Papers by Linfeng Zhang

49 papers
Stop Looking for “Important Tokens” in Multimodal Language Models: Duplication Matters More (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Vision tokens in multimodal large language models often dominate computational overhead due to excessive length compared to linguistic modality.
Approach: They propose a token pruning method which defines an importance criterion for vision tokens and prunes the unimportant vision token during inference.
Outcome: The proposed method can prune 88.9% of vision tokens while maintaining comparable performance.
Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models: Are We Solving the Right Problem? (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Multimodal large language models have shown remarkable performance for cross-modal understanding and generation, yet suffer from severe inference costs.
Approach: They propose to prune redundant tokens in MLLMs to reduce computation and storage costs.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the computational and storage costs of MLLMs by identifying redundant tokens and pruning them.
Sentence-State LSTM for Text Representation (P18-1)

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Challenge: LSTMs have been shown to suffer from various limitations due to their sequential nature.
Approach: They propose to model hidden states of all words simultaneously at each recurrent step rather than one word at a time.
Outcome: The proposed model has strong representation power, giving competitive performances compared to stacked BiLSTM models with similar parameter numbers.
Friend-training: Learning from Models of Different but Related Tasks (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Current self-training methods focus on improving model performance on a single task.
Approach: They propose a cross-task self-training framework where models trained to do different tasks are used in iterative training, pseudo-labeling, and retraining processes to help each other for better selection of pseudo-labeled labels.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves the best performance compared to baselines on two dialogue understanding tasks.
Leveraging Dependency Forest for Neural Medical Relation Extraction (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for medical relation extraction use dependency syntax as a source of features.
Approach: They propose a method to extract relational information from medical literature by using dependency forests.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the standard tree-based methods in the medical domain.
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications.
Approach: They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities.
Outcome: The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions.
Data Whisperer: Efficient Data Selection for Task-Specific LLM Fine-Tuning via Few-Shot In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Using fine-tuning on task-specific data is essential for large language models to be effective in specialized tasks.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages few-shot in-context learning with the model to be fine-tuned.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods with a 3.1-point improvement and a 7.4 speedup on the Llama-3-8B-Instruct model using just 10% of the dataset.
Inconsistent dialogue responses and how to recover from them (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to assess and bolster utterance consistency of chat systems have been shown difficult to detect.
Approach: They propose to use annotators to write dialogue responses and recovery utterances to assess and bolster utteration consistency of chat systems.
Outcome: The proposed dataset significantly improves the detection and resolution of inconsistencies in chat conversations.
LED-Merging: Mitigating Safety-Utility Conflicts in Model Merging with Location-Election-Disjoint (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models for specialized tasks are costly and time-consuming.
Approach: They propose a framework that locates task-specific neurons via gradient-based attribution and dynamically Elects critical neurons through multi-model importance fusion.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces harmful response rates while preserving 95% of utility performance.
Semantic Role Labeling Guided Multi-turn Dialogue ReWriter (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing attentive models attend to all words without prior focus, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words.
Approach: They propose to use semantic role labeling to provide additional guidance for multi-turn dialogue rewriting models.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on multi-turn dialogue rewriting tasks.
Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to addressing factual inaccuracies require high-quality human factuality annotations to mitigate these hallucinations.
Approach: They propose to leverage the self-evaluation capability of an LLM to provide training signals that steer the model towards factuality.
Outcome: The proposed approach significantly improves factual accuracy over LLMs across three key knowledge-intensive tasks on TruthfulQA and BioGEN.
Stability Implies Redundancy: Delta Attention Selective Halting for Efficient Long-Context Prefilling (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to reduce sequence length rely on heuristics that break compatibility with hardware-efficient kernels like FlashAttention.
Approach: They propose a method that selectively halts stabilized tokens by monitoring layer-wise update dynamics of the self-attention mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed method can reduce prefill complexity while preserving model accuracy and hardware efficiency.
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)

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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.
Beyond Black-Box Interventions: Latent Probing for Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to improve contextual faithfulness treat the LLM as a black box, generating responses that are inconsistent with the provided context.
Approach: They propose a framework for faithful RAG that operates in three stages: (i) fine-grained knowledge pruning to filter irrelevant context, (ii) latent conflict probing to identify hard conflicts in the model’s latent space, and (iv) conflict-aware attention to modulate attention heads toward faithful context integration.
Outcome: Experiments show that ProbeRAG significantly improves both accuracy and contextual faithfulness.
Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on structured tasks, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a bottleneck.
Approach: They propose a framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models up to 10x their size and can be scalable and effective.
Are We Using the Right Benchmark: An Evaluation Framework for Visual Token Compression Methods (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models have focused on visual token compression.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks.
Outcome: The proposed evaluation framework leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks.
End-to-End AMR Coreference Resolution (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on AMR focuses on individual sentences, but there is a need for multi-sentence AMRs.
Approach: They propose to use an end-to-end AMR coreference resolution model to generate multi-sentence AMRs.
Outcome: The proposed model reduces error propagation and is more robust for both in- and out-domain situations.
StreamMeCo: Long-Term Agent Memory Compression for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: StreamMeCo is an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework for video understanding.
Approach: They propose an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework that evicts redundant memory nodes and introduces a time-decay memory retrieval mechanism to mitigate performance degradation.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 1.87 speedup in memory retrieval while delivering an average accuracy improvement of 1.0% on three challenging benchmark datasets.
LegalGraphRAG: Multi-Agent Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Legal Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) is a new approach to document retrieval, but it is not suitable for legal reasoning.
Approach: They propose a framework for reliable legal reasoning that structures knowledge as relational graphs and uses a multi-agent system to verify validity.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing GraphRAG models in accurate and trustworthy legal analysis.
Bypassing Neural Evaluations for Fast Audio Editing via Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in audio diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-audio editing via inversion techniques, but these models typically rely on dense, fixed-step sampling trajectories to maintain structural integrity.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation framework that accelerates inversion-based editing process by dynamically evaluating only the most critical generative phases.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves a 3.9 speedup with negligible loss in fidelity.
GraphKV: Breaking the Static Selection Paradigm with Graph-Based KV Cache Eviction (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Efficient Key-Value (KV) cache management is essential for processing long text sequences in large language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a graph-based framework that redefines token selection for KV cache compression.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be used in existing KV cache eviction methods such as SnapKV and PyramidKV in a plug-and-play manner.
OpenFact: Factuality Enhanced Open Knowledge Extraction (2023.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing OIE systems organize knowledge into subject-relation-object (SRO) triplets, and they use templates to extract such knowledge triplet.
Approach: They propose a framework to handle expressiveness and groundedness in OpenFact . they propose to use templates, extra constraints, and adopt human efforts to ensure that most triplets contain enough details.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves expressiveness and groundedness of OpenFact . it is more accurate and denser than OPIEC-Linked, which is grounded to Wikidata .
SafeConv: Explaining and Correcting Conversational Unsafe Behavior (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing datasets do not provide enough annotation to explain unsafe behavior . current chatbots generate toxic and offensive responses, which can be dangerous .
Approach: They construct a dataset called SafeConv that provides comprehensive annotations for chatbots . they compare safe alternatives to rewrite unsafe responses .
Outcome: The proposed model can explain unsafe behavior and detoxify chatbots, the authors show . the proposed model is able to detect unsafe utterances, extract unsafe spans, and convert unsafe responses to safe versions.
A Graph-to-Sequence Model for AMR-to-Text Generation (P18-1)

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Challenge: Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic formalism that encodes the meaning of a sentence as a rooted, directed graph.
Approach: They propose a neural graph-to-sequence model that leverages LSTM to encode a linearized AMR structure.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods on a benchmark.
SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Autoregressive (AR) language models are a dominant paradigm in the field of parallelism and non-causal modeling.
Approach: They propose a blockwise discrete diffusion model that preserves AR-compatible serving while enabling parallel intra-block generation.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves theoretical speedups over 5 and wall-clock speedup of 2.3 on H200 GPUs in latency-critical regimes.
Cross-domain Generalization for AMR Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to predict an AMR graph from textual input.
Approach: They evaluate five representative AMR parsers on five domains and analyze challenges to cross-domain parsing.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the domain distribution divergence of text and AMR features on two out-of-domain sets.
Structural Information Preserving for Graph-to-Text Generation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing models that mess up or drop the core structural information of input graphs are lacking in graph-to-text generation.
Approach: They propose to leverage richer training signals to guide a graph-to-text generation model by focusing on autoencoding losses and back-propagating the losses to better calibrate the model.
Outcome: Experiments on two benchmarks show the proposed model over a state-of-the-art model . two types of autoencoding losses are used to back-propagate the model based on multitask training .
MWPO: Enhancing LLMs Performance through Multi-Weight Preference Strength and Length Optimization (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing offline alternatives to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are available at https://github.com/AIR-hl/MWPO.
Approach: They propose an offline method to optimize preference pairs based on implicit reward margins and response length margins by reweighting them using a geometric mixture.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four different scales and reduces generation length by 9.4%.
SDAR-VL: Stable and Efficient Block-wise Diffusion for Vision-Language Understanding (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing block-wise discrete diffusion models lack robust autoregressive (AR) decoders.
Approach: They propose a block-wise discrete diffusion framework for large-scale vision-language understanding with a progressive beta noise curriculum.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves training efficiency, convergence stability, and task performance over conventional block diffusion.
Semantic-based Pre-training for Dialogue Understanding (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models are weak in understanding the main semantic meaning of a dialogue context.
Approach: They propose a semantic-based framework that leverages explicit semantic knowledge to capture the core semantic information in dialogues during pre-training.
Outcome: The proposed model is superior to existing models on chit-chats and task-oriented dialogues.
Online Back-Parsing for AMR-to-Text Generation (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Abstract meaning representation (AMR) is a semantic graph representation that abstracts meaning away from a sentence.
Approach: They propose a decoder that back predicts projected AMR graphs on target sentences . their results show superiority over previous state-of-the-art decoded graph Transformer .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on two AMR benchmarks.
Learning a Grammar Inducer from Massive Uncurated Instructional Videos (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: aims to find more accurate syntactic grammars for accompanying text using video data.
Approach: They build a video-aided grammar induction model that can learn video-span correlation without manual features.
Outcome: The proposed model can learn video-span correlation without manual features adopted by previous systems.
SR-LLM: Rethinking the Structured Representation in Large Language Model (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Structured representations have long been pivotal in computational linguistics, but their role remains ambiguous in the Large Language Models (LLMs) era.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates structured representations into LLMs from training-free and training-dependent perspectives.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates structured representations through natural language descriptions in LLM prompts while augmenting the model’s inference capability through fine-tuning on linguistically described structured representation.
Leveraging Context Information for Natural Question Generation (N18-2)

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Challenge: Existing work for natural question generation ignores the input passage or hard-codes answer positions.
Approach: They propose a model that matches the answer with the passage before generating a question.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model using rich features.
Video Compression Commander: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Video Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that Video Large Language Models (Vide-oLLMs) are efficient at video understanding but lack the quadratic complexity of visual tokens.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play inference acceleration framework for VideoLLM token compression that quantifies each frame’s uniqueness and adaptively adjusts compression intensity across frames.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on video large language models and benchmarks show that the proposed framework can preserve essential information while reducing redundancy in video sequences.
ZPR2: Joint Zero Pronoun Recovery and Resolution using Multi-Task Learning and BERT (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Zero pronoun recovery and resolution aim at recovering the dropped pronounce and pointing out its anaphoric mentions.
Approach: They propose to solve two tasks together to recover the dropped pronoun and point out its anaphoric mentions.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms previous state of the arts benchmarks on two benchmarks.
AgentSlimming: Towards Efficient and Cost-Aware Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Automated expansion methods often result in bloated structures with redundant agents, leading to excessive token consumption.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play compression framework for graph-structured multi-agent workflows . they estimate the importance score of each agent and remove redundant agents .
Outcome: Experiments show that AgentSlimming reduces average token cost by 78.9% with negligible performance degradation.
Semantic Representation for Dialogue Modeling (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for dialogue modeling lack ability to represent core semantics, such as ignoring important entities.
Approach: They develop an algorithm to construct dialogue-level AMR graphs from sentence-level data and explore two ways to incorporate AMRs into dialogue modeling.
Outcome: The proposed model is superior to existing models on dialogue understanding and response generation tasks.
Mask Tokens as Prophet: Fine-Grained Cache Eviction for Efficient dLLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing cache eviction strategies for autoregressive language models fail to account for the role of mask tokens and specific characteristics in dLLMs.
Approach: They propose a training-free cache eviction framework tailored to dLLMs that denies a fully masked sequence and allows parallel decoding at the expense of memory and computation.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces the cost of memory and cache eviction and improves efficiency by reducing allocation in intermediate layers and concentrating resources on prompt-preferring heads.
MelTrim: Coarse-to-Fine Data Pruning for Speech Classification (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Unlike image or text classification, speech classification tasks are particularly challenging due to the difficulty in capturing the acoustic, semantic, and contextual representations.
Approach: They propose a dataset pruning method that coarsely filters redundant samples using DBSCAN clustering on Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 49.5% improvement in WA on the MEAD dataset and 41.9% reduction in EER on speaker identification tasks.
Domain-Adaptive Pretraining Methods for Dialogue Understanding (2021.acl-short)

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Challenge: Recent advances in pretraining methods have achieved promising results on NLP tasks . however, it is unclear which pretraining objective is the most effective for each downstream task .
Approach: They evaluate the effectiveness of domain-adaptive pretraining objectives on downstream tasks . they use open-domain data to pretrain language models like BERT and SpanBERT .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two dialogue understanding tasks with domain-adaptive pretraining objectives.
Unlocking Speech Instruction Data Potential with Query Rewriting (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs lack datasets and biased training tasks to follow speech instructions.
Approach: They propose a query rewriting framework that uses multiple agents to annotate and validate the synthesized speech.
Outcome: The proposed framework can transform text instructions into distributions more suitable for TTS models for speech synthesis without human annotation.
ProtoCycle: Reflective Tool-Augmented Planning for Text-Guided Protein Design (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent deep generative models have already shown encouraging * Equal contribution.
Approach: They propose to use generic instruction-tuned LLMs as direct text-to-sequence generators to achieve this goal.
Outcome: Recent studies show that reflection improves sequence quality and alignment while maintaining competitive foldability.
Preference Heads in Large Language Models: A Mechanistic Framework for Interpretable Personalization (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models exhibit strong implicit personalization ability, but most approaches treat this behavior as a black box.
Approach: They propose a mechanistic interpretation perspective and propose 'sparse' set of Preference Heads . they compute a Preference Contribution Score for each attention head and compare their predictions .
Outcome: The proposed framework computes a Preference Contribution Score (PCS) for each attention head and measures its causal impact on user aligned outputs.
Video-aided Unsupervised Grammar Induction (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods of multi-modal grammar induction focus on grammar inducing from text-image pairs, but videos provide even richer information, such as static objects and actions.
Approach: They propose a video-aided grammar induction model which learns a constituency parser from unlabeled text and its corresponding video.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing systems on three benchmarks.
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages.
Approach: They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling.
N-ary Relation Extraction using Graph-State LSTM (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for cross-sentence relation extraction split the input graph into two DAGs, but important information can be lost in the splitting procedure.
Approach: They propose a graph-state LSTM model which uses a parallel state to model each word, recurrently enriching state values via message passing.
Outcome: The proposed model keeps the original graph structure, and speeds up computation by allowing more parallelization.
Empower Nested Boolean Logic via Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a new self-supervised learning method allows language models to generalize to much harder and longer-hop logic.
Approach: They propose a self-supervised learning method to empower language models with boolean logic . they augment training data with nested booles and program training from simpler to harder ones .
Outcome: The proposed method allows language models to generalize to much harder and longer-hop logic, which can hardly be learned through naive training.

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