Papers by Lin Zhong
Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Li, Xiaoran Shang, Qizhi Pei, Yun Zhu, Xin Gao, Honglin Lin, Zhanping Zhong, Zhuoshi Pan, Zheng Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Conghui He, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | High-quality post-training data is the primary engine driving LLM capabilities . datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking their true developmental context . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development using data lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes domain-specific structural patterns in Math-oriented datasets and general-domain corpora. |
Disentangling Reasoning Capabilities from Language Models with Compositional Reasoning Transformers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | ReasonFormer is a unified reasoning framework for complex decision-making . it is based on the dual-process theory of cognitive science, where two cognitive systems interact to form a whole reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified reasoning framework that mirrors the modular reasoning process of humans . they decouple the representation module and the reasoning modules to capture different levels of cognition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that humans can perform better in complex decision-making tasks. |
Contrastive Video-Language Learning with Fine-grained Frame Sampling (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | despite recent progress in video and language representation learning, the weak or sparse correspondence between the two modalities remains a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained contrastive objective for video frame sampling to improve cross-modal correspondence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on YouCookII with long videos. |
Vision-Language Model Fine-Tuning via Simple Parameter-Efficient Modification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models have seen the success of prompt tuning and adapter tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune CLIP without introducing any overhead of extra parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves CLIP by 7.27% average harmonic mean accuracy. |
The LLM Already Knows: Estimating LLM-Perceived Question Difficulty via Hidden Representations (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for difficulty estimation rely on repeated response sampling, auxiliary models, or fine-tuning the target model itself. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages only the hidden representations produced by large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in difficulty estimation on textual and multimodal tasks and improves adaptive reasoning strategies with fewer generated tokens. |
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)
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Zheng Liu, Honglin Lin, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Mengzhang Cai, Yun Zhu, Zhanping Zhong, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Xiaoran Shang, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
RepoAgent: An LLM-Powered Open-Source Framework for Repository-level Code Documentation Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Qinyu Luo, Yining Ye, Shihao Liang, Zhong Zhang, Yujia Qin, Yaxi Lu, Yesai Wu, Xin Cong, Yankai Lin, Yingli Zhang, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Xia et al., 2018) demonstrate that a large language model can generate and maintain high-quality code documentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model powered open-source framework for generating, maintaining, and updating code documentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality documentation for the entire project. |
Neural Chain-of-Thought Search: Searching the Optimal Reasoning Path to Enhance Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent research indicates that Large Reasoning Models suffer from a strategic bottleneck at reasoning path planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates reasoning as a dynamic search for the optimal thinking strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and computational cost while reducing generation length by over 22%. |
Modeling Multi-Dimensional Cognitive States in Large Language Models under Cognitive Crowding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) mainly address isolated tasks such as emotion analysis or stance detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale model that combines large-level annotations with hyperbolic space to model human cognitive states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on cognitive dimensions on single dimension tasks while retaining strong hierarchical structure. |
MATO: A Model-Agnostic Training Optimization for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with strong in-house performance may struggle to generalize to diverse expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic t**raining method to improve ASTE model inference . they propose to compute the violation rate (VR) on each element of one triplet . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve aspect sentiment triplet extraction models consistent with expected results facing triplet element diversity. |
Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Bingxiang He, Zhong Zhuang, Jia Deng, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Jie Zhou, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current language model-driven agents lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to inspect users’ implicit intentions through explicit queries and a model expert as the upstream in agent design to enhance user-agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency. |
Pluralistic Alignment for Healthcare: A Role-Driven Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models fail to reflect diversity in sensitive domains like healthcare, where personal, cultural, and situational factors shape pluralism. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight, generalizable, pluralistic alignment approach to model diverse perspectives and values in open and closed models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach advances the pluralistic alignment for all three modes across seven varying-sized open and closed models. |
GEM: A General Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Tasks (2021.findings-acl)
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Lin Su, Nan Duan, Edward Cui, Lei Ji, Chenfei Wu, Huaishao Luo, Yongfei Liu, Ming Zhong, Taroon Bharti, Arun Sacheti
| Challenge: | Existing datasets that focus on natural language tasks are not considered as a general evaluation benchmark for multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They present a general evaluation benchmark for multimodal tasks, GEM 1 . they compare it with existing multimodal vision-language datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with existing vision-language datasets focusing on natural language tasks . it is the largest vision-linguistic dataset covering image-language tasks and video-language task at the same time . |
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. |
Cacheback: Speculative Decoding With Nothing But Cache (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that large language models are unable to model locality in language. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free and model-agnostic speculative decoding method that exploits locality in language to accelerate Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance among comparable methods . it leverages only LRU cache tables of token n-grams to generate draft sequences . |
Helios: A Foundational Language Model for Smart Energy Knowledge Reasoning and Application (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Enersys is a collaborative framework for end-to-end dataset construction that combines a large-scale pretraining, SFT, and RLHF datasets to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model tailored to the smart energy domain and a collaborative framework to advance LLM research in this field. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves domain knowledge mastery, task execution accuracy, and alignment with human preferences. |
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. |
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. |
Reasoning Graph Enhanced Exemplars Retrieval for In-Context Learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on semantic similarity between queries and candidate exemplars, while logical connections between reasoning steps can be beneficial to depict problem-solving process. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve exemplars with semantic and structural similarity using a graph kernel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art retrieval-based approaches on mathematics and logical reasoning tasks. |
AgentRM: Enhancing Agent Generalization with Reward Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen, Siyu Yan, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agents have strong performance on held-in tasks, but their generalizability to unseen tasks remains poor. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based generalizable reward model to guide the policy model for effective test-time search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agentRM outperforms existing agents on held-in tasks by 8.8 points on average. |
XMC-Agent : Dynamic Navigation over Scalable Hierarchical Index for Incremental Extreme Multi-label Classification (2024.findings-acl)
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Yanjiang Liu, Tianyun Zhong, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for XMC struggle with the growing set of labels due to their static label assumptions, and embedding-based methods struggle with complex mapping relationships due to late interaction paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model (LLM) powered agent framework for extreme multi-label classification, XMC-Agent, which can effectively learn, manage and predict the extremely large and dynamically increasing set of labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn, manage and predict the extremely large and dynamically growing set of labels and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three standard datasets. |
ASD-iLLM:An Intervention Large Language Model for Autistic Children based on Real Clinical Dialogue Intervention Dataset (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuzhong Lai, Chenxi Li, Junhong Lai, Yucun Zhong, Chenyu Yan, Xiang Li, Haifeng Li, Gang Pan, Lin Yao, Yueming Wang
| Challenge: | Currently, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for autism intervention is a significant yet challenging task, especially when directly employing LLMs as an intervention doctor. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training LLMs to conduct dialogue interventions in accordance with the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) they also propose 'role-play' strategy in which LLM act as autistic children to comprehensively evaluate the doctor model's capabilities at the dialogue level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in both automatic and human evaluation, with intervention strategies and dialogue style more closely resembling those of clinical intervention doctors. |
Distance between Relevant Information Pieces Causes Bias in Long-Context LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Runchu Tian, Yanghao Li, Yuepeng Fu, Siyang Deng, Qinyu Luo, Cheng Qian, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Xiaojiang Liu
| Challenge: | Positional biases in large language models hinder their ability to process long inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess positional bias in large language models involving multiple pieces of relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the performance of long-context language models by examining their models with different input lengths and tasks. |
FedCSR: A Federated Framework for Multi-Platform Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation with Dual Contrastive Learning (2025.coling-main)
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Dongyi Zheng, Hongyu Zhang, Jianyang Zhai, Lin Zhong, Lingzhi Wang, Jiyuan Feng, Xiangke Liao, Yonghong Tian, Nong Xiao, Qing Liao
| Challenge: | Existing federated frameworks for cross-domain sequential recommendation rely on user alignment, which increases communication costs and privacy risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated cross-domain sequential recommendation framework that eliminates the need for user alignment between platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework eliminates the need for user alignment between platforms. |
RouterEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Routing LLMs to Explore Model-level Scaling Up in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a lack of comprehensive benchmarks for Routing large language models has hindered the development of routers. |
| Approach: | They propose a router-based benchmark to evaluate Routing large language models . the benchmark includes performance records for 12 popular LLM evaluations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-level scaling up phenomenon can surpass the best single model in the pool and many existing strong LLMs. |
Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yaxi Lu, Haolun Li, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Fangming Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have facilitated the development of intelligent applications like automatic web search (Qin et al., 2023) Several methods exist for generating JSON strings from LLMs, including Prompting but often miss certain schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 40K different JSON schemas to assess models' ability to generate valid JSON outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves both in generating JSON outputs and downstream tasks. |
Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Question Classification and Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on the optimization of prompts and improvements in workflow, with few studies delving into the exploration of the questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework based on question classification and multi-agent collaboration (QCMA-Sql) they employ multiple cross-attention mechanisms to train a schema selector to classify questions and select the most suitable database schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Spider dataset and achieves 87.4% execution accuracy. |
LOCR: Location-Guided Transformer for Optical Character Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Academic documents are packed with texts, equations, tables, and figures, posing challenges for accurate OCR results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates location guiding into the transformer architecture during autoregression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on an original large-scale dataset comprising 53M text-location pairs from 89K academic document pages. |
MiniLongBench: The Low-cost Long Context Understanding Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LCU benchmarks for large language models often result in prohibitively high evaluation costs . existing benchmarks exhibit significant redundancy, which means inefficiency in evaluation . |
| Approach: | They propose a data compression method tailored for long-text data with sparse information characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces evaluation costs to 4.5% of the long-text benchmark LongBench . the proposed method is based on a long-term LCU benchmark with sparse information characteristics . |
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. |
Improving Precancerous Case Characterization via Transformer-based Ensemble Learning (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Yizhen Zhong, Jiajie Xiao, Thomas Vetterli, Mahan Matin, Ellen Loo, Jimmy Lin, Richard Bourgon, Ofer Shapira
| Challenge: | Application of natural language processing (NLP) to cancer pathology reports has been focused on detecting cancer cases, ignoring precancerous cases. |
| Approach: | They developed transformer-based deep neural network NLP models to perform the CRC phenotyping with the goal of extracting precancerous lesion attributes and distinguishing cancer and precancirous cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 0.914 macro-F1 scores for classifying patients into negative, non-advanced adenoma, advanced adénoma and CRC. |
Cognitive Policy-Driven LLM for Diagnosis and Intervention of Cognitive Distortions in Emotional Support Conversation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for ESC ignore cognitive distortions in help-seekers' expressions . current models provide basic emotional comfort, rather than helping help- seekers address psychological distress at a deeper cognitive level. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model framework to enhance LLMs' ability to diagnose and intervene cognitive distortions in help-seekers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms 15 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of distortion diagnosis accuracy, intervention strategy effectiveness, and safety risk control. |
EMA: An Episodic Memory Agent for Efficient and Selective Memory (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory-augmented methods often incorporate full dialog histories without filtering, resulting in information redundancy and inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that abstracts conversational context into Episodic Memory Units (EMUs) they propose EMA, MemDecider and a filtering decision module to reduce noise and improve overall performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token consumption by 11.48% while improving performance on two widely-used benchmarks. |
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. |
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. |
Golden Touchstone: A Comprehensive Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Financial Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaojun Wu, Junxi Liu, Huan-Yi Su, Zhouchi Lin, Yiyan Qi, Chengjin Xu, Jiajun Su, Jiajie Zhong, Fuwei Wang, Saizhuo Wang, Fengrui Hua, Jia Li, Jian Guo
| Challenge: | Existing financial benchmarks suffer from limited language and task coverage, low-quality datasets, and inadequate adaptability for LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual benchmark for financial LLMs that assesses models’ language understanding and generation capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bilingual benchmark assesses models’ language understanding and generation capabilities. |
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. |
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. |