan Liu, Yanan Cao, Jingang Wang, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on integrating commonsense knowledge into chatbots to enhance their ability to understand and generate dialogue responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates commonsense knowledge into chatbots to enable them to elicit more empathetic responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to uncover the implicit requirements of the conversation, aiming to elicit more empathetic responses. |
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. |
Knowledge-Centric Hallucination Detection (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiangkun Hu, Dongyu Ru, Lin Qiu, Qipeng Guo, Tianhang Zhang, Yang Xu, Yun Luo, Pengfei Liu, Yue Zhang, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but a tendency to hallucinate. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces claim-triplets to represent claims in LLM responses and evaluates them against a reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior methods by 18.2 to 27.2 points on a benchmark spanning various NLP tasks and annotated 11k claim-triplets from 2.1k responses by seven LLMs. |
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. |
RED: Unleashing Token-Level Rewards from Holistic Feedback via Reward Redistribution (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach to aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
Audio-Aware Large Language Models as Judges for Speaking Styles (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Cheng-Han Chiang, Xiaofei Wang, Chung-Ching Lin, Kevin Lin, Linjie Li, Radu Kopetz, Yao Qian, Zhendong Wang, Zhengyuan Yang, Hung-yi Lee, Lijuan Wang
| Challenge: | Audio-aware large language models (ALLMs) can understand textual and non-textual information in the audio input. |
| Approach: | They use audio-aware large language models (ALLMs) to evaluate the speaking styles of SLMs on two tasks: voice style instruction following and role-playing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can understand the textual and non-textual information in the audio input and can be used as a judge to assess the speaking styles of SLMs. |
GLA: Grounding Large Language Models in Molecular Hierarchy for Chemical Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing molecule-language models obscure the hierarchical organization of chemical semantics . Existing models rely on linear or uniform encodings, causing structural distortion . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates intrinsic molecular topology into large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on cross-modal retrieval, captioning, and property prediction benchmarks. |
An Effective Deployment of Contrastive Learning in Multi-label Text Classification (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on contrastive learning in natural language processing tasks have not explored the effectiveness of the technology. |
| Approach: | They propose five novel contrastive losses for multi-label text classification tasks that exploit the complexity of the input logic and the semantic representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed contrastive losses improve multi-label text classification tasks and can be adapted for multi-task tasks. |
Synthesizing Text-to-SQL Data from Weak and Strong LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a capability gap exists between open-source and closed-source large language models (LLMs) . the adoption of closed-sourced LLMs introduces concerns pertaining to openness, privacy, and substantial costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data approach that combines strong and weak models for error information . they demonstrate the effectiveness of SENSE, a specialized text-to-SQL model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances the domain generalization of text-to-SQL models and explores the potential of error data supervision through preference learning. |
ATG: Benchmarking Automated Theorem Generation for Generative Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative language models (LMs) can generate new or reusable theorems, but their ability to generate new theorels is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Metamath library to generate new theorems that can be saved as reusable knowledge for future theoretical proving. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates whether an agent can generate valuable (and possibly brand new) theorems that are applicable for downstream theoretic proving as reusable knowledge. |
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)
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Chenhao Zhang, Xi Feng, Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Jinchang Hou, Kaixin Deng, Guangzeng Han, Qinrui Li, Bingli Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yifei Zhang, Qixuan Zhao, Yiming Liang, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Ge Zhang, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context. |
Implicit Reasoning in Transformers is Reasoning through Shortcuts (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Language models can perform step-by-step reasoning and achieve high accuracy in both in-domain and out-of-domain tests via implicit reasoning. |
| Approach: | They train GPT-2 from scratch on a curated multi-step mathematical reasoning dataset and conduct analytical experiments to investigate how language models perform implicit reasoning in multi- step tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on multi-step tasks than the explicit reasoning model. |
RAG4ITOps: A Supervised Fine-Tunable and Comprehensive RAG Framework for IT Operations and Maintenance (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved the open-domain QA’s performance, but how to efficiently handle enterprise-exclusive corpora and build domain-specific QA systems are still not studied for industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a general and comprehensive framework based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and facilitate the whole business process of establishing QA systems for IT operations and maintenance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior results on two kinds of QA tasks. |
HyperCRS: Hypergraph-Aware Multi-Grained Preference Learning to Burst Filter Bubbles in Conversational Recommendation System (2025.findings-acl)
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Yongsen Zheng, Mingjie Qian, Guohua Wang, Yang Liu, Ziliang Chen, Mingzhi Mao, Liang Lin, Kwok-Yan Lam
| Challenge: | Existing methods to analyze filter bubbles in the static recommendation environment are unable to burst them during user interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm to learn multi-grained user preferences during dynamic user-system interactions via natural language conversations to burst filter bubbles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves state-of-the-art performance and the superior of bursting filter bubbles in the conversational recommendation system. |
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. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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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
| 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 . |
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. |
Jailbreaking? One Step Is Enough! (2025.acl-long)
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Weixiong Zheng, Peijian Zeng, YiWei Li, Hongyan Wu, Nankai Lin, Junhao Chen, Aimin Yang, Yongmei Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel in various tasks but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to generate harmful outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reverse Embedded Defense Attack mechanism that disguises the attack intention as the "defense" intention against harmful content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on open-source and closed-source models and enables successful jailbreak in one iteration. |
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. |
Breaking Boundaries in Retrieval Systems: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Denoise-Finetuning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing domain adaptation methods for dense retrieval models use unadapted rerank models, leading to imprecise labels. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt a rerank model to the target domain before using it for label generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better results across three retrieval datasets. |
From Behavioral Performance to Internal Competence: Interpreting Vision-Language Models with VLM-Lens (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Hala Sheta, Eric Haoran Huang, Shuyu Wu, Ilia Alenabi, Jiajun Hong, Ryker Lin, Ruoxi Ning, Daniel Wei, Jialin Yang, Jiawei Zhou, Ziqiao Ma, Freda Shi
| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models are based on exactmatch based accuracy and its derivations to evaluate performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports systematic benchmarking, analysis, and interpretation of vision-language models by extracting intermediate outputs from any layer during the forward pass of open-source VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports 16 state-of-the-art base VLMs and their over 30 variants and is extensible to accommodate new models without changing the core logic. |
ThinkPilot: Steering Reasoning Models via Automated Think-prefixes Optimization (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are powerful but still suffer from inefficient and off-target reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that automatically optimizes Large Reasoning Models' reasoning by generating think-prefixes that evolve driven by a taxonomy of reasoning behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves accuracy-length trade-off for efficient reasoning, drastically improves safety and improves instruction following. |
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. |
InternalInspector I2: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Mohammad Beigi, Ying Shen, Runing Yang, Zihao Lin, Qifan Wang, Ankith Mohan, Jianfeng He, Ming Jin, Chang-Tien Lu, Lifu Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with generating reliable outputs, often producing high-confidence inaccuracies known as hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages contrastive learning on internal states including attention states, feed-forward states, and activation states of all layers to enhance confidence estimation in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The framework outperforms existing methods in the hallucination detection benchmark HaluEval and the previous methods at the same time. |
Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Tabular Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extend chain-of-thought reasoning into large language models are not viable in the scenario of privatization deployment or limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extends chain-of-thought reasoning into tabular language models . framework coordinates two TaLMs responsible for CoT generation and answer inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art ChatGPT on the TABMWP dataset by 9.55% (82.60%92.15% in accuracy) with less parameters (0.8B). |
CoT-Edit: Reinforcement Learning of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Code Edit Suggestion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current code edit models require continuous human guidance to maintain context coherence, thereby disrupting programming flow and increasing cognitive load. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that guides LLMs to discover chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning paths for code editing without requiring human-annotated CoT data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on an industrial dataset and achieves 60.2% edit accuracy. |
Target-Aware Language Modeling via Granular Data Sampling (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ernie Chang, Pin-Jie Lin, Yang Li, Changsheng Zhao, Daeil Kim, Rastislav Rabatin, Zechun Liu, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra
| Challenge: | Language model pretraining is the cornerstone of universal language models (LMs), creating generalpurpose representations to excel across a variety of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multi-granular tokens to sample large-scale language models for domain-specific use cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms random sampled samples on eight benchmarks with 1% of the data and performs on par with the full RefinedWeb data. |
Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-goal navigation fail to extract informative visual cues, leading agents to wander around. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both simulation and real-world environments. |
Rumor Detection on Twitter with Claim-Guided Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for rumor detection are limited to the strict relation of user responses or oversimplify the conversation structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reinforces interaction of user opinions while reducing negative impact imposed by irrelevant posts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on three Twitter datasets and can detect rumors at early stages. |
ExeCoder: Empowering Large Language Models with Executability Representation for Code Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Minghua He, Yue Chen, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Wenjie Yin, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing code translation models only learn the contextual semantics of code during pre-training, neglecting executability information closely related to the execution state of the code. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM specifically designed for code translation called ExeCoder . it uses executability representations such as functional semantics and syntax structures to enhance LLMs' capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing open-source code translation models on two metrics. |
Interpretable User Satisfaction Estimation for Conversational Systems with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Ying-Chun Lin, Jennifer Neville, Jack Stokes, Longqi Yang, Tara Safavi, Mengting Wan, Scott Counts, Siddharth Suri, Reid Andersen, Xiaofeng Xu, Deepak Gupta, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Xia Song, Georg Buscher, Saurabh Tiwary, Brent Hecht, Jaime Teevan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to user satisfaction estimation are hard to interpret and lack generalizable patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised prompting to extract interpretable user satisfaction signals from natural language utterances to tailor an LLM to USE using labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts interpretable signals of user satisfaction from natural language utterances more effectively than embedding-based approaches. |
SELF-GUARD: Empower the LLM to Safeguard Itself (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have investigated methods to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs) safety training involves fine-tuning the LLM with adversarial samples, which activate the LRM’s capabilities against jailbreak. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety training approach that integrates safety training and safeguards to train the LLM to perform harmfulness detection on its own outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces harmful output and adds a [harmful] or [harmless] tag to the end of the LLM's response. |
HAD: HAllucination Detection Language Models Based on a Comprehensive Hallucination Taxonomy (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | relying on large language models for information has raised concerns about reliability and accuracy of outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination taxonomy with 11 categories for various NLG tasks and propose HAllucination Detection models which integrate hallucinism detection, span-level identification, and correction into a single inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baselines on HaluEval, FactCHD, and FaithBench, confirming their robustness and versatility. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
Vulnerability of Text-to-Image Models to Prompt Template Stealing: A Differential Evolution Approach (2025.findings-acl)
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Yurong Wu, Fangwen Mu, Qiuhong Zhang, Jinjing Zhao, Xinrun Xu, Lingrui Mei, Yang Wu, Lin Shi, Junjie Wang, Zhiming Ding, Yiwei Wang
| Challenge: | Prompt trading has emerged as a significant intellectual property concern in recent years, where vendors entice users by showcasing sample images before selling prompt templates that can generate similar images. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-stealing benchmark consisting of 50 templates and 450 images organized into Easy and Hard difficulty levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods with an average improvement of over 10%. |
Orca: A Few-shot Benchmark for Chinese Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Nuo Chen, Hongguang Li, Junqing He, Yinan Bao, Xinshi Lin, Qi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Baoyuan Wang, Jia Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for conversational machine reading comprehension are inconsistent with real scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese CMRC benchmark to evaluate model's generalization ability towards diverse domains by using zero-shot/few-shot settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 831 hot-topic driven conversations with 4,742 turns and cover 33 domains. |
Bridging the Domain Gaps in Context Representations for k-Nearest Neighbor Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Zhiwei Cao, Baosong Yang, Huan Lin, Suhang Wu, Xiangpeng Wei, Dayiheng Liu, Jun Xie, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve k-Nearest neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) are based on the ability to non-parametrically adapt to new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to boost the datastore retrieval of k-Nearest neighbor machine translation by reconstructing the original datastore. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the retrieval and translation quality of k-Nearest neighbor machine translation by reconstructing the original datastore. |
Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Lin Zheng, Jiayi Xin, Qintong Li, Lijun Wu, Zhihong Deng, Yang Lu, Qi Liu, Sheng Wang, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Using multiple sequence alignments (MSA) to extract evolutionary knowledge is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple sequence alignments to augment protein representations . they propose to employ Retrieved Sequence Augmentation to enhance protein representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses MSA Transformer by 5% in structural and property prediction tasks while being 373 times faster. |
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
| 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. |
Direct Preference Optimization for Neural Machine Translation with Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that MBR decoding can significantly improve translation performance of Multilingual Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a monolingual fine-tuning set to fine- tune MLLMs to get the gains of MBR without additional computation in inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms greedy decoding and beam search on multiple NMT tests. |
LegalAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Legal Domain (2025.acl-long)
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Haitao Li, Junjie Chen, Jingli Yang, Qingyao Ai, Wei Jia, Youfeng Liu, Kai Lin, Yueyue Wu, Guozhi Yuan, Yiran Hu, Wuyue Wang, Yiqun Liu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing general-domain benchmarks do not capture complexity of real-world judicial cognition and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM Agents in the legal domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 17 corpora from real-world legal scenarios and provides 37 tools for interacting with external knowledge. |
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. |
IM-TQA: A Chinese Table Question Answering Dataset with Implicit and Multi-type Table Structures (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks only evaluate model performance on tables with explicit table structures, which means headers are explicitly annotated and treated as model input during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a new Table Question Answering (TQA) dataset with implicit and multi-type table structures that requires the model to understand tables without directly available header annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on a dataset with implicit and multi-type table structures and can handle multi-table tables including previously neglected complex tables. |
FanChuan: A Multilingual and Graph-Structured Benchmark For Parody Detection and Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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Yilun Zheng, Sha Li, Fangkun Wu, Yang Ziyi, Lin Hongchao, Zhichao Hu, Cai Xinjun, Ziming Wang, Jinxuan Chen, Sitao Luan, Jiahao Xu, Lihui Chen
| Challenge: | Parody is an emerging phenomenon on social media, where individuals imitate a role or position opposite to their own . limited available data and deficient diversity in current datasets hinder study of parody . |
| Approach: | They build a dataset of parody users and annotated comments from both English and Chinese corpora to test parody detection and comment sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets provide richer contextual information, which is lacking in existing datasets. |
N-GLARE: An Non-Generative Latent Representation-Efficient LLM Safety Evaluator (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating the safety robustness of LLMs is critical for their deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent representations to characterize hidden layer dynamics by analyzing the APT of latent models and introducing the JSS metric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the APT (Angular-Probabilistic Trajectory) of latent representations and introduces the JSS (Jensen-Shannon Separability) metric. |
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. |
IndoCL: Benchmarking Indonesian Language Development Assessment (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent interest has surged in applying natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to evaluate language development in both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an Indonesian corpus as a benchmark for LDA tasks and to use existing large-scale language models to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts language-independent features, relieving laborious computation and reliance on specific language. |
Cultural Bias Matters: A Cross-Cultural Benchmark Dataset and Sentiment-Enriched Model for Understanding Multimodal Metaphors (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Metaphors are pervasive in communication, making them crucial for natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multicultural multimodal metaphor dataset designed for cross-cultural studies of metaphor in Chinese and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves metaphor comprehension across cultural backgrounds and cultural domains. |
Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing goal-oriented dialogue datasets focus on identifying slots and values, but in reality, customer service agents follow multi-step procedures derived from explicit company policies. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fully-labeled dataset to study customer service dialogue systems in real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models but still lacks 50.8% absolute accuracy to reach human-level performance on the dataset. |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
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Siwei Wu, JinCheng Ren, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Yiming Liang, Jie Liu, Yunwen Li, Tyler Loakman, Tianyu Zheng, Boyu Feng, Huaqing Yuan, Zili Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenhao Huang, Chenglin Cai, Haoran Que, Jian Yang, Yuelin Bai, Zekun Moore Wang, Zhouliang Yu, Qunshu Lin, Ding Pan, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Tiannan Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shenzhi Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Minghao Liu, Guoyin Wang, Ge Zhang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark. |
A Sentiment-Controllable Topic-to-Essay Generator with Topic Knowledge Graph (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
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. |
Prompt Tuning for Unified Multimodal Pretrained Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has demonstrated success in natural language pretraining and even vision pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply prompt tuning to a unified sequence-to-sequence pretrained model by adding a sequence of learnable embeddings to each layer and finetuning the pretrained models on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other parameter-efficient tuning methods on multimodal models and is robust against adversarial attacks. |
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. |
Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning with Synthesized Image-Dialogue Data (2024.findings-acl)
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Yanda Li, Chi Zhang, Gang Yu, Wanqi Yang, Zhibin Wang, Bin Fu, Guosheng Lin, Chunhua Shen, Ling Chen, Yunchao Wei
| Challenge: | OpenAI's GPT-4 has demonstrated remarkable multimodal capabilities, but specific mechanics of GPT4 remain unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose a data collection methodology that synchronously synthesizes images and dialogues for visual instruction tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on ten commonly assessed models and provides greater flexibility compared to existing methods. |
Disentangling Reasoning Tokens and Boilerplate Tokens For Language Model Fine-tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance agent capabilities for Large Language Models treat all tokens equally . however, reasoning tokens versus boilerplate tokens differ in importance and learning complexity . recent research has focused on enhancing agent capabilities in large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a Shuffle-Aware Discriminator (SHAD) for adaptive token discrimination . they propose SHAD method which adaptively emphasizes reasoning tokens during fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance over standard fine-tuning methods. |
Plug-and-Play Data Module for Code RL: Adaptive Ambiguity Replay (2026.findings-acl)
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Jianqing Zhang, Wei Xia, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Yang Liu, Jian Cao, Qiang Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) rely on static, in-epoch metrics that overlook training dynamics, often introducing low-utility or outdated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module that prioritizes cross-epoch ambiguous samples to neutralize the noise from stale experiences. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on nine LLMs show that Adaptive Ambiguity Replay outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on real-world code editing tasks. |
Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference: Multi-Candidate Optimization for Diverse Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing diverse NMT models lack translation diversity due to a discrepancy between training and inference . despite the success of diverse NTM, there is still a lack of translation diversity . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-candidate optimization framework for diverse NMT to deal with this defect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is transparent to basic diverse NMT models, and universally makes better trade-off between diversity and quality. |
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. |
A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capability to refine their generated answers through self-correction, enabling continuous performance improvement over multiple rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic theory to model the dynamics of accuracy change and explain performance improvements observed in multi-round self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict accuracy curves and improve accuracy over multiple rounds. |
Rationales Are Not Silver Bullets: Measuring the Impact of Rationales on Model Performance and Reliability (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that training language models with rationales augmentation is beneficial, but this view does not hold consistently. |
| Approach: | They conduct comprehensive investigations to thoroughly inspect the impact of rationales on model performance and a novel perspective of model reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms untrained models in several areas and provides informative regulations on the broad utilization of rationales. |
Qwen2.5-xCoder: Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multilingual Code Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Yibo Miao, Shanghaoran Quan, Zhenhe Wu, Qiyao Peng, Liqun Yang, Tianyu Liu, Zeyu Cui, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train code LLMs view each programming language in isolation . experimental results show that Qwen2.5-xCoder can bridge the gap between different programming languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows agents to collaborate to enhance multilingual instruction tuning for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that Qwen2.5-xCoder can transfer knowledge efficiently and effectively between languages. |
CURE: Critique-Driven Unified Reinforcement Learning for Test-Time Self-Improvement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing critique-guided methods fail to equip models with the autonomous improvement capabilities required for test-time scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly optimizes a single policy for standard solving, critiquing, and guided re-exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maintains competitive single-turn performance and unlocks effective inference-time scaling. |
QaRL: Rollout-Aligned Quantization-Aware RL for Fast and Stable Training under Training–Inference Mismatch (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Gu, Hao Wang, Jiacheng Liu, Lujun Li, Qiyuan Zhu, Bei Liu, Binxing Xu, Lei Wang, Xintong Yang, Sida Lin, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning with simple rule-based reward functions (RLVR) can induce emergent reasoning behaviors and yield gains in challenging domains such as math problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a rollout-alignment-quantization-aware RL which aligns training-side forward with the quantized rollout to minimize mismatch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms quantized-rollout training by +5.5 on Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE for math problems while maintaining low-bit throughput. |
Designing Templates for Eliciting Commonsense Knowledge from Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Models (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract implicit knowledge from pretrained models are still unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a template-based approach to extract implicit knowledge for commonsense reasoning on multiple-choice questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed template can be extended to other MC tasks with contexts such as supporting facts in open-book question answering settings. |
LaoPLM: Pre-trained Language Models for Lao (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) can capture different levels of concepts in context . previous work on Lao has been hampered by the lack of annotated datasets . |
| Approach: | They construct a text classification dataset to alleviate the resource-scarce situation of Lao . they evaluate them on two downstream tasks: part-of-speech tagging and text classification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture different levels of concepts in context and generate universal language representations. |
ODUTQA-MDC: A Task for Open-Domain Underspecified Tabular QA with Multi-turn Dialogue-based Clarification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tabular QA are limited to closed-domain scenarios . existing approaches do not solve the core challenge of generating correct answers without user clarification . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to tackle underspecified or uncertain queries in tabular question answering . they propose ODUTQA-MDC task and a multi-agent framework to detect ambiguities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels at detecting ambiguities, clarifying them through dialogue, and refining answers. |
Parameter Selection: Why We Should Pay More Attention to It (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | supervised learning is a challenging process due to the huge number of parameter combinations. |
| Approach: | They present an example of parameter selection in supervised learning . authors use a set of frequently occurring labels without a parameter tuning . they say this illustrates the seriousness of parameter tuning in a supervised field . |
| Outcome: | The proposed study shows that without adequate attention, the research progress can be uncertain or even illusive. |
Evaluating Character Understanding of Large Language Models via Character Profiling from Fictional Works (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed numerous AI applications, among which role-playing agents (RPAs) are particularly popular. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs' character understanding capability via the character profiling task, i.e., summarizing character profiles from corresponding materials, a widely adopted yet understudied practice for RPA development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and literature summarization methods and proves its ability to understand fictional characters in downstream tasks. |
A Knowledge Regularized Hierarchical Approach for Emotion Cause Analysis (D19-1)
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| 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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| 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. |
Semantic Contribution-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for Black-Box Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval-agmented generation fail to generalize effectively in black-box scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the semantic importance of words to dynamically adjust retrieval thresholds and filter information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest score on four long-form, knowledge-intensive generation datasets. |
SciMMIR: Benchmarking Scientific Multi-modal Information Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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Siwei Wu, Yizhi Li, Kang Zhu, Ge Zhang, Yiming Liang, Kaijing Ma, Chenghao Xiao, Haoran Zhang, Bohao Yang, Wenhu Chen, Wenhao Huang, Noura Al Moubayed, Jie Fu, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Multi-modal information retrieval (MMIR) is a rapidly evolving field . current benchmarks for image-text pairings overlook the scientific domain . |
| Approach: | They develop a scientific domain-specific MMIR benchmark to evaluate image-text pairings using open-access research paper corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 530K image-text pairs extracted from scientific documents with detailed captions. |
Contextualized Query Embeddings for Conversational Search (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to conversational search use multiple inference pipelines that require long inference times . despite their effectiveness, such a pipeline often includes multiple neural models that require longer inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate conversational query reformulation directly into a dense retrieval model . they use a dataset with pseudo-relevance labels to overcome the lack of training data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model rewrites conversational queries as dense representations in conversational search and open-domain question answering datasets. |
Supervised Optimism Correction: Be Confident When LLMs Are Sure (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across diverse tasks such as instruction following, code generation, and medical diagnosis. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised fine-tuning-based auxiliary loss for Q-value estimations during supervised refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms beam search on GSM8K, MATH, and GAOKAO on reasoning benchmarks. |
Exploring Backdoor Vulnerabilities of Chat Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to a security threat known as Backdoor Attack. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack method that distributes trigger scenarios across user inputs in different rounds and makes the backdoor be triggered only when all trigger scenarios have appeared in the historical conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high attack success rates on chat models while maintaining normal capabilities on providing helpful responses to benign user requests. |
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. |
Data-to-Text Generation with Style Imitation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to data-to-text generation focus on improving content fidelity, but lack explicit control over writing styles. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to control writing styles by using existing sentences as "soft" templates . they conduct experiments in restaurants and sports domains to test their approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves stronger performance than a range of comparison methods. |
DeepPlanning: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Agentic Planning with Verifiable Constraints (2026.acl-long)
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Yinger Zhang, Shutong Jiang, Renhao Li, Jianhong Tu, Yang Su, Lianghao Deng, Xudong Guo, ChenXu Lv, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Existing LLM planning benchmarks emphasize local, step-level reasoning rather than global constrained optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for practical long-horizon agent planning that uses local constrained reasoning and global constrained optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that even frontier agentic LLMs struggle with these problems. |
Contextual Domain Classification with Temporal Representations (2021.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies that incorporate context in SLU have focused on domains where context is limited to a few minutes. |
| Approach: | They propose temporal representations that combine wall-clock second difference and turn order offset information to utilize both recent and distant context in a novel large-scale setup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces 13.04% of classification errors compared to baseline . previous studies have focused on domains where context is limited to a few minutes . |
Combating Label Sparsity in Short Text Topic Modeling via Nearest Neighbor Augmentation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic models suffer from poor performance when applied to short text contents due to the limited length of a single topic. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural short text topic model that augments reconstruction labels with k-nearest documents to complement relevant but unobserved words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on multiple public short-text datasets and can derive high-quality topics and document representations. |
MRE-MI: A Multi-image Dataset for Multimodal Relation Extraction in Social Media Posts (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Multimodal Relation Extraction focus on single image scenarios . current approaches focus on text paired with a single image, ignoring valuable insights provided by remaining images. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-annotated dataset that includes multi-image and single-image instances for relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves relation extraction in multi-image scenarios. |
End-to-End Open-Domain Question Answering with BERTserini (N19-4)
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| Challenge: | a new open-domain question answering system integrates best practices from IR with a BERT-based reader to identify answers from a large corpus of Wikipedia articles. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end question answering system that integrates BERT with an IR reader. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on a standard benchmark test collection. |
Locality Preserving Sentence Encoding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings can be used to learn sentence embedds on the sentence level. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence embedding method that uses the inner product to compute semantic similarity between sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method encodes sentences better in the sense of semantic structures. |
Self-Explanation Prompting Improves Dialogue Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success in various NLP tasks, but the vast model parameters pose challenges in downstream fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic prompting strategy that analyzes each dialogue utterance before task execution to enhance LLMs' comprehension in multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms other zero-shot prompts and matches or exceeds efficacy of few-shot ones. |
Improved Word Sense Disambiguation with Enhanced Sense Representations (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised word sense disambiguation systems do not provide enough information about word senses. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate synonyms, example phrases or sentences showing usage of word senses and sense gloss of hypernyms into the sense representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves an F1 score of 82.0% on the standard benchmark test dataset of the English all-words WSD task. |
Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bohao Yang, Dong Liu, Chenghao Xiao, Kun Zhao, Chen Tang, Chao Li, Lin Yuan, Yang Guang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating human-like text, but the potential for freely customisable characters remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which employs Large Language Models to create freely customisable characters through personalised characteristic feature injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights for developing more accurate and customisable human simulacra. |
Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Generalization in Theory and Practice: Reverse KL vs. Forward KL (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Weak-to-strong generalization is a promising approach to guide stronger systems, but its effectiveness is constrained by the inherent imperfections of weak model supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a theoretically grounded approach that replaces forward KL divergence with reverse KL, which prioritizes high-confidence predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach replaces forward KL divergence with reverse KL, reducing the influence of unreliable weak supervision. |
Commonality and Individuality! Integrating Humor Commonality with Speaker Individuality for Humor Recognition (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for humor recognition focus on one aspect of humor commonalities, ignoring the multifaceted nature of humor. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonality and individuality incorporated network for humor recognition that integrates multifaceted humor commonalities with speaker individuality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates multifaceted humor commonalities with speaker individuality to deepen the understanding of humor expressions. |
DenseLoRA: Dense Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is an efficient approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) but many of the weights in these matrices are redundant, leading to inefficiencies in parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation approach that fine-tunes two low-ranked matrices and adapts them through a dense low-Rank matrix, improving parameter utilization and adaptation efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 83.8% accuracy with only 0.01% of trainable parameters compared to LoRA's 80.8% with 0.70% of trainability parameters on LLaMA3-8B. |
Enhancing LLM Language Adaption through Cross-lingual In-Context Pre-training (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing cross-lingual transfer are limited by parallel resources and lack linguistic and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual in-context pre-training approach that leverages semantically related bilingual Wikipedia documents to enhance cross-linguistic transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves multilingual performance on three models across six target languages. |
Evaluating Token-Level and Passage-Level Dense Retrieval Models for Math Information Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has shown that dense retrieval methods are suboptimal for capturing contextual similarities in complex data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a structure search method and efficient bi-encoder dense retrieval models to capture contextual similarities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on token-level and passage-level dense retrieval tasks. |
TAKE: Topic-shift Aware Knowledge sElection for Dialogue Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work finds that realizing who holds the initiative can help select knowledge . however, there is a strong semantic transition between two rounds, probably leading to initiative misjudgment . |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-shift Aware Knowledge sElector(TAKE) model which locates relevant parts from dialogue history to improve knowledge selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the WoW. |
Noise Robust Named Entity Understanding for Voice Assistants (2021.naacl-industry)
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Deepak Muralidharan, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Sida Gao, Xiao Yang, Justine Kao, Stephen Pulman, Atish Kothari, Ray Shen, Yinying Pan, Vivek Kaul, Mubarak Seyed Ibrahim, Gang Xiang, Nan Dun, Yidan Zhou, Andy O, Yuan Zhang, Pooja Chitkara, Xuan Wang, Alkesh Patel, Kushal Tayal, Roger Zheng, Peter Grasch, Jason D Williams, Lin Li
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition and Entity Linking are challenging for voice assistants . utterances are relatively short, so there is not much context to help disambiguate . |
| Approach: | They propose a Named Entity Understanding system that combines NER and EL in a joint reranking module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves NER accuracy by up to 3.13% and EL accuracy by 3.6% in F1 score . it also leads to better accuracies in other natural language understanding tasks . |
Weights-Rotated Preference Optimization for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chenxu Yang, Ruipeng Jia, Mingyu Zheng, Naibin Gu, Zheng Lin, Siyuan Chen, Weichong Yin, Hua Wu, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to align large language models with high reward hacking are limited by the complexity of the parameter space and the complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a weights-rotated preference optimization algorithm that constrains the output layer logits with the KL divergence inherited from DPO and fine-tunes the intermediate hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves a 3.27-point improvement on AlpacaEval 2 and surpasses the best baseline by 6.2 to 7.5 points on MT-Bench with merely 0.015% of the trainable parameters. |
Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that only provide information about user preferences can be inaccurate in e-commerce recommender systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which integrates the recommender system and dialog generation system by introducing information about users’ preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve better performance in both dialog generation and recommendation compared with baselines. |
From Storage to Experience: A Survey on the Evolution of LLM Agent Memory Mechanisms (2026.findings-acl)
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Jinghao Luo, Yuchen Tian, Chuxue Cao, Ziyang Luo, Hongzhan Lin, Kaixin Li, Chuyi Kong, Ruichao Yang, Jing Ma
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents have fundamentally reshaped artificial intelligence . however, the inherent statelessness of LLMs hinders their ability to maintain logical consistency across complex, multi-step tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for LLM agent memory mechanisms that formalizes the development process into three stages: storage, reflection, and experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework breaks the development process into three stages . it analyzes the need for long-range consistency, challenges in dynamic environments, and the ultimate goal of continual learning. |
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Inversion Learning for Highly Effective NLG Evaluation Prompts (2026.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating natural language generation systems is challenging due to the diversity of valid outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an inversion learning method that learns effective reverse mappings from model outputs back to their input instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method requires only a single evaluation sample and eliminates manual prompt engineering. |
LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoshi Pan, Qianhui Wu, Huiqiang Jiang, Menglin Xia, Xufang Luo, Jue Zhang, Qingwei Lin, Victor Rühle, Yuqing Yang, Chin-Yew Lin, H. Vicky Zhao, Lili Qiu, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to compress prompts only leverage unidirectional context, causing suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic prompt compression method that takes tokens from context . they use a Transformer encoder to capture all essential information needed for prompt compression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 3x-6x faster than existing prompt compression methods and faster than baselines. |
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. |
Modeling Intra- and Inter-Modal Relations: Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis lack a mechanism to understand complex relations between different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph contrastive learning framework for multimodal sentiment analysis that explores the relationships between modality representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art in multimodal sentiment analysis on two benchmark datasets. |
Take Its Essence, Discard Its Dross! Debiasing for Toxic Language Detection via Counterfactual Causal Effect (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate lexical bias in toxic language detection (TLD) do not exploit the “useful” and “misleading” impact of the bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual Causal Debiasing Framework to mitigate lexical bias in toxic language detection (TLD) it preserves the “useful impact” of lexical bias and eliminates the "misleading impact" they propose to use the same framework to analyze the causal effect of a sentence and bias tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves the “useful impact” of lexical bias and eliminates the ‘misleading impact’ Empirical evaluations show that the proposed model outperforms current debiased models for out-of-distribution data. |
VecInfer: Efficient LLM Inference with Low-Bit KV Cache via Outlier-Suppressed Vector Quantization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing quantization methods for large language models suffer performance degradation at ultra-low bit-widths due to key cache outliers. |
| Approach: | They propose a vector quantization method that suppresses outliers in the key cache and reduces memory access overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline quantization methods across long-context understanding and mathematical reasoning tasks while minimizing memory access overhead. |
Solving Math Word Problems via Cooperative Reasoning induced Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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Xinyu Zhu, Junjie Wang, Lin Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang, Yongfeng Huang, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Yujiu Yang
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) can be used to solve math word problems, but they lack fast adaptivity as humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving the math word problem . they use system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier to generate reasoning paths . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieves 9.6% improvement over baselines. |
ProMedTS: A Self-Supervised, Prompt-Guided Multimodal Approach for Integrating Medical Text and Time Series (2025.findings-acl)
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Shuai Niu, Jing Ma, Hongzhan Lin, Liang Bai, Zhihua Wang, V. W., Richard Yi Da Xu, Guo Li, Xian Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at processing unstructured data, but integrating time series data with text remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised multimodal framework that uses prompt-guided learning to unify heterogeneous data types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on disease diagnosis tasks using real-world datasets. |
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. |
MAPLE: Enhancing Review Generation with Multi-Aspect Prompt LEarning in Explainable Recommendation (2025.acl-long)
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Ching-Wen Yang, Zhi-Quan Feng, Ying-Jia Lin, Che Wei Chen, Kun-da Wu, Hao Xu, Yao Jui-Feng, Hung-Yu Kao
| Challenge: | Existing models that generate generic aspects do not provide personalized informative recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates aspect category as another input dimension to facilitate memorizing fine-grained aspect terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline model on restaurant review datasets in the restaurant domain. |
NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yingfeng Luo, Ziqiang Xu, Yuxuan Ouyang, MuRun Yang, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Tong Zheng, Bei Li, Peinan Feng, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) yet scaling to many languages while maintaining robust performance across directions remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to reduce the number of translations in one direction . they propose auxiliary parallel sentences to promote cross-lingual transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with or better than substantially larger baselines. |
Learning to Correct Noisy Labels for Fine-Grained Entity Typing via Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that noise correction in fine-grained entity typing improves quality of training samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages multiple prediction results to correct noisy labels . they integrate prediction results and utilize a differentiated margin to identify inaccurate labels a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves quality of training samples annotated using distant supervision, ChatGPT, and crowdsourcing. |
InSerter: Speech Instruction Following with Unsupervised Interleaved Pre-training (2025.acl-long)
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Dingdong Wang, Jin Xu, Ruihang Chu, Zhifang Guo, Xiong Wang, Jincenzi Wu, Dongchao Yang, Shengpeng Ji, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Recent advances in speech large language models exhibit suboptimal performance in adhering to speech instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train large-scale unsupervised speech-text sequences . they use text-to-speech conversion to generate textual continuations corresponding to provided speech segments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior or competitive results across diverse speech processing tasks. |
OSCR-Attack: One-Shot Character Level Attacks through Self-Optimizing Continuous Relaxation (2026.findings-acl)
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Lingyi Kong, Zhuo Liu, Zhanghao Hu, Qilong Qiu, Yutao Yang, Jingjing Xue, Zheng Wang, Lin Gui, Feiping Nie
| Challenge: | Character-level adversarial attacks preserve semantics but are costly and inefficient . generative LLMs are gaining popularity due to their uncertainty and vulnerability to textual adversarials . |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework that transforms discrete choices into continuous representations and a conflict resolution strategy that maps them back into discrete insertion operations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves ASR by 21.45% points and accelerates the attack by 3.66 times compared to baselines. |
AXIS: Efficient Human-Agent-Computer Interaction with API-First LLM-Based Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Junting Lu, Zhiyang Zhang, Fangkai Yang, Jue Zhang, Lu Wang, Chao Du, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled LLM-based agents to directly interact with application user interfaces (UIs), enhancing agents’ performance in complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent framework that prioritizes actions through application programming interfaces over UI actions and facilitates the creation and expansion of APIs through automated exploration of applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces task completion time by 65%-70% and cognitive workload by 38%-53% while maintaining accuracy of 97%-98% compared to humans. |
Label Words as Local Task Vectors in In-Context Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities, one of the most important being in-context learning (ICL). |
| Approach: | They hypothesized that the network creates a task vector in specific positions during ICL, which can be computed by averaging across the dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve zero-shot performance with dummy inputs comparable to few-shot learning by patching the global task vector. |
Taming the Real-world Complexities in CPT E/M Coding with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Islam Nassar, Yang Lin, Yuan Jin, Rongxin Zhu, Chang Wei Tan, Zenan Zhai, Nitika Mathur, Thanh Tien Vu, Xu Zhong, Long Duong, Yuan-Fang Li
| Challenge: | Evaluation and Management (E/M) coding is performed by physicians and trained human coders who review clinical encounter notes and electronic health record data to assign appropriate codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automates evaluation and management coding tasks using the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an increase in coding accuracy of more than 36% over a commercial CPT E/M coding system and almost 5% over our strongest single-prompt baseline. |
PAM: Enhancing General Alignment of Large Reasoning Models through Priority-Aware Metacognition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies indicate that System-2 thinking alone does not transfer to the general alignment domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to use priority-aware metacognition to help LRMs understand human preferences and monitor and regulate their thinking process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves general alignment performance by 10 points on helpfulness and harmless benchmarks. |
LaoBench: A Large-Scale Multidimensional Lao Benchmark for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jian Gao, Richeng Xuan, Zhaolu Kang, Dingshi Liao, Wenxin Huang, Zongmou Huang, Yangdi Xu, Bowen Qin, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, null Changjinli, Yonghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing SEA-focused benchmarks miss Lao-specific cultural grounding and linguistic properties. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for assessing large language models in Lao . they use open-source and held-out subsets to evaluate languages with a hybrid pipeline . |
| Outcome: | LaoBench is the first large-scale, high-quality, and multidimensional benchmark for assessing LLM language understanding and reasoning in Lao. |
AdaptFlow: Adaptive Workflow Optimization via Meta-Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Runchuan Zhu, Bowen Jiang, Lingrui Mei, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Haoxiang Gao, Fengshuo Bai, Pu Zhao, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models rely on static templates or manual workflows. |
| Approach: | AdaptFlow is a language-based meta-learning framework inspired by model-agnostic meta- learning. |
| Outcome: | AdaptFlow outperforms manual and automated workflows on question answering, code generation and mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
HSS-Synth: Humanities and Social Sciences Data Synthesis for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Ru Peng, Tianyu Zhao, Xijun Gu, Zhiting Fan, Haokai Xu, Jinyang Zhang, Yawen Zeng, Yihong Zhuang, Kexin Yang, Junyang Lin, Dayiheng Liu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | High-quality, diverse data are vital for large language models (LLMs) but remain scarce and costly. |
| Approach: | They define the first HSS domain system covering 14 mainstream fields and introduce HSS-Synth. |
| Outcome: | the proposed pipeline outperforms 14 leading baselines on 16 benchmarks. |
Learning Dynamic Context Augmentation for Global Entity Linking (D19-1)
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Xiyuan Yang, Xiaotao Gu, Sheng Lin, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang, Fei Wu, Zhigang Chen, Guoping Hu, Xiang Ren
| Challenge: | Existing collective entity linking methods are expensive and often lack local context information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic context-augmented inference model that can be used to make collective inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can cope with different local EL models with different learning settings, base models, decision orders and attention mechanisms. |
A Comprehensive Survey of Process Reward Models: Data Generation, Model Construction, and Usage (2026.acl-long)
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Congmin Zheng, Jiachen Zhu, Zhuoying Ou, Yuxiang Chen, Kangning Zhang, Rong Shan, Zeyu Zheng, Mengyue Yang, Jianghao Lin, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains dominated by outcome reward models that judge only final answers. |
| Approach: | They summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents . goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables finer credit assignment, richer diagnostics, and improved robustness. |
Filter-then-Generate: Large Language Models with Structure-Text Adapter for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evidence suggests that LLMs perform worse than conventional KGC approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a filter-then-generate paradigm and a multiple-choice question format to harness the capability of LLMs while mitigating the issue casused by hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves substantial performance gain compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. |
LogicSolver: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Logical Prompt-enhanced Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in MWP solving are uninterpretable due to shallow heuristics . a new approach to solve automatic word problem solvers requires a solver to predict expression tree and corresponding linguistic logic formulas simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate interpretable logical formulas based on algebraic knowledge as the grounded linguistic logic of each solution equation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves interpretability of a MWP solver by using logical prompts and interpretation generation. |
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. |
From Completion to Editing: Unlocking Context-Aware Code Infilling via Search-and-Replace Instruction Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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Jiajun Zhang, Zeyu Cui, Jiaxi Yang, Lei Zhang, Yuheng Jing, Zeyao Ma, Tianyi Bai, Zilei Wang, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) models suffer from performance degradation and prohibitive latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a search-and-replace infilling framework that integrates agentic verification and editing into a single-pass inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework harmonizes completion tasks with the instruction-following priors of Chat LLMs, extending the paradigm from static infilling to dynamic context-aware editing. |
LOTUS: Evolving Multimodal Unlearning via Hyperbolic Entailment and Lorentz Transport (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing unlearning methods suffer from a geometric mismatch, causing catastrophic forgetting or unsafe substitution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for surgical semantic pruning within the Lorentz manifold. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MLLMU-Bench show that LOTUS significantly outperforms baselines while maintaining general utility. |
GammaE: Gamma Embeddings for Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs are difficult due to complicated query structures and incomplete graph data. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic embedding model for encoding entities and queries to answer different types of FOL queries on KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on public benchmarks on three large logical query datasets. |
COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Yiming Liang, Leo Jin, Junting Zhou, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Mingshan Chang, Tianyu Zheng, Xincheng Zhang, Nuo Ma, Zekun Moore Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Haihong Wu, Hongquan Lin, Wenhao Huang, Jiajun Zhang, Chenghua Lin, Jie Fu, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for Chinese instruction tuning are not well-aligned with Chinese users’ interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese instruction tuning datasets to improve instruction fine-tuning for Chinese users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that Chinese models achieve competitive performance in diverse benchmarks. |
Improving Text Generation with Student-Forcing Optimal Transport (2020.emnlp-main)
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Jianqiao Li, Chunyuan Li, Guoyin Wang, Hao Fu, Yuhchen Lin, Liqun Chen, Yizhe Zhang, Chenyang Tao, Ruiyi Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Qian Yang, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to train models, but during testing, the model is conditioned on previously generated tokens, resulting in exposure bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use optimal transport to match the sequences generated in MLE and test modes to reduce exposure bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is validated on machine translation, text summarization, and text generation tasks. |
Detecting Customer Complaint Escalation with Recurrent Neural Networks and Manually-Engineered Features (N19-2)
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Wei Yang, Luchen Tan, Chunwei Lu, Anqi Cui, Han Li, Xi Chen, Kun Xiong, Muzi Wang, Ming Li, Jian Pei, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | e-commerce companies often have the option of escalating complaints by filing grievances with a government authority . this is detrimental to an ecommerce company, but this problem is challenging to solve by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and provides better recall and triage for specialized agents. |
TeachMaster: Generative Teaching via Code (2026.acl-industry)
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Yuheng Wang, Runde Yang, Lin Wu, Jie Zhang, Jingru Fan, Tianle Zhou, Ruoyu Fu, Huatao Li, Ruijie Shi, Siheng Chen, Weinan E, Chen Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating video content are limited by high costs and slow update cycles. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shifting educators from manual creators to high-level directors who focus on pedagogical intents while agents handle execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces production costs to 0.3% of traditional course videos and provides a robust solution for scalable education. |
SRAP-Agent: Simulating and Optimizing Scarce Resource Allocation Policy with LLM-based Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on the allocation of public scarce resources has limitations due to data scarcity and data scariness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Large Language Models into economic simulations . they conduct extensive policy simulation experiments to verify the framework's effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between theoretical models and real-world dynamics by integrating large language models into economic simulations. |
MedDCR: Learning to Design Agentic Workflows for Medical Coding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical coding is the process of translating unstructured clinical notes into standardized diagnostic and procedural codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop framework that treats workflow design as a learning problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art workflows on benchmark datasets and produces interpretable, adaptable workflows that better reflect real coding practice. |
Tougher Text, Smarter Models: Raising the Bar for Adversarial Defence Benchmarks (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing have highlighted the vulnerability of deep learning models to adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for textual adversarial defence that evaluates state-of-the-art defence mechanisms across diverse datasets, models, and tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates a wide range of datasets and evaluates state-of-the-art defence mechanisms. |
Selective In-Context Data Augmentation for Intent Detection using Pointwise V-Information (2023.eacl-main)
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Yen-Ting Lin, Alexandros Papangelis, Seokhwan Kim, Sungjin Lee, Devamanyu Hazarika, Mahdi Namazifar, Di Jin, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Intent detection is a fundamental element in task-oriented dialogue systems, usually occurring within the Natural Language Understanding component. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context data augmentation approach that fine-tunes a pre-trained language model and synthesizes new datapoints that correspond to given intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces training data that achieves state-of-the-art on three challenging intent detection datasets and performs on par with the state- of-the art in full-shot settings. |
Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts for Low-Resource Domains via Adversarial Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection methods are poor at detecting false rumors about breaking news or trending topics due to the lack of training data and prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial contrastive learning framework to detect false rumors by adapting features learned from well-resourced rumor data to that of the low-resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two low-resource datasets and shows superior performance . it overcomes restriction of domain and/or language usage and improves robustness . |
VC4VG: Optimizing Video Captions for Text-to-Video Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text-to-video generation highlight the critical role of high-quality video-text pairs in training models capable of producing coherent and instruction-aligned videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a caption optimization framework tailored to the needs of T2V models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves video caption quality and video generation performance. |
Thinking Beyond the Local: Multi-View Instructed Adaptive Reasoning in KG-Enhanced LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models adopt query-driven iterative reasoning from a local perspective, limiting efficiency and accuracy for complex multi-hop tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view instructed adaptive reasoning of LLM on Knowledge Graphs that allows LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overcomes the limitations of local exploration by enabling LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. |
Multi-level Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Internalization in Dialogue Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Lanrui Wang, Chong Tian, Liang Pang, Jiangnan Li, Qirong Ho, Yanan Cao, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models struggle with dull and repetitive outputs, a problem commonly termed as text degeneration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows the model to "cheat" the objective by duplicating knowledge segments in a superficial pattern matching based on overlap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a WoW dataset and shows that it works across models and decoding strategies. |
LIME: Less Is More for MLLM Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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King Zhu, Qianbo Zang, Shian Jia, Siwei Wu, Feiteng Fang, Yizhi Li, Shuyue Guo, Tianyu Zheng, Jiawei Guo, Bo Li, Haoning Wu, Xingwei Qu, Jian Yang, Ruibo Liu, Xiang Yue, Jiaheng Liu, Chenghua Lin, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing MLLM benchmarks and unified evaluation frameworks cannot accurately and efficiently reflect the ability of MLMLs. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automated benchmark curated using a pipeline that filters out uninformative samples and eliminates answer leakage by focusing on tasks that require image-based understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reduces the number of samples by 76% and evaluation time by 77% while it can more effectively distinguish different models’ abilities. |
Rethinking Vocabulary Augmentation: Addressing the Challenges of Low-Resource Languages in Multilingual Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment vocabularies ignore the disparities between model representation and frequency distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entropy-Consistency Word Selection method which integrates semantic and frequency metrics for vocabulary augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance for low-resource languages compared to high-resourced ones . it integrates semantic and frequency metrics for vocabulary augmentation . |
Personalized Video Comment Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generating personalized responses in video poses a unique challenge for language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new automatic metric based on Large Language Models with few-shot in-context learning that measures quality from the aspects of emotion, language style and content relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric measures quality from emotion, language style and content relevance with human evaluations. |
More Data or Better Data? A Critical Analysis of Data Selection and Synthesis for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Despite various proposed data construction methods, their practical utility in real-world pipelines remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of open-source datasets and data synthesis techniques for mathematical reasoning under a unified pipeline designed to mirror training and deployment scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipelines mirror training and deployment scenarios and are suitable for industrial applications. |
Label-Enhanced Hierarchical Contextualized Representation for Sequential Metaphor Identification (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to identify metaphors ignore extra information from data, such as contextual information and broader discourse information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model augmented with hierarchical contextualized representation to extract more information from both sentence-level and discourse-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two tasks using a VUA dataset. |
MGCL: Multi-Granularity Clue Learning for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction via Cross-Grained Knowledge Distillation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional methods often rely on coarse-grained clause-level annotations, which overlook valuable fine-grain clues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that captures fine-grained clues from a weakly-supervised perspective efficiently by using a teacher model to give sub-clause clues without needing fine-grain annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering improved interpretability. |
Shanks: Simultaneous Hearing and Thinking for Spoken Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Cheng-Han Chiang, Xiaofei Wang, Linjie Li, Chung-Ching Lin, Kevin Lin, Shujie Liu, Zhendong Wang, Zhengyuan Yang, Hung-yi Lee, Lijuan Wang
| Challenge: | Existing large language models and spoken language models (SLMs) begin thinking and taking actions only after the user has finished their turn. |
| Approach: | They propose a general inference framework that enables SLMs to generate unspoken chain-of-thought reasoning while listening to user input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances real-time user–SLM interaction in two scenarios. |
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
| Challenge: | Traditional alignment methods rely on human annotations and are subjective and misalignment with real-world user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages in-situ user feedback during conversations with LLMs to create preference datasets automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and classifies user feedback to LLM responses between conversation turns and creates examples of preferred and dispreferred responses according to user preferences. |
Pseudo-label Data Construction Method and Syntax-enhanced Model for Chinese Semantic Error Recognition (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on Chinese text error recognition has focused on pre-trained models, but training them from scratch is time-consuming and laborious. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for Chinese Semantic Error Recognition that generates pseudo-labels for augmented samples based on perplexity and model respectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing models in Chinese text error recognition due to Chinese semantics' complexity. |
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. |
A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)
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Keke Lian, Wang Bin, Lei Zhang, Libo Chen, Junjie Wang, Ziming Zhao, Yujiu Yang, Miaoqian Lin, Haotong Duan, Haoran Zhao, Shuang Liao, Mingda Guo, Quan Jiazheng, Yilu Zhong, Chenhao He, Chen Zichuan, Jie Wu, Haoling Li, Zhaoxuan Li, Jiongchi Yu, Hui LI, Dong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing security evaluation benchmarks lack relevance to real-world AI programming tasks . current LLMs struggle with secure coding, research shows . |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level evaluation benchmark to assess security of AI-generated code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mirrors real-world AI programming tasks and offers valuable insights into the state of AI code generation. |
Fair Text-Attributed Graph Representation Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) inherit issues from Graph Neural Networks such as fairness. |
| Approach: | They propose to evolve LM-as-encoder to LM as-fair-encoding process to explore fairness in TAGRL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed process can be integrated with fairness-enhancing strategies on the GNNs decoder side. |
Towards User-Driven Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a good translation should implicitly mirror user traits rather than translate the original content semantically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures user traits from historical inputs . they propose 'user-driven' NMT to model user behavior under a zero-shot learning fashion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can capture user traits from historical inputs under zero-shot learning fashion. |
Empower Large Language Model to Perform Better on Industrial Domain-Specific Question Answering (2023.emnlp-industry)
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Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Zezhong Wang, Lu Wang, Bo Qiao, Jue Zhang, Mohit Garg, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity but lack specific domain knowledge in domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model interaction paradigm that empowers LLM to achieve better performance on domain-specific tasks where it is not proficient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the commonly used LLM with retrieval methods in domain-specific tasks. |
Voice Query Auto Completion (2021.emnlp-main)
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Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Kendra Chalkley, Ji Xin, Liming Zhang, Wenyan Li, Gefei Yang, Yajie Mao, Junho Shin, Geoffrey Craig Murray, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing methods fail to complete voice queries from incomplete prefixes because they use orthographic prefix and substrings instead of the true phonetic prefix. |
| Approach: | They propose to condition QAC approaches on intermediate transcriptions to complete voice queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method obtains an 18% relative improvement over previous methods on a speech-enabled smart television with real-life voice search traffic. |
Transferring General Multimodal Pretrained Models to Text Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text recognition rely on large-scale pretraining on human-annotated or synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transfer multimodal pretrained models to text recognition using image captioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Chinese text recognition benchmark. |
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. |
Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats (2026.acl-industry)
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Pengxiang Zhao, Hui-Ling Zhen, Xing Li, Han Bao, Weizhe Lin, Zhiyuan Yang, Yu Zi Wei, Xin Wang, Mingxuan Yuan, Xianzhi Yu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of floating-point formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed formats excel with high-variance data and are compatible with state-of-the-art quantization frameworks. |
Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection via Cross-Modal Graph Convolutional Network (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multimodal sarcasm detection using textual and visual information have been limited to text-only approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a cross-modal graph for each multi-modal instance to explicitly draw the ironic relations between textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal sarcasm detection. |
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. |
From Experience to Skill: Multi-Agent Generative Engine Optimization via Reusable Strategy Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Beining Wu, Fuyou Mao, Jiong Lin, Cheng Yang, Jiaxuan Lu, Yifu Guo, Siyu Zhang, Yifan Wu, Ying Huang, Fu Li
| Challenge: | Generative engines (GEs) are replacing ranked links with citation-grounded answers . current methods are unable to accumulate or transfer effective strategies across tasks and engines . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework where planning, editing, and fidelity-aware evaluation serve as the execution layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms heuristic baselines in visibility and citation fidelity on three mainstream engines. |
Hate Speech Detection Based on Sentiment Knowledge Sharing (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hate speech detection are stereotyped and biased . et al., a paper examining the effectiveness of multitask learning in hate speech recognition tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a hate speech detection framework based on sentiment knowledge sharing . they extract affective features of the target sentence and use sentiment features from external resources . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect hate speech over two public datasets. |
Facilitating Fine-grained Detection of Chinese Toxic Language: Hierarchical Taxonomy, Resources, and Benchmarks (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets suffer from a lack of fine-grained annotations, such as the toxic type and expressions with indirect toxicity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark model to detect toxic language by incorporating lexical features into a Chinese dataset to facilitate fine-grained annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on insulting vocabulary containing implicit profanity and is able to detect toxic language with lexical features. |
DisCo: Distilled Student Models Co-training for Semi-supervised Text Mining (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text mining models are fine-tuned by fine-timing a large pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised learning framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large pre-trained language model using knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks while maintaining comparable performance. |
Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chenyu Shi, Xiao Wang, Qiming Ge, Songyang Gao, Xianjun Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Xun Zhao, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted a tendency among large language models to refuse to answer benign queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach to reduce excessive attention to harmful words like ‘kill’ and a method to decode the next-token predictions by contrastive decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the refusal rate by 20% while having little impact on safety. |
KuiLeiXi: a Chinese Open-Ended Text Adventure Game (2021.acl-demo)
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Yadong Xi, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li, Lei Lin, Yanjiang Chen, Shuhan Yang, Xuhan Chen, Kailun Tao, Zhi Li, Gongzheng Li, Lin Jiang, Siyan Liu, Zeng Zhao, Minlie Huang, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own. |
SetConv: A New Approach for Learning from Imbalanced Data (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for classification are biased towards the majority class when the Imbalance Ratio (IR) is high. |
| Approach: | They propose a set convolution operation and an episodic training strategy to extract a single representative for each class, so that classifiers can later be trained on a balanced class distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm is permutation-invariant despite the order of inputs and shows superiority on multiple large-scale benchmark text datasets. |
A Multi-lingual Multi-task Architecture for Low-resource Sequence Labeling (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that multi-task learning can boost the performance of related tasks such as MT and abstractive text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-lingual multi-task architecture to develop supervised models with a minimal amount of labeled data for sequence labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves 4.3%-50.5% absolute gains compared to mono-lingual model . the proposed model is particularly effective in low-resource settings . |
LongLLMLingua: Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compression (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Longer prompts introduce irrelevant and redundant information, which can weaken LLMs' performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt compression tool that improves LLMs' perception of key information in input prompts by up to 21.4% with around 4x fewer tokens in GPT-3.5-Turbo. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution improves performance and reduces costs and latency by up to 21.4% with around 4x fewer tokens in the NaturalQuestions benchmark. |
A Universal Discriminator for Zero-Shot Generalization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generative modeling has been the dominant approach for large-scale pretraining and zeroshot generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a discriminator that predicts whether a text sample comes from the true data distribution and which option has the highest probability of coming from the real data distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed discriminative approach outperforms GANs on a number of NLP tasks by 16.0%, 7.8%, and 11.5% respectively. |
NeKo: Cross-Modality Post-Recognition Error Correction with Tasks-Guided Mixture-of-Experts Language Model (2025.acl-industry)
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Yen-Ting Lin, Zhehuai Chen, Piotr Zelasko, Zhen Wan, Xuesong Yang, Zih-Ching Chen, Krishna C Puvvada, Ke Hu, Szu-Wei Fu, Jun Wei Chiu, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Chao-Han Huck Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a model on a mixture of domain datasets require separate correction language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task correction MoE that trains experts to become an "expert" of speech-to-text, language-totext and vision-to text datasets by learning to route each dataset’s tokens to its mapped expert. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-3.5 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet on the Open ASR Leaderboard and reaches an average relative 5.0% WER reduction and substantial improvements in BLEU scores. |
WECA: A WordNet-Encoded Collocation-Attention Network for Homographic Pun Recognition (D18-1)
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Yufeng Diao, Hongfei Lin, Di Wu, Liang Yang, Kan Xu, Zhihao Yang, Jian Wang, Shaowu Zhang, Bo Xu, Dongyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Homographic puns have a long history in human writing, widely used in written and spoken literature, which intended as jokes. |
| Approach: | They propose a WordNet-encoded model to settle polysemy of homographic puns and a word weighted model for recognizing them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distinguish between homographic pun and non-homographic pun texts. |