Papers by Lu Sun

META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing code sandboxes fail to provide accurate verification and efficiency under high-concurrency workloads.
Approach:	They propose a high-fidelity code verification system that provides sandbox feedback for RL training and evaluation.
Outcome:	The proposed system outperforms heuristic-matching baselines on LiveCodeBench and training stability on high-concurrency workloads.

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Liangtai Sun, Xingyu Chen, Lu Chen, Tianle Dai, Zichen Zhu, Kai Yu

ARise: Towards Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning via Risk-Adaptive Search (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Current task-oriented dialogue systems focus on multi-turn text/speech interaction, then call back-end APIs to perform task.
Approach:	They propose a GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system that can perform GUI operations on real APPs without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs.
Outcome:	The proposed GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system can perform GUI operations on real APPs and execute tasks without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs.

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Yize Zhang, Tianshu Wang, Sirui Chen, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Chaochao Lu

All Languages Matter: Understanding and Mitigating Language Bias in Multilingual RAG (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but their application in open-ended, knowledge-intensive, complex reasoning scenarios is limited.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates risk assessment of intermediate reasoning states with dynamic retrieval-augmented generation within a Monte Carlo tree search paradigm.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art KAR methods by up to 23.10% and the latest RAG-equipped large reasoning models by upto 25.37%.

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Dan Wang, Guozhao Mo, Yafei Shi, Cheng Zhang, Bo Zheng, Boxi Cao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Existing mRAG systems suffer from a language bias during reranking, systematically favoring English and the query’s native language.
Approach:	They propose a language-agnostic utility-driven reranker alignment technique to mitigate language bias during re-ranking.
Outcome:	The proposed approach mitigates language bias and consistently improves mRAG performance across languages.

RSMeM: Knowledge-Enhanced Memory Evolution for Remote Sensing Agents with Systematic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Bingxian Wu, Yu Zhang, Zonghao Guo, Tang Liu, Chen Qian, Yuxiang Lu, Xingbo Du, Yanghao Li, Yidan Zhang, Chi Chen, Ling Yao, Chenghu Zhou, Maosong Sun

Learning In-context Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing RS agents built on general-purpose LLMs are domain-agnostic, resulting in brittle and error-prone workflows.
Approach:	They propose a knowledge-enhanced memory evolution mechanism that bootstraps RS agents with pre-distilled domain knowledge and iteratively integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution.
Outcome:	Experiments show that the new model improves tool-use performance and accuracy . iteratively, iteration of the model integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution .

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Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jie Lou, Wei Jia, Dai Dai, Hua Wu, Boxi Cao, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Teach Small Models to Reason by Curriculum Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to recognize entities in text are limited by the diversity of entity types and the lack of high-quality annotations.
Approach:	They propose an in-context learning-based NER approach that can inject in-const NER ability into PLMs and recognize entities of novel types on-the-fly using only a few demonstrative instances.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the PLMs+fine-tuning counterparts on 4 few-shot NER datasets and significantly outperformed the Plms+initialized extractors.

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Wangyi Jiang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

SafeAgent: Safeguarding LLM Agents via an Automated Risk Simulator (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) show strong System-2-style reasoning, but at the cost of significant computational overhead.
Approach:	They propose a two-stage curriculum distillation framework which builds a robust internal problem-solving student model and then teaches the student model to externalize this knowledge as explicit reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms single-stage baselines on mathematical benchmarks and significantly outperformed LRMs on complex tasks.

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Xueyang Zhou, Weidong Wang, Lin Lu, Jiawen Shi, Guiyao Tie, Xu Yongtian, Lixing Chen, Pan Zhou, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Lichao Sun

Challenge:	SafeAgent improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation.
Approach:	They propose a framework that improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms closed-source models on two safety benchmarks and one real-world task.

AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)

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Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu, Jixuan Huang, Honglin Guo, Baodai Huang, Tinggang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Chenyu Liu, Jiajun Sun, Jiazheng Zhang, Dingwei Zhu, Xin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Yuming Yang, Junjie Ye, Minghe Gao, Dongrui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Guohao Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Distilling Discrimination and Generalization Knowledge for Event Detection via Delta-Representation Learning (P19-1)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified.
Approach:	They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 .
Outcome:	Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 .

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Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Aegis:An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering (2024.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Current neural event detection approaches focus on trigger-centric representations, which work well on distilling discrimination knowledge, but poorly on learning generalization knowledge.
Approach:	They propose a Delta-learning approach to distill discrimination and generalization knowledge by incrementally learning and adaptively fusing event representation.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly outperforms previous approaches on unseen/sparse trigger words and achieves state-of-the-art performance on ACE2005 and KBP2017 datasets.

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Lu Shi, Bin Qi, Jiarui Luo, Yang Zhang, Zhanzhao Liang, Zhaowei Gao, Wenke Deng, Lin Sun

AdDriftBench: A Benchmark for Detecting Data Drift and Label Drift in Short Video Advertising (2025.findings-emnlp)

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.

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Yinghao Song, Xiangji Zeng, Shuai Cui, Lu Sun, Zhaowei Liu, Yuan Yuan, Yulu Wang, Hai Zhou, Zhaohan Gong

REInstruct: Building Instruction Data from Unlabeled Corpus (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Short video advertising scenarios present unique challenges due to data drift (DD) and label drift (LD).
Approach:	They propose to use data drift and label drift to evaluate models under rapidly shifting content distributions and labeling scenarios to assess their generalization capabilities.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs moderately in short video advertising contexts, particularly in handling fine-grained semantics and adapting to shifting instructions.

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Shu Chen, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

MemSearcher: Iterative Memory Integration for Search Agent via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for annotating instruction data are expensive and difficult to scale.
Approach:	They propose a method to automatically build instruction data from an unlabeled corpus without heavy reliance on proprietary LLMs and human annotation.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing methods on AlpacaEval leaderboard and other open-source methods.

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Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Debing Zhang, Xianpei Han

Few-Shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition Based on Mutlimodal Causal Intervention Graph (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Recent LLM-based search agents often concatenate the full interaction history into the context, producing long and noisy inputs and increasing compute cost and memory overhead.
Approach:	They propose an agent framework that maintains a compact memory during multi-turn interactions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms strong history-concatenation (ReAct-style) baselines on a range of public datasets while maintaining nearly constant token counts across multi-turn interactions.

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Feihong Lu, Xiaocui Yang, Qian Li, Qingyun Sun, Ke Jiang, Cheng Ji, Jianxin Li

DynaMaR: Dynamic Prompt with Mask Token Representation (2022.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Existing methods for multimodal named entity recognition are limited due to limited resources.
Approach:	They propose a Few-shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition task to address these relation types by constructing a multimodal graph and a new multimodal causal intervention strategy.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on two multimodal named entity recognition datasets.

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Xiaodi Sun, Sunny Rajagopalan, Priyanka Nigam, Weiyi Lu, Yi Xu, Iman Keivanloo, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi

RepoAgent: An LLM-Powered Open-Source Framework for Repository-level Code Documentation Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)

Challenge:	Recent research shows that large language models pretrained using unsupervised approaches can achieve significant performance improvement on many downstream tasks.
Approach:	They propose an unsupervised approach to fine-tuning large language models using unsupervised approaches to many downstream tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed approach improves on four e-commerce applications and can achieve an average improvement of 10% in few-shot settings and 3.7% in data-rich settings over the standard approach.

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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

SingaKids: A Multilingual Multimodal Dialogic Tutor for Language Learning (2025.acl-industry)

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.

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Zhengyuan Liu, Geyu Lin, Hui Li Tan, Huayun Zhang, Yanfeng Lu, Xiaoxue Gao, Stella Xin Yin, Sun He, Hock Huan Goh, Lung Hsiang Wong, Nancy F. Chen

Executing Natural Language-Described Algorithms with Large Language Models: An Investigation (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Empirical studies show that SingaKids provides effective dialogic teaching, benefiting learners at different performance levels.
Approach:	They propose a dialogic tutor designed to facilitate language learning through picture description tasks.
Outcome:	Empirical studies show that SingaKids provides effective dialogic teaching, benefiting learners at different performance levels.

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Xin Zheng, Qiming Zhu, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence, creating new SOTAs and reaching human-level language understanding performance on a series of tasks and benchmarks.
Approach:	They propose to use an algorithm test set sourced from Introduction to Algorithm to assess LLMs' code execution abilities.
Outcome:	The proposed model can execute programs described in natural language as long as no heavy numeric computation is involved.

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Yaojie Lu, Qing Liu, Dai Dai, Xinyan Xiao, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hua Wu

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

Challenge:	Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas.
Approach:	They propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can model different IE tasks, generate targeted structures, and learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources.

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Hao Zheng, Guozhao Mo, Xinru Yan, Qianhao Yuan, Wenkai Zhang, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Challenge:	Existing presentation agents rely on predefined workflows and fixed templates to generate presentations.
Approach:	They propose an agentic framework that adapts to diverse user intents and iterative refinement based on observation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can be used to generate presentations with environmental observations.

LaMP-Val: Large Language Models Empower Personalized Valuation in Auction (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Jie Sun, Tianyu Zhang, Houcheng Jiang, Kexin Huang, Xiang Shu, Zhibo Zhu, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Junkang Wu, Chi Luo, An Zhang, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Concept Prerequisite Relation Learning in Educational Data (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Currently, most research focuses on the bidding algorithms used within auction mechanisms.
Approach:	They propose a personalized valuation framework that integrates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process.
Outcome:	The proposed framework incorporates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process.

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Chenghao Jia, Yongliang Shen, Yechun Tang, Lu Sun, Weiming Lu

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods to learn prerequisite relations among concepts are lacking . concepts are crucial for learning, organizing, applying and generating knowledge .
Approach:	They propose a concept prerequisite relation learning approach which combines concept representation and concept pairwise features to make it more practical.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on four datasets.

Progressive Self-Supervised Attention Learning for Aspect-Level Sentiment Analysis (P19-1)

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Jialong Tang, Ziyao Lu, Jinsong Su, Yubin Ge, Linfeng Song, Le Sun, Jiebo Luo

Sentiment Analysis

Challenge:	Experimental results show that our proposed approach yields better attention mechanisms . dominant ASC models are mostly discriminative classifiers based on manual feature engineering .
Approach:	They propose a self-supervised approach to aspect-level sentiment classification that mines useful attention supervision information from a training corpus to refine attention mechanisms.
Outcome:	The proposed approach yields better attention mechanisms on multiple datasets.

ShieldLM: Empowering LLMs as Aligned, Customizable and Explainable Safety Detectors (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Zhexin Zhang, Yida Lu, Jingyuan Ma, Di Zhang, Rui Li, Pei Ke, Hao Sun, Lei Sha, Zhifang Sui, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang

MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)

Challenge:	Existing tools for detecting safety issues in LLMs are expensive and inefficient.
Approach:	They propose an LLM-based safety detector which annotates the safety of queries and provides explanations for its decisions.
Outcome:	The proposed detector outperforms baselines on four sets of query-response pairs and is effective as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs.

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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts.
Approach:	They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition.
Outcome:	The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead.

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via Superposition Concept Discrimination (2024.lrec-main)

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Jiawei Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Yaojie Lu, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun

CogToM: A Comprehensive Theory of Mind Benchmark inspired by Human Cognition for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify entities of target types with limited number of illustrative instances.
Approach:	They propose a superposition concept discriminator which solves the intrinsic generalization problem by an active learning paradigm.
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly improves few-shot named entity recognition (FS-NER) with minimal additional efforts.

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Haibo Tong, Zeyang Yue, Feifei Zhao, Erliang Lin, Lu Jia, Ruolin Chen, Yinqian Sun, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited to false belief tasks, highlighting bottlenecks in specific dimensions.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' Theory of Mind capabilities . they evaluate 8000 bilingual instances across 46 paradigms and validated by 49 human annotators .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark reveals performance heterogeneities and bottlenecks in 22 representative models.

Clear Up Confusion: Advancing Cross-Domain Few-Shot Relation Extraction through Relation-Aware Prompt Learning (2024.naacl-short)

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Ge Bai, Chenji Lu, Daichi Guo, Shilong Li, Ying Liu, Zhang Zhang, Guanting Dong, Ruifang Liu, Sun Yong

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing approaches to few-shot Relation Extraction (RE) are prone to confusion when applying knowledge to a target domain with entirely new types of relations.
Approach:	They propose a relation-aware prompt learning method with pre-training to clear confusion by decomposing relation types through an innovative label prompt.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms previous sota methods and yields better results on cross-domain few-shot RE tasks.

Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion with Self-Supervised Adaptive Graph Alignment (2022.acl-long)

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Zijie Huang, Zheng Li, Haoming Jiang, Tianyu Cao, Hanqing Lu, Bing Yin, Karthik Subbian, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang

PaperRegister: Boosting Flexible-grained Paper Search via Hierarchical Register Indexing (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to predict missing facts in knowledge graphs are limited in language alignment . SS-AGA uses seed alignment as an edge type to fuses all KGs as a whole graph .
Approach:	They propose a self-supervised adaptive graph alignment method that fuses all KGs as a whole graph by regarding alignment as 'a new edge type' they propose SS-AGA method that uses relation-aware attention weights to capture potential alignment pairs in a new paradigm.
Outcome:	The proposed method can predict missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) but language alignment is scarce and new alignment identification is noisy.

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Zhuoqun Li, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun

Virtual Context Enhancing Jailbreak Attacks with Special Token Injection (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing paper search systems lack detailed information to support finer-grained queries.
Approach:	They propose a paper-based index that transforms abstract-based corpus index into hierarchical index tree and offline can support paper search queries.
Outcome:	The proposed system achieves the SOTA performance and excels in fine-grained scenarios.

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Yuqi Zhou, Lin Lu, Ryan Sun, Pan Zhou, Lichao Sun

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing jailbreak attacks target the two phases of user interaction: prompt input and model computation.
Approach:	They propose a new tool that leverages special tokens to improve jailbreak attacks . they found that the tool can increase success rates of existing jailbreak methods by 40% .
Outcome:	The proposed solution can improve success rates of four widely used jailbreak methods by approximately 40% across various LLMs.

Adaptive Scaling for Sparse Detection in Information Extraction (P18-1)

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Robust Preference Optimization via Dynamic Target Margins (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Detection problems involving positive instances are often deficient in information extraction tasks . a number of researches have employed neural network models to solve detection problems .
Approach:	They propose an algorithm which can handle positive sparsity problem and directly optimize over F-measure . they borrow the idea of marginal utility from economics and propose a theoretical framework for instance importance measuring .
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm improves on positive sparsity problem and over F-measure . it leads to more effective and stable training of neural network based detection models.

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Jie Sun, Junkang Wu, Jiancan Wu, Zhibo Zhu, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Lintao Ma, Xiang Wang

Understanding Attention for Text Classification (2020.acl-main)

Challenge:	Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an efficient method for ensuring safety and reliability in practical applications.
Approach:	They propose a dynamic target margin preference optimization algorithm that adjusts reward margins at the pairwise level.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves an average 4.4% improvement over baselines, setting new benchmarks for state-of-the-art performance.

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Xiaobing Sun, Wei Lu

Explainability & Interpretability in NLP

Challenge:	Existing studies have focused on whether local attention weights reflect the importance of input representations.
Approach:	They propose to analyze for each word token the following two quantities: its polarity score and its attention score, where the latter is a global assessment on the token’s significance.
Outcome:	The proposed model can be improved under conditions where the interplay between the two quantities can contribute towards model performance.

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

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

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.

StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun

Memorizing is Not Enough: Deep Knowledge Injection Through Reasoning (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities.
Approach:	They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework.
Outcome:	The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge.

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Ruoxi Xu, Yunjie Ji, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Yingfei Sun, Xiangang Li, Le Sun

A Rigorous Study on Named Entity Recognition: Can Fine-tuning Pretrained Model Lead to the Promised Land? (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing knowledge injection frameworks focus on knowledge memorization and retrieval, but static nature of large language models leads to outdated information as the real world evolves or when adapting to domain-specific knowledge.
Approach:	They propose a four-tier knowledge injection framework that defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association.
Outcome:	The proposed framework defines the levels of knowledge injection: memorization, retrieval, reasoning, and association.

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Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Jialong Tang, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Zhicheng Wei, Nicholas Jing Yuan

Sparsity-Accelerated Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task of information extraction.
Approach:	They propose to perform randomization tests on standard NER benchmarks to examine name regularity, mention coverage and context diversity.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs better on standard NER benchmarks than other models on open datasets.

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Da Ma, Lu Chen, Pengyu Wang, Hongshen Xu, Hanqi Li, Liangtai Sun, Su Zhu, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu

AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various NLP tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning.
Approach:	They propose to leverage sparsity in pre-trained LLMs to accelerate training by disregarding computations for unimportant neurons.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process.

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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

D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, WenJie Lu, Yuqi Wang, Jinyuan Li, Song Cao, He Cui, Tengfei Tian, Xuelin Zhang, Haotian Luo, Di Sun, Jun Fang, Hua Chai, Naiqiang Tan, Gang Pan

Challenge:	Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to automate a wide spectrum of human tasks by emulating user interaction.
Approach:	They propose a deliberative framework that leverages a fine-grained tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves SOTA among open-source general models on AndroidWorld and ScreenSpot-V2 . it leverages a fine-grained, app-specific tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process .

Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)

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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun

Syntactic Text Processing

Challenge:	Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence.
Approach:	They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary.
Outcome:	Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training.

ConsistentChat: Building Skeleton-Guided Consistent Multi-Turn Dialogues for Large Language Models from Scratch (2025.emnlp-main)

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Jiawei Chen, Xinyan Guan, Qianhao Yuan, Mo Guozhao, Weixiang Zhou, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Xianpei Han

Critic-CoT: Boosting the Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Model via Chain-of-Thought Critic (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing instruction data synthesis methods focus on single-turn instructions and neglect cross-turn coherence, resulting in context drift and reduced task completion rates.
Approach:	They propose a framework that constrains multi-turn instruction synthesis by explicitly modeling human conversational intent.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing models trained on single-turn and multi-turn instruction datasets.

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Xin Zheng, Jie Lou, Boxi Cao, Xueru Wen, Yuqiu Ji, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Debing Zhang, Le Sun

ChatGPT Is a Knowledgeable but Inexperienced Solver: An Investigation of Commonsense Problem in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to improve the reasoning performance of large language models rely on intuitive instance-level feedback, which limits the reasoning capabilities.
Approach:	They propose a framework that pushes LLMs toward System-2-like critic capability by using a step-wise CoT reasoning paradigm and automatic construction of weak-supervision data without human annotation.
Outcome:	The proposed model significantly improves task-solving performance by filtering out invalid solutions or iterative refinement.

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Ning Bian, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Ben He, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong

RMTBench: Benchmarking LLMs Through Multi-Turn User-Centric Role-Playing (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	acquiring and representing commonsense in machines has posed a long-standing challenge (Li et al., 2021; Zhang e t al, 2022; Zhou e al. 2023) .
Approach:	They use a commonsense-based LLM to evaluate ChatGPT's commonsensing abilities by analyzing 11 datasets and generating knowledge descriptions.
Outcome:	The proposed model can achieve good QA accuracies while still struggling with certain domains of datasets.

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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

RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Following (2025.findings-acl)

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.

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Junru Lu, Jiazheng Li, Guodong Shen, Lin Gui, Siyu An, Yulan He, Di Yin, Xing Sun

GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing role-playing datasets mostly contribute to controlling role style and knowledge boundaries, but overlook role-following in instruction-follower scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following composite benchmark, named RoleMRC, which includes multi-turn dialogues between ideal roles and humans, including free chats or discussions upon given passages .
Outcome:	The proposed model improves instruction-following without compromising general role-playing and reasoning capabilities.

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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.

ProgressLM: Towards Progress Reasoning in Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Jianshu Zhang, Chengxuan Qian, Haosen Sun, Haoran Lu, Dingcheng Wang, Letian Xue, Han Liu

Towards Interactivity and Interpretability: A Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction Framework (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing models for task progress estimation lack long-horizon and dynamic reasoning . estimating how much of a task has been completed requires long-term reasoning based on partial information.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark for evaluating progress reasoning from a single observation . they instantiate a two-stage paradigm that combines episodic retrieval with mental simulation .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark improves on 14 VLMs on a small scale and shows common failure patterns.

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Yiquan Wu, Yifei Liu, Weiming Lu, Yating Zhang, Jun Feng, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang

Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process.
Approach:	They propose a rationale-based legal judgment prediction framework that follows the judge's real trial logic and provides good interactivity and interpretability.
Outcome:	The proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use.

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Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang

Representation Learning

Challenge:	Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge.
Approach:	They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities.

Across Programming Language Silos: A Study on Cross-Lingual Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Qiming Zhu, Jialun Cao, Xuanang Chen, Weili Zhang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Shing-Chi Cheung

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Current research on large language models with retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) has focused on single-language settings, leaving their cross-lingual effectiveness underexplored.
Approach:	They construct a dataset covering 13 PLs with nearly 14K instances to study cross-lingual code knowledge transfer in RACG.
Outcome:	The proposed model shows unequal cross-lingual knowledge transfer even with direct injection and shows limited reliance on natural language information embedded in code when equipped with a code-specific retriever.

CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)

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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan

Challenge:	Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages .
Approach:	They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models .
Outcome:	The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English .

On-Policy Self-Alignment with Fine-grained Knowledge Feedback for Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-acl)

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Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Xinyu Lu, Yuqiu Ji, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Debing Zhang, Le Sun

STATE ToxiCN: A Benchmark for Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large language models exhibit behavior that deviates from the boundaries of their knowledge during response generation.
Approach:	They propose a framework that allows large language models to explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals.
Outcome:	The proposed framework enables LLMs to explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals.

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Zewen Bai, Liang Yang, Shengdi Yin, Junyu Lu, Jingjie Zeng, Haohao Zhu, Yuanyuan Sun, Hongfei Lin

Ethical NLP

Challenge:	Existing studies on Chinese hate speech detection lack span-level fine-grained annotations.
Approach:	They construct a Span-level target-aware Toxicity Extraction dataset and evaluate existing models for Chinese hateful slang.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is the first span-level Chinese hate speech dataset and evaluates the ability of existing models to understand hate semantics.

WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Huawen Feng, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Qianli Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang

CogBench: Benchmarking Cognitive Alignment of Large Language Models in Educational Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)

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 .

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Tong Lu, Zhichun Wang, Yuanhao Sun, Yaoyu Zhou, Mingrui Li, Yiming Guan, Zhiyong Bai

Question Answering

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) possess strong capabilities in language understanding and generation, as well as remarkable problem-solving abilities.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to assess the cognitive alignment capabilities of large language models in educational QA.
Outcome:	The proposed evaluation benchmark assesses the cognitive alignment capabilities of large language models in educational QA.

Beyond Full Fine-tuning: Harnessing the Power of LoRA for Multi-Task Instruction Tuning (2024.lrec-main)

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Chunlei Xin, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Court View Generation by Stimulating Internal Knowledge and Incorporating External Knowledge (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithm for large-scale language models.
Approach:	They conduct a systematic study of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on diverse tasks and rich resources with different learning capacities.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm can achieve remarkable performance in high-resource and multi-task scenarios, even comparable to full fine-tuning.

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Yifei Liu, Yiquan Wu, Ang Li, Yating Zhang, Changlong Sun, Weiming Lu, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang

DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in language generation, but they encounter difficulties in the knowledge-intensive legal domain.
Approach:	They propose to decompose court views into different parts, stimulate internal knowledge, and incorporate external information to unleash the power of LLMs in the task.
Outcome:	The proposed method generates more accurate and reliable court views on two real-world datasets LAIC2021 and CJO2022.

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Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun

Challenge:	Existing studies in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) do not sufficiently address the design of complex engineering solutions.
Approach:	They propose a retrieval-augmented generation system that leverages tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions.
Outcome:	Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications.

CL-QR: Cross-Lingual Enhanced Query Reformulation for Multi-lingual Conversational AI Agents (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Zhongkai Sun, Zhengyang Zhao, Sixing Lu, Chengyuan Ma, Xiaohu Liu, Xing Fan, Wei Shen, Chenlei Guo

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Existing QR systems that reformulate defective user queries are limited in English due to the scarcity of non-English QR labels.
Approach:	They propose a query reformulation method which reformulates defective user queries to improve non-English QR performance.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves non-English QR performance by leveraging abundant reformulation resources in English.

Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering (2025.coling-main)

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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

HIPO: A Hierarchical Prompt Optimization Framework with Task Awareness and Fine-Grained Debugging (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing retrieval methods aim to gather relevant passages but fail to prioritize consistent and useful information for the reader.
Approach:	They propose a novel method which re-ranks passages based on the reader's prediction probability distribution and clusters passage according to the predicted answers.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the quality of evidence passages under zero-shot scenarios.

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Lu Qi, Lei Chai, Hongrui Yu, Binhang Qi, Hailong Sun

Value Compass Benchmarks: A Comprehensive, Generative and Self-Evolving Platform for LLMs’ Value Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)

Challenge:	Existing methods for prompt optimization apply the same prompt across all samples . existing methods ignore variation in sample difficulty .
Approach:	They propose a framework that shifts the paradigm from dataset-level to sample-level optimization.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines on 27 tasks and reduces API calls, token consumption and overall cost by 1.2 to 80.

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Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Shitong Duan, Jindong Wang, Yuzhuo Bai, Muhua Huang, Yang Ou, Scarlett Li, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Zhicheng Dou, Maosong Sun, James Evans, Xing Xie

Challenge:	Current evaluation methods for large language models face two key challenges: 1. evaluation validity and 2. Result interpretation reduce the pluralistic and incommensurable values to one-dimensional scores.
Approach:	They propose a platform for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) that provides a generative evaluation paradigm that automatically creates real-world test items co-evolving with ever-advancing LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed platform provides a framework for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) with fine-grained scores and case studies across 27 value dimensions for 33 leading LLMs, customized comparisons, and visualized analysis of LLM’s alignment with cultural values.

When Models Outthink Their Safety: Unveiling and Mitigating Self-Jailbreak in Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Yingzhi Mao, Chunkang Zhang, Junxiang Wang, Xinyan Guan, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

FloorPlan-LLaMa: Aligning Architects’ Feedback and Domain Knowledge in Architectural Floor Plan Generation (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods often apply coarse-grained constraints over entire reasoning trajectories . Existing approaches often apply unsafe constraints, causing unsafe outputs .
Approach:	They propose a trajectory-level training framework that mitigates Self-Jailbreak . they propose 'chain-of-guardrail' to mitigate self-jailbreak by targeting step-level interventions .
Outcome:	The proposed framework mitigates Self-Jailbreak by targeting step-level interventions while maintaining reasoning ability.

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Jun Yin, Pengyu Zeng, Haoyuan Sun, Yuqin Dai, Han Zheng, Miao Zhang, Yachao Zhang, Shuai Lu

Challenge:	Existing evaluation methods for floor plan generation rely on statistical metrics like FID, GED, and PSNR, which fail to evaluate using domain knowledge.
Approach:	They propose to use a first floor plan dataset to train a floor plan generation model based on a multi-dimensional preference score and a textual analysis to integrate architects’ professional expertise and preferences.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baseline models in text-conditional and class-condition tasks and is more rational and aligns better with human preferences.

Eliminating Biased Length Reliance of Direct Preference Optimization via Down-Sampled KL Divergence (2024.emnlp-main)

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Junru Lu, Jiazheng Li, Siyu An, Meng Zhao, Yulan He, Di Yin, Xing Sun

Challenge:	Existing studies attributed verbosity to biased labels, but new research shows that DPO can be effective in mitigating verboses.
Approach:	They propose to use a method to reduce the amount of verbosity in LLMs by using a downsampling approach.
Outcome:	The proposed approach overcomes the problem of verbosity by reducing the length reliance of the proposed algorithm.

NeuSym-RAG: Hybrid Neural Symbolic Retrieval with Multiview Structuring for PDF Question Answering (2025.acl-long)

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Ruisheng Cao, Hanchong Zhang, Tiancheng Huang, Zhangyi Kang, Yuxin Zhang, Liangtai Sun, Hanqi Li, Yuxun Miao, Shuai Fan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu

ChildTalk: A Multi-Dialect Chinese Child Speech Corpus with Full-Length Child–Caregiver Conversations for Speech Recognition (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation neglect PDF structure and layout . individual PDFs often exceed prompt limits and user queries may span multiple documents.
Approach:	They propose a hybrid neural symbolic retrieval framework which combines both paradigms in an interactive process.
Outcome:	The proposed framework organizes semi-structured PDF content into relational database and vectorstore . it defeats both RAG and structured baselines on three PDF-based QA datasets .

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Jiaming Zhou, Yujie Guo, Shiwan Zhao, Yao Lu, Jianye Wang, Haoqin Sun, Hui Wang, Yong Qin

Noisy Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Self-Training for Speculative Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for children remains challenging due to developmental variability and the scarcity of high-quality corpora.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale Chinese child speech corpus that contains 112.5 hours of speech from 498 children and 500 caregivers.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves in-domain and cross-domain performance on children's speech.

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Ruijie Wang, Baoyu Li, Yichen Lu, Dachun Sun, Jinning Li, Yuchen Yan, Shengzhong Liu, Hanghang Tong, Tarek Abdelzaher

The Linguistic Connectivities Within Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	State-of-the-art methods fail in speculative reasoning task on knowledge graphs . state-of the-art approaches assume correctness of fact is determined by its presence in KG .
Approach:	They propose a speculative reasoning task on real-world knowledge graphs . they propose nPUGraph that estimates correctness of both collected and uncollected facts .
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves the robustness of a label posterior-aware graph encoder against false positive links and identifies missing facts to provide high-quality grounds of reasoning.

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Dan Wang, Boxi Cao, Ning Bian, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Le Sun, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han

MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Recent studies have discovered notable disparities in their performance across different languages.
Approach:	They conduct a systematic investigation into the behaviors of large language models across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios and reveals a Linguistic Map correlates with the richness of available resources and linguistic family relations.
Outcome:	The proposed model demonstrates that there are significant disparities in performance across languages across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios.

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Guoli Yin, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Feng Nan, Yanchao Sun, Zhaoyang Xu, Shen Ma, Jiarui Lu, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Dian Ang Yap, Yizhe Zhang, Karsten Ahnert, Vik Kamath, Mathias Berglund, Dominic Walsh, Tobias Gindele, Juergen Wiest, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Jiulong Shan, Meng Cao, Ruoming Pang, Zirui Wang

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes.
Approach:	They propose a Massive Multitask Agent Understanding benchmark that evaluates LLMs across five domains and offline tasks.
Outcome:	The Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark evaluates models across five domains including Tool-use, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA, Data Science and Machine Learning coding, Contest-level programming and Mathematics.

TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos? (2024.findings-acl)

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Yuanxin Liu, Shicheng Li, Yi Liu, Yuxiang Wang, Shuhuai Ren, Lei Li, Sishuo Chen, Xu Sun, Lu Hou

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks on video large language models lack a comprehensive feedback on temporal perception ability . current models cannot distinguish between different temporal aspects and are limited in task formats .
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate temporal perception ability of video large language models . they construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks show that video large language models exhibit poor temporal perception ability.

READoc: A Unified Benchmark for Realistic Document Structured Extraction (2025.findings-acl)

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Zichao Li, Aizier Abulaiti, Yaojie Lu, Xuanang Chen, Jia Zheng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Le Sun

FIPO: Free-form Instruction-oriented Prompt Optimization with Preference Dataset and Modular Fine-tuning Schema (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Document Structured Extraction (DSE) is a field of document structure analysis that aims to extract structured content from raw documents.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate document structured extraction systems by converting unstructured PDFs into semantically rich Markdown.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark is based on 3,576 diverse and real-world documents from arXiv, GitHub, and Zenodo.

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Junru Lu, Siyu An, Min Zhang, Yulan He, Di Yin, Xing Sun

Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	naive prompts can enhance the task performance of large language models, but they are resource-intensive.
Approach:	They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that refines naive prompts according to task outputs from in-box testing models.
Outcome:	The proposed method is based on a large-scale dataset and performed fairly across multiple models.

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Yiquan Wu, Siying Zhou, Yifei Liu, Weiming Lu, Xiaozhong Liu, Yating Zhang, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task.
Approach:	They propose a framework that leverages the strength of both LLMs and domain-specific models in the context of precedents.
Outcome:	The proposed framework leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents.

Text2Event: Controllable Sequence-to-Structure Generation for End-to-end Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)

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Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jin Xu, Xianpei Han, Jialong Tang, Annan Li, Le Sun, Meng Liao, Shaoyi Chen

FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods to extract event records from text decompose complex structure prediction task into multiple subtasks.
Approach:	They propose a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can extract events from text . they propose unified event extraction, constrained decoding algorithm and curriculum learning algorithm .
Outcome:	The proposed method can achieve competitive performance using record-level annotations in both supervised learning and transfer learning settings.

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Yingjia Wan, Haochen Tan, Xiao Zhu, Xinyu Zhou, Zhiwei Li, Qingsong Lv, Changxuan Sun, Jiaqi Zeng, Yi Xu, Jianqiao Lu, Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo

DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Prior evaluation pipelines fail to evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs due to inefficiency and costly human assessment.
Approach:	They propose a fast and strong evaluation pipeline that can evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs . they propose 'faStFact' to reduce cost of web searching and inference calling .
Outcome:	The proposed evaluation pipeline achieves highest alignment with human evaluation and efficiency among existing baselines.

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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.

OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulation (2026.acl-long)

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Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Wenbo Li, Amirali Amini, Bo Sun, Yakov Bart, Weimin Lyu, Jiri Gesi, Tian Wang, Jing Huang, Yu Su, Upol Ehsan, Malihe Alikhani, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Lydia Chilton, Dakuo Wang

Challenge:	evaluating LLMs' ability to mimic real user behavior remains an open challenge due to the lack of high-quality, publicly available datasets that capture both the observable actions and the internal reasoning of an actual user.
Approach:	They propose a dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action collected from real human participants during online shopping sessions.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is the first to evaluate how well current LLMs can accurately simulate the next web action of a specific user.

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

Robustness in NLP

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

Syntactic and Semantic-driven Learning for Open Information Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)

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.

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Jialong Tang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Xinyan Xiao, Hua Wu

HiChunk: Evaluating and Enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Chunking (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the supervised counterparts, and can even achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art (SoA) model.
Approach:	They propose a syntactic and semantic-driven learning approach that can learn open IE models without human-labelled data by leveraging syntakic and semantic knowledge as noisier, higher-level supervision.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms supervised counterparts and can achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art models.

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Wensheng Lu, Keyu Chen, Zhifeng Shen, Ruizhi Qiao, Xing Sun

Meta-Cognitive Analysis: Evaluating Declarative and Procedural Knowledge in Datasets and Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation benchmarks for document chunking are inadequate due to evidence sparsity . evaluators are unable to evaluate different chunking methods due to the evidence sparing .
Approach:	They propose a QA benchmark for document chunking and a hierarchical document structuring framework for it.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves document chunking quality within reasonable time consumption.

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Zhuoqun Li, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Hao Xiang, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Debiasing In-Context Learning by Instructing LLMs How to Follow Demonstrations (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models have push NLP into a new era, moving away from traditional task-specific pre-train finetuning paradigm.
Approach:	They provide a comprehensive analysis of declarative and procedural knowledge for large language models and evaluate their effectiveness.
Outcome:	The proposed model can perform better with both kinds of knowledge, but at different speeds.

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Lvxue Li, Jiaqi Chen, Xinyu Lu, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Unraveling Feature Extraction Mechanisms in Neural Networks (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	In-context learning (ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability.
Approach:	They propose to de-biase demonstration bias in in-context learning by focusing on semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations and reducing the semantic hazard.
Outcome:	The proposed methods significantly improve performance on six datasets.

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Xiaobing Sun, Jiaxi Li, Wei Lu

Reflective RAG: Self-Evaluation Driven Strategy Optimization in Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Neural networks have become indispensable across a variety of natural language processing tasks.
Approach:	They propose a theoretical approach based on Neural Tangent Kernels to investigate neural networks' internal mechanisms.
Outcome:	The proposed approach can be applied to analyze language modeling tasks . it shows that the choice of activation function can affect feature extraction .

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Haiyan Wu, Chenchen Wang, Chaoqun Sun, Chengxiong Lu, Yan-Hong Chen, Zhiqiang Zhang, Xiaoqing Feng

Self-Steering Optimization: Autonomous Preference Optimization for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent agentic RAG systems lack the capacity to evaluate the utility of retrieved information, leading to brittle reasoning and suboptimal decision-making.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates self-evaluation to dynamically optimize retrieval and generation strategy.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms strong agentic baselines on five knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks and improves training stability and generalization to multi-hop reasoning tasks.

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Hao Xiang, Bowen Yu, Hongyu Lin, Keming Lu, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Le Sun, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin

Robust Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Adversarial Denoising Training (2020.coling-main)

Challenge:	Prior research focused on developing data generation methods, while insufficient attention has been paid to quality control mechanisms and often produces inaccurate and unhelpful data.
Approach:	They propose an algorithm that automatically generates high-quality preference data, eliminating manual annotation requirements.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm outperforms baselines in human preference alignment and reward optimization.

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Haipeng Sun, Rui Wang, Kehai Chen, Xugang Lu, Masao Utiyama, Eiichiro Sumita, Tiejun Zhao

Transferable Post-training via Inverse Value Learning (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) has attracted great interest in the machine translation community.
Approach:	They propose to explicitly take noisy data into consideration to improve the robustness of UNMT based systems.
Outcome:	The proposed methods significantly improved the robustness of the conventional UNMT systems in noisy scenarios.

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Xinyu Lu, Xueru Wen, Yaojie Lu, Bowen Yu, Hongyu Lin, Haiyang Yu, Le Sun, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li

Streaming Hallucination Detection in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing algorithms for post-training large datasets are requiring a large computational effort.
Approach:	They propose to model the changes at logits level during post-training using a separate neural network . they demonstrate that the value network can be seamlessly integrated with another pre-trained model .
Outcome:	The proposed model can be integrated with another pre-trained model during inference, enabling similar capability enhancements.

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Haolang Lu, Minghui Pan, Ripeng LI, Guoshun Nan, Jialin Zhuang, Zijie Zhao, Zhongxiang Sun, Kun Wang, Yang Liu

MONTROSE: LLM-driven Monte Carlo Tree Search Self-Refinement for Cross-Domain Rumor Detection (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Long chain-of-thought reasoning improves performance of large language models, yet hallucinations in such settings often emerge subtly and propagate across reasoning steps.
Approach:	They propose to treat step-level hallucination judgments as local observations and introduce a cumulative prefix-level signal that tracks the global evolution of the reasoning state over the entire trajectory.
Outcome:	The proposed method enables streaming hallucination detection in long CoT reasoning, providing real-time, interpretable evidence.

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Shanshan Liu, Menglong Lu, Zhen Huang, Zejiang He, Liu Liu, Zhigang Sun, Dongsheng Li

ViDove: A Translation Agent System with Multimodal Context and Memory-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-demos)

Challenge:	Existing feature alignment methods are susceptible to task interference during training.
Approach:	MONTROSE is a cross-domain rumor detection method that generates high-quality synthetic data for the target domain and a domain-sharpness-aware approach to train models with these synthetic data.
Outcome:	Experiments show that MONTROSE improves in cross-domain rumor detection.

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Yichen Lu, Wei Dai, Jiaen Liu, Ching Wing Kwok, Zongheng Wu, Xudong Xiao, Ao Sun, Sheng Fu, Jianyuan Zhan, Yian Wang, Takatomo Saito, Sicheng Lai

Machine Translation

Challenge:	Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in Machine Translation (MT) tasks.
Approach:	They propose a translation agent system designed for multimodal input that leverages visual and contextual background information to enhance the translation process.
Outcome:	The proposed translation agent achieves significantly higher translation quality in subtitle generation and general translation tasks compared to previous state-of-the-art systems.

Rule or Story, Which is a Better Commonsense Expression for Talking with Large Language Models? (2024.acl-long)

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Ning Bian, Xianpei Han, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Ben He, Le Sun

On the Editability of Delta Parameters in Post-Trained Models (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that stories outperform rules as the expression for retrieving commonsense from LLMs, exhibiting higher generation confidence and commonsensense accuracy.
Approach:	They investigate the commonsense ability of large language models expressed through stories and rules to retrieve commonsensing knowledge from LLMs.
Outcome:	The stories outperform rules as commonsense expressions on 28 commonsensense QA datasets, exhibiting higher generation confidence and commonsence accuracy.

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Qiaoyu Tang, Le Yu, Bowen Yu, Hongyu Lin, Keming Lu, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

AutoAlign: Get Your LLM Aligned with Minimal Annotations (2025.acl-demo)

Challenge:	Several studies have explored delta parameter properties via pruning, quantization, low-rank approximation, and extrapolation, but what properties of delta parameters are essential for maintaining performance?
Approach:	They propose to examine delta parameter properties along magnitude and sign . they propose to use a loss-based local surrogate analysis to examine editing effects .
Outcome:	The proposed analysis shows that delta parameters can be edited while maintaining performance.

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Xinyu Lu, Dong Xu, Chunkang Zhang, Xinyan Guan, Junxiang Wang, Qingyu Zhang, Pengbo Wang, Yingzhi Mao, Hao Xiang, Xueru Wen, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han

User Feedback Alignment for LLM-powered Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2025.acl-industry)

Challenge:	Automated Alignment (ALM) is a set of algorithms designed to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intentions and values while minimizing manual intervention.
Approach:	They propose an open-source toolkit that integrates mainstream automated algorithms through a consistent interface and an accessible workflow supporting one-click execution for prompt synthesis and automatic alignment signal construction.
Outcome:	The proposed framework enables easy reproduction of existing results through extensive benchmarks and facilitates the development of novel approaches via modular components.

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Jianling Wang, Yifan Liu, Yinghao Sun, Xuejian Ma, Yueqi Wang, He Ma, Zhengyang Su, Minmin Chen, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Ningren Han, Haokai Lu

One vs. Many QA Matching with both Word-level and Sentence-level Attention Network (C18-1)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to broaden user experiences beyond established preferences and reinforce feedback loops.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical approach that combines hierarchic planning with LLM inference-time scaling to improve recommendation relevancy without compromising novelty.
Outcome:	The proposed approach shows significant gains in both user satisfaction and exploration diversity.

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Lu Wang, Shoushan Li, Changlong Sun, Luo Si, Xiaozhong Liu, Min Zhang, Guodong Zhou

Question Answering

Challenge:	Existing studies on question answer matching focus on formal text . however, there exists many scenarios where the QA text is informal .
Approach:	They propose a novel QA matching approach using informal text from a product review site.
Outcome:	The proposed approach improves word-level and sentence-level attentions for solving the noisy problem in the informal text.

Narrative Order Aware Story Generation via Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Zhicong Lu, Li Jin, Guangluan Xu, Linmei Hu, Nayu Liu, Xiaoyu Li, Xian Sun, Zequn Zhang, Kaiwen Wei

Expanding the Boundaries of Vision Prior Knowledge in Multi-modal Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing storytelling systems suffer from insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order.
Approach:	They propose a narrative order aware framework to generate coherent stories with flashbacks . they propose 'bidirectional pretraining model with Optimal Transport Reward' to improve quality .
Outcome:	The proposed framework generates coherent stories with flashbacks with a novel optimal transport reward.

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Qiao Liang, Yanjiang Liu, Weixiang Zhou, Ben He, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Yingfei Sun

Anaphor Assisted Document-Level Relation Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, but the impact of vision encoder’s prior knowledge is seldom investigated.
Approach:	They propose a metric to quantify the effect of prior knowledge on MLLM performance by integrating prior knowledge at the vision encoder level into a training framework.
Outcome:	The proposed training framework incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level, and significantly boosts visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs.

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Chonggang Lu, Richong Zhang, Kai Sun, Jaein Kim, Cunwang Zhang, Yongyi Mao

Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for document-level relation extraction are incomplete and lack anaphor for identifying relations between entities.
Approach:	They propose an Anaphor-Assisted (AA) framework for document-level relation extraction . they use a document or sentences as intermediate nodes to model cross-sentence entity interactions .
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the widely-used datasets.

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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

Text Generation

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities.
Approach:	They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset.

AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustrations via Reference-Guided Styling (2026.acl-demo)

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Zhen Lin, Qiujie Xie, Minjun Zhu, Shichen Li, QiYao Sun, Enhao Gu, Yiran Ding, Ke Sun, Fang Guo, Panzhong Lu, Zhiyuan Ning, Yixuan Weng, Yue Zhang

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Existing automated systems for scientific illustrations are limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency.
Approach:	They propose an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images.
Outcome:	The proposed system generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific texts while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images.

Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Yijia Xiao, Wanjia Zhao, Junkai Zhang, Yiqiao Jin, Han Zhang, Zhicheng Ren, Renliang Sun, Haixin Wang, Guancheng Wan, Pan Lu, Xiao Luo, Yu Zhang, James Zou, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang

Knowing When to Quit: Diagnosing and Training LLMs to Abort Futile Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on specific aspects or applications, but this study provides a comprehensive overview of Protein-specific large language models.
Approach:	This paper proposes a structured taxonomy of state-of-the-art ProteinLLMs . they analyze how they leverage large-scale protein sequence data for improved accuracy .
Outcome:	The proposed model covers their architectures, training datasets, evaluation metrics, and diverse applications.

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Xinyan Guan, Jiali Zeng, Chunlei Xin, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Fandong Meng

Beyond the Context Window: Scaling Agentic RL via End-to-end Optimized Context Compression (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models generate costly yet semantically void reasoning on beyond-capability tasks . the dominant failure mode is specious reasoning, superficially valid outputs with subtle hallucinations .
Approach:	They propose a capability-aligned reinforcement learning approach that aligns model behavior with capability boundaries.
Outcome:	The proposed model reduces futile reasoning while maintaining performance across tasks.

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Miao Lu, Weiwei Sun, Weihua Du, Zhan Ling, Xuesong Yao, Kang Liu, Jiecao Chen

Summarization

Challenge:	Existing reinforcement learning pipelines suffer from degraded instruction following, excessive rollout costs, and strict context limits.
Approach:	They propose a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon multi-turn tool use where context length quickly becomes a bottleneck.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves the success rate while maintaining the same or even lower working context length compared to baselines.

Open Grounded Planning: Challenges and Benchmark Construction (2024.acl-long)

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Shiguang Guo, Ziliang Deng, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Challenge:	Existing work on LLM-based planning uses language generation to produce free-style plans . however, these plans are not grounded in an executable set of actions .
Approach:	They propose a new task for open grounded planning that asks the model to generate an executable plan based on a variable action set.
Outcome:	The proposed task is open grounded planning, which is based on a set of variables.

Optimizing Native Sparse Attention with Latent Attention and Local Global Alternating Strategies (2026.findings-acl)

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Yuxuan Hu, Jianchao Tan, Jiaqi Zhang, Wen Zan, Pingwei Sun, Yifan Lu, Xunliang Cai, Jing Zhang

Grammar-Based Code Representation: Is It a Worthy Pursuit for LLMs? (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing research has proposed a variety of training-free and post-training methods for selecting critical key-value pairs at each generation step.
Approach:	They propose to use local (sliding-window) and global (compression/selective) attention across layers to enlarge long-context modeling.
Outcome:	Experiments on models from 340M to 1.3B parameters show that the proposed method matches or exceeds full attention and native sparse attention in both common-sense reasoning and long-context understanding tasks.

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Qingyuan Liang, Zhao Zhang, Zeyu Sun, Zheng Lin, Qi Luo, Xiao Yueyi, Yizhou Chen, Yuqun Zhang, Haotian Zhang, Lu Zhang, Chenbin Chenbin, Yingfei Xiong

Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing research demonstrates the effectiveness of grammar-based code representations in small-scale models, showing their ability to reduce syntax errors and enhance performance.
Approach:	They develop a series of billion-scale grammar-based code representations that incorporate grammar rules into the code generation process.
Outcome:	Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that grammar-based representations reduce syntax errors and improve performance even in billion-scale models.

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Qiyue Gao, Xinyu Pi, Kevin Liu, Junrong Chen, Ruolan Yang, Xinqi Huang, Xinyu Fang, Lu Sun, Gautham Kishore, Bo Ai, Stone Tao, Mengyang Liu, Jiaxi Yang, Chao-Jung Lai, Chuanyang Jin, Jiannan Xiang, Benhao Huang, Zeming Chen, David Danks, Hao Su, Tianmin Shu, Ziqiao Ma, Lianhui Qin, Zhiting Hu

PPTAgent: Generating and Evaluating Presentations Beyond Text-to-Slides (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent studies have evaluated and shown limitations in specific capabilities such as visual understanding, but a systematic evaluation of VLMs’ fundamental WM abilities remains absent.
Approach:	They propose a framework that assesses perception and prediction to provide an atomic evaluation of VLMs as WMs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework assesses perception and prediction abilities on 15 latest VLMs and compares them to human-level models.

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Hao Zheng, Xinyan Guan, Hao Kong, Wenkai Zhang, Jia Zheng, Weixiang Zhou, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Interpret and Improve In-Context Learning via the Lens of Input-Label Mappings (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for generating presentations from documents focus on improving and evaluating content quality in isolation, overlooking visual appeal and structural coherence.
Approach:	They propose an edit-based presentation generation system that analyzes and iterates on slides to create new slides.
Outcome:	The proposed presentation generation tool outperforms existing methods in three dimensions . it analyzes slides, iterates and generates edit actions based on selected slides .

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Chenghao Sun, Zhen Huang, Yonggang Zhang, Le Lu, Houqiang Li, Xinmei Tian, Xu Shen, Jieping Ye

Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models excel at downstream NLP tasks through in-context learning . however, the internal mechanisms behind ICL remain under-explored .
Approach:	They propose a PC patching approach to identify modules where input-label mappings function . they observe and verify that key heads utilize input-labeled mappings to generate target labels for new queries.
Outcome:	The proposed approach detects modules where input-label mappings function . it also detects that key heads use the mappings to generate labels for new queries .

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Yaxi Lu, Haolun Li, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Fangming Liu, Maosong Sun

Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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.

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Senjie Jin, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Sirui Song, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbo Zhang, Peng Sun, Hong Lu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Rethinking Creativity Evaluation: A Critical Analysis of Existing Creativity Evaluations (2026.eacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python.
Approach:	They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability.
Outcome:	The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline.

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Li-Chun Lu, Miri Liu, Pin Chun Lu, Yufei Tian, Shao-Hua Sun, Nanyun Peng

Syntactic Text Processing

Challenge:	Creativity measures that distinguish creativity in one domain fail in others, and different metrics disagree on the same data points.
Approach:	They examine, analyze, and compare four representative creativity measures across the diverse creative domains, including creative writing, unconventional problem-solving, and research ideation.
Outcome:	The measures of creativity across creative domains are compared using a set of human-aligned examples and lack consistency across domains and metrics.

TESTA: Temporal-Spatial Token Aggregation for Long-form Video-Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Shuhuai Ren, Sishuo Chen, Shicheng Li, Xu Sun, Lu Hou

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Experimental results show that TESTA reduces the number of visual tokens by 75% and thus accelerates video encoding.
Approach:	They propose a method to condense video semantics by aggregating similar frames and patches within each frame.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces visual tokens by 75% and accelerates video encoding.

Parameter-Efficient Conversational Recommender System as a Language Processing Task (2024.eacl-long)

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Mathieu Ravaut, Hao Zhang, Lu Xu, Aixin Sun, Yong Liu

Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to recommend items are categorized into attribute-based and generation-based methods.
Approach:	They propose to represent items in natural language and formulate a conversational recommender system that can be optimized in a single stage without relying on non-textual metadata.
Outcome:	The proposed model can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph.

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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang

Speech & Audio in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level.
Approach:	They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set.

A Role-Selected Sharing Network for Joint Machine-Human Chatting Handoff and Service Satisfaction Analysis (2021.emnlp-main)

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Jiawei Liu, Kaisong Song, Yangyang Kang, Guoxiu He, Zhuoren Jiang, Changlong Sun, Wei Lu, Xiaozhong Liu

Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent efforts to predict chatbot failure hatches vital apprehensions due to complexity of human conversation.
Approach:	They propose a model that integrates dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework.
Outcome:	The proposed model integrates dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework.

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Zichao Li, Shaojie He, Meng Liao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Yanxiong Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Challenge:	Document logical structuring is crucial for document intelligence due to the complexity of text segment dependencies in the document.
Approach:	They propose an end-to-end, generation-based method for document logical structuring that generates the action sequence via a global context-aware generative model and updates its global context and current logical structure based on the generated actions.
Outcome:	Experiments on ChCatExt and HierDoc datasets show that Seg2Act performs better than previous methods in both supervised and transfer learning settings.

Sequence-to-Nuggets: Nested Entity Mention Detection via Anchor-Region Networks (P19-1)

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DPGA-TextSyn: Differentially Private Genetic Algorithm for Synthetic Text Generation (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Named entity recognition (NER) approaches restrict each word belonging to at most one entity mention.
Approach:	They propose to model and leverage the head-driven phrase structures of entity mentions to solve this problem.
Outcome:	The proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art on three standard nested entity mention detection benchmarks.

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Zhonghao Sun, Zhiliang Tian, Yiping Song, Yuyi Si, Juhua Zhang, Minlie Huang, Kai Lu, Zeyu Xiong, Xinwang Liu, Dongsheng Li

Ethical NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods to fine-tune large language models pose privacy risks . researchers have synthesized data with strong generation capabilities closed-source LLMs to alleviate this problem .
Approach:	They propose to combine general LLMs with genetic algorithm to produce relevant and diverse synthetic text under differential privacy constraints.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly improves the performance of the model in downstream tasks while ensuring privacy.

Fusion Makes Perfection: An Efficient Multi-Grained Matching Approach for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (2024.naacl-short)

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Shilong Li, Ge Bai, Zhang Zhang, Ying Liu, Chenji Lu, Daichi Guo, Ruifang Liu, Sun Yong

Legal Judgment Prediction based on Knowledge-enhanced Multi-Task and Multi-Label Text Classification (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to extract unseen relations require laborious manual annotation . a new approach uses fine-grained matching to reduce manual annotation cost .
Approach:	They propose an efficient multi-grained matching approach that uses virtual entity matching to reduce manual annotation cost.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves inference efficiency and accuracy in zero-shot relation extraction tasks.

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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Ming Cai, Adam Jatowt, Xiang Zhou, Weiming Lu, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang

Two Issues with Chinese Spelling Correction and A Refinement Solution (2024.acl-short)

Challenge:	Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is an essential task for legal AI, aiming at predicting judgments based on the facts of a case.
Approach:	They propose a knowledge-enhanced approach that incorporates 'label-level knowledge' to enhance the representation of case facts for each task and 'task-level' knowledge to improve synergy.
Outcome:	The proposed method is effective in comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines.

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Changxuan Sun, Linlin She, Xuesong Lu

Advancing Sequential Numerical Prediction in Autoregressive Models (2025.acl-short)

Challenge:	Existing models contain many spelling errors, resulting in performance bottlenecks and performance issues.
Approach:	They propose to fix the SIGHAN datasets and re-evaluate four representative Chinese Spelling Correction models using the fixed datasets.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves the models in all metrics by notable margins.

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Xiang Fei, Jinghui Lu, Qi Sun, Hao Feng, Yanjie Wang, Wei Shi, An-Lan Wang, Jingqun Tang, Can Huang

Challenge:	Autoregressive models are the de facto choice for sequence generation tasks, but standard approaches treat digits as independent tokens and apply cross-entropy loss, overlooking the coherent structure of numerical sequences.
Approach:	They propose a novel approach to entropy loss by extending the Earth Mover’s Distance to preserve ordinal relationships between numerical values and sequence-level to penalize the overall discrepancy between predicted and actual sequences.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments show that NTIL improves numerical prediction and integrates effectively with LLMs/MLLMs.

From Discourse to Narrative: Knowledge Projection for Event Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)

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Jialong Tang, Hongyu Lin, Meng Liao, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weijian Xie, Jin Xu

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing event-centric knowledge graphs rely on explicit connectives to extract relations between events.
Approach:	They propose a knowledge projection paradigm for event relation extraction using commonalities between events.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and extrinsic results verify the extracted event relations.

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Yifei Li, Hanane Nour Moussa, Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Botao Yu, Mingyi Xue, Benjamin Burns, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Vishal Dey, Zitong Lu, Chen Wei, Qianheng Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Song Gao, Xuhui Huang, Xia Ning, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Huan Sun

Beyond Query Bias: Candidate-Aware Iterative Refinement for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery.
Approach:	They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows.
Outcome:	The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages.

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Nan Sun, Jing Tang, Lei Sun, Rui Chen, Yuxing Lu, Xiangxiang Chu, Hefei Ling, Yujun Cai

Cheems: A Practical Guidance for Building and Evaluating Chinese Reward Models from Scratch (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to retrieve target images suffer from inherent cognitive bias due to unknown candidate distribution.
Approach:	They propose a training-free framework that reframes ZS-CIR as a self-correcting process . they propose to use retrieved results as feedback to perceive the candidate distribution .
Outcome:	Experiments on public benchmarks show that CoRR outperforms other SOTA methods.

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Xueru Wen, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, XingYu XingYu, Yuqiu Ji, Guohai Xu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Debing Zhang

Challenge:	Existing Chinese resources are small in scale and limited to specific domains, making them insufficient for LLM post-training.
Approach:	They propose a Chinese-annotated reward model and a preference dataset to address this gap . they evaluate Chinese RMs on CheemsBench and construct an RM that captures human preferences .
Outcome:	The proposed RM achieves state-of-the-art performance on CheemsBench and CheeMePreference.

Focus-aware Response Generation in Inquiry Conversation (2023.findings-acl)

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Yiquan Wu, Weiming Lu, Yating Zhang, Adam Jatowt, Jun Feng, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang

Chain-of-Rewrite: Aligning Question and Documents for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies on response generation focus on relevance and fluency, rarely paying attention to the focus.
Approach:	They propose a Focus-aware response generation method that takes the focus into consideration and optimizes a multi-level encoder and focal decoder to generate multiple candidate responses.
Outcome:	The proposed method generates candidate responses that correspond to different focuses and performs better on two orthogonal inquiry conversation datasets.

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Chunlei Xin, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

CAT-probing: A Metric-based Approach to Interpret How Pre-trained Models for Programming Language Attend Code Structure (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to answer open-domain question have encountered term mismatch and limited interaction between IR systems and large language models.
Approach:	They propose a method which leverages the guidance and feedback gained from the analysis to provide faithful and consistent extensions for effective question answering.
Outcome:	Experiments on four open-domain question answering datasets show the proposed method performs well under zero-shot settings.

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Nuo Chen, Qiushi Sun, Renyu Zhu, Xiang Li, Xuesong Lu, Ming Gao

Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information (D19-1)

Challenge:	Existing code pre-trained models fail to consider inherent characteristics of codes . Existing methods to interpret code pretrained model fail to take into account inherent characteristics .
Approach:	They propose a probing method to quantitatively interpret how CodePTMs attend code structure.
Outcome:	The proposed method denoises input code sequences and measures commonality between token-level attention scores and pair-wise distances between corresponding AST nodes.

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Hsiu-Wei Yang, Yanyan Zou, Peng Shi, Wei Lu, Jimmy Lin, Xu Sun

From Informal to Formal – Incorporating and Evaluating LLMs on Natural Language Requirements to Verifiable Formal Proofs (2025.acl-long)

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.

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Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Meiziniu Li, Haoyang Ma, Haokun Li, Mengda He, Cheng Wen, Le Sun, Hongyu Zhang, Shengchao Qin, Shing-Chi Cheung, Cong Tian

Minimally-Supervised Relation Induction from Pre-trained Language Model (2022.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Recent studies in formal mathematical reasoning have shown an unstoppable growth trend.
Approach:	They constructed 18k high-quality instruction-response pairs across five mainstream formal specification languages and evaluated them against ten open-sourced LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed model compared instruction-response pairs across five formal specification languages and found that the LLMs were good at writing proof segments when given either the code, or the detailed description of proof steps.

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Lu Sun, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu

Cost-sensitive Regularization for Label Confusion-aware Event Detection (P19-1)

Challenge:	Existing methods to induce relation in NLP depend heavily on word embeddings.
Approach:	They propose a method to induce relation with BERT under minimal supervision . they first extract proper templates from corpus and then use BERT attention weights to represent the pseudo-sentences.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in relation induction tasks on Google Analogy Test Sets, Bigger Analogy test set (BATS) and DiffVec.

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Improving Contextual Query Rewrite for Conversational AI Agents through User-preference Feedback Learning (2023.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Recent advances in event detection focus on wordwise classification with one NIL class for tokens do not trigger any event.
Approach:	They propose a cost-sensitive regularization method which penalizes more on mislabeling . they propose two estimators which can effectively measure such label confusion based on instance-level statistics .
Outcome:	The proposed method can improve the performance of different models in English and Chinese event detection.

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Zhongkai Sun, Yingxue Zhou, Jie Hao, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Chengyuan Ma, Wei Shen, Chenlei Guo

Gazetteer-Enhanced Attentive Neural Networks for Named Entity Recognition (D19-1)

Challenge:	Contextual query rewriting (CQR) is a crucial component in Conversational AI agents, leveraging contextual information from previous user-agent conversations to improve comprehension of current user intent.
Approach:	They propose a framework to enhance the CQR model's capability in generating user preference-aligned rewrites.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves the CQR model's ability to generate user preference-aligned rewrites.

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Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Bin Dong, Shanshan Jiang

Nugget Proposal Networks for Chinese Event Detection (P18-1)

Challenge:	Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental NLP task.
Approach:	They propose a gazetteer-based attentive neural network which can enhance region-based NER . they first model the mention-context association and then an auxiliary gazetteers .
Outcome:	The proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art on ACE2005 named entity recognition benchmark.

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DongbaMIE: A Multimodal Information Extraction Dataset for Evaluating Semantic Understanding of Dongba Pictograms (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Nugget Proposal Networks (NPNs) can solve word-trigger mismatch problem . word-wise event detection models suffer from word-tree mismatch because of multiple triggers .
Approach:	They propose a novel way to detect event triggers in a character-wise paradigm . they propose entire trigger nuggets centered at each character regardless of word boundaries .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two datasets.

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Xiaojun Bi, Shuo Li, Junyao Xing, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Weizheng Qiao, Lu Han, Ziwei Sun, Peng Li, Yang Liu

Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Dongba pictographic is the only pictograph script still in use in the world.
Approach:	DongbaMIE is the first dataset focusing on multimodal information extraction of Dongbe pictographs.
Outcome:	The dataset contains 23,530 sentence-level and 2,539 paragraph-level high-quality text-image pairs.

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Shuo Li, Jiajun Sun, Guodong Zheng, Xiaoran Fan, Yujiong Shen, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Yuming Yang, Wenming Tan, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

BILLY: Steering Large Language Models via Merging Persona Vectors for Creative Generation (2026.eacl-long)

Challenge:	Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations.
Approach:	They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures.

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Tsung-Min Pai, Jui-I Wang, Li-Chun Lu, Shao-Hua Sun, Hung-yi Lee, Kai-Wei Chang

Asynchronous Convergence in Multi-Task Learning via Knowledge Distillation from Converged Tasks (2022.naacl-industry)

Challenge:	Multi-LLM systems enhance creativity of large language models by simulating human collective intelligence but suffer from significant drawbacks, such as high computational costs and inference latency.
Approach:	They propose a training-free framework that captures the benefits of multi-LLM collaboration by extracting and blending multiple distinct persona vectors directly in the model’s activation space.
Outcome:	The proposed framework surpasses model prompting and traditional multi-LLM approaches while significantly reducing inference time and computational costs.

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Weiyi Lu, Sunny Rajagopalan, Priyanka Nigam, Jaspreet Singh, Xiaodi Sun, Yi Xu, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi

AiraXiv: An AI-Driven Open-Access Platform for Human and AI Scientists (2026.acl-demo)

Challenge:	Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to solve multiple tasks by sharing a base representation among them.
Approach:	They propose an approach that allows for "asynchronous" convergence among the tasks where each task can converge on its own schedule.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing methods in two 5-task MTL setups.

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Junshu Pan, Panzhong Lu, Yixuan Weng, QiYao Sun, Fang Guo, Zijie Yang, Qiji Zhou, Yue Zhang

Challenge:	Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated the growth of both human-authored and AI-generated research outputs.
Approach:	They propose an AI-driven open-access platform built on open preprints, AI-augmented analysis and review, and reader feedback.
Outcome:	The proposed platform supports human scientists through an interactive UI and AI scientists through Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based interactions.

CRUXEVAL-X: A Benchmark for Multilingual Code Reasoning, Understanding and Execution (2025.acl-long)

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Ruiyang Xu, Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Ming Wen, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Shing-Chi Cheung, Le Sun

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Existing code benchmarks focus on code generation, while those for code reasoning are insufficient.
Approach:	They propose a multi-lingual code reasoning benchmark that contains 19 programming languages and at least 600 subjects for each language.
Outcome:	The proposed model trains on Python and achieves 34.4% Pass@1 in other languages, revealing the cross-language generalization of LLMs.

More Than Sum of Its Parts: Deciphering Intent Shifts in Multimodal Hate Speech Detection (2026.findings-acl)

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Runze Sun, Yu Zheng, Zexuan Xiong, Zhongjin Qu, Lei Chen, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu

SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing systems struggle with multimodal content where the emergent meaning transcends the aggregation of individual modalities.
Approach:	They propose a framework to characterize semantic intent shifts where modalities interact to construct implicit hate from benign cues or neutralize toxicity through semantic inversion.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on H-VLI and on established benchmarks.

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Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang

Sparse Latents Steer Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences.
Approach:	They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs.

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Chunlei Xin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Xuanang Chen, Xinyan Guan, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Improved Sparse Upcycling for Instruction Tuning (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	In this study, we uncover interpretable latents that govern RAG behavior in large language models . Sparse Autoencoders are used to control large language model (LLM) behavior .
Approach:	They leverage Sparse Autoencoders within the LLaMA Scope to uncover latents that govern RAG behaviors.
Outcome:	The proposed model can be used to control large language models without architectural modifications.

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Wangyi Jiang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for sparse upcycling lead to performance degradation in instruction tuning scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a representation-based approach to convert dense language models into sparsely activated ones by initializing router weights from language models.
Outcome:	The proposed architecture improves model capabilities and routing consistency across multiple benchmarks.

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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

SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains.
Approach:	They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries.
Outcome:	The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark.

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Hui Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Yifan Yang, Shujie Liu, Junyang Chen, Yanzhe Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Jinyu Li, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Yan Lu, Yong Qin

SoFA: Shielded On-the-fly Alignment via Priority Rule Following (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks.
Approach:	They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages.

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Xinyu Lu, Bowen Yu, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Haiyang Yu, Le Sun, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li