Papers by Ming Zhang
MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haowei Liu, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Yaya Shi, Chaoya Jiang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC. |
HEAL: Hybrid Enhancement with LLM-based Agents for Text-attributed Hypergraph Self-supervised Representation Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance text-attributed hypergraph self-supervised learning are limited by label scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that leverages large language models to enhance hypergraph self-supervised learning by integrating hyperedges into a self-representation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates informative nodes and hyperedges through multi-round interaction with LLM-based agents. |
LECO: Improving Early Exiting via Learned Exits and Comparison-based Exiting Mechanism (2023.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on dynamic early exiting has neglected the intermediate exits’ architectural designs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for learning exits and COmparison-based early exiting to improve PTMs’ early exit performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the SOTA performance on multi-exit BERT training and dynamic early exiting on pre-trained models. |
Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Jiang, Jiahao Chen, Zhenghao Xiang, Zhixiong Yang, Hanchen Wang, Jiabao Zhuang, Xinmeng Che, Jiajun Sun, Hui Li, Yifei Cao, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Junjie Ye, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, but academic research remains non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning that includes a licensed synthetic dataset and a song generation model, Muse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text–music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. |
R2A-TLS: Reflective Retrieval-Augmented Timeline Summarization with Causal-Semantic Integration (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to capture coherent event narratives due to fragmented descriptions . Existing approaches accumulate noise through iterative retrieval strategies that lack relevance evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reflective retrieval-augmented timeline summarization with Causal-Semantic Intergration approach for open-domain timeline summarizing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the best prior published approaches. |
LCR-RAG: Enhancing Logical Consistency in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Neuro-symbolic Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to ground large language models in external knowledge and improve factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates neuro-symbolic verification with reinforcement learning to optimize logical consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong RAG baselines on hotpotQA, ASQA, and TriviaQA. |
SumSurvey: An Abstractive Dataset of Scientific Survey Papers for Long Document Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a growing need for long document summarization datasets with 16k input is causing problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze salient information in long document summarizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models and LLMs in the distribution form of salient information and the distribution of salinal information is an indicator of quality. |
Safe: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via Retrospective Step-aware Formal Verification (2025.acl-long)
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Chengwu Liu, Ye Yuan, Yichun Yin, Yan Xu, Xin Xu, Zaoyu Chen, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting is a de facto method to elicit reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a step-aware formal verification framework Safe to address hallucinations in CoT prompting . they propose 'formal step' as a benchmark for step correctness theorem proving with 30,809 formal statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant performance improvement while offering interpretable and verifiable evidence. |
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. |
Enhancing the Context Representation in Similarity-based Word Sense Disambiguation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing similarity-based systems focus on learning sense embeddings using only the sentence where the word appears, neglecting its global context. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextoriented embedding technique that takes better advantage of both word-level and sense-level global context of an ambiguous word for disambiguation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on all-words WSD benchmarks in knowledge-based category by large margins. |
LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised learning methods in natural language processing require large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose an active learning loop that takes LLMs as annotators and puts them into an active loop to determine what to annotate efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with few-shot performance in two NLP tasks. |
Shortcuts Arising from Contrast: Towards Effective and Lightweight Clean-Label Attacks in Prompt-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based learning paradigms are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, requiring false activations and false data augmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses triggers to create stronger shortcuts by leveraging activation values and data selection strategies to create the shortcuts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on the concept that a backdoor acts as a shortcut and can achieve high effectiveness and stealthiness at low poisoning rates. |
AnRe: Analogical Replay for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) are vital for event prediction, yet current methods face limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free Analogical Replay reasoning framework that uses LLMs to extract historical contexts and generate analogical reasoning examples as contextual inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing training-free methods on four benchmarks. |
FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wu, Hongru Sun, Wanqing Li, Xinguo Yu, Hao Ming, Xiao Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Jiahong Zhao, Yi Guo, Jie Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states. |
Multi-source Meta Transfer for Low Resource Multiple-Choice Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MCQA datasets are small in size, which increases difficulty of model learning and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source meta transfer framework for low-resource multiple-choice question answering . they extend meta learning by incorporating multiple training sources to learn a generalized feature representation across domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is independent of backbone language models and can bridge the distribution gap between training sources and target. |
Graphine: A Dataset for Graph-aware Terminology Definition Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Lack of large-scale terminology definition dataset hinders definition generation . lack of precise terminology definitions poses great challenges in scientific communication . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale terminology definition dataset Graphine that exploits the graph structure of terminologies to generate graph-aware text generation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by exploiting graph structure of terminologies. |
ActionStudio: A Lightweight Framework for Data and Training of Large Action Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jianguo Zhang, Thai Quoc Hoang, Ming Zhu, Zuxin Liu, Shiyu Wang, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Akshara Prabhakar, Haolin Chen, Weiran Yao, Zhiwei Liu, Juntao Tan, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing infrastructure for efficient agentic data processing and model training remains underdeveloped. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and extensible data and training framework for large action models . they propose to unify diverse agent trajectories using Unified Format 2.0 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows 9 higher throughput than existing frameworks and performs well across public and realistic agent benchmarks. |
Budget-Constrained Tool Learning with Planning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for budget-constrained tool learning have been overlooked . et al., 2023b) compared tool learning with other methods to improve performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for budget-constrained tool learning by creating a preferable plan under the budget constraint before utilizing the tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the cost of tool learning and reaches competitive Pass Rate. |
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)
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Hongzhan Chen, Hehong Chen, Ming Yan, Wenshen Xu, Gao Xing, Weizhou Shen, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on role-playing agents have focused on enhancing their conversational capability, role-specific knowledge and style, but there has been a gap in assessing their social intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the sociality of role-playing agents using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from various sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. |
RubricBench: Aligning Model-Generated Rubrics with Human Standards (2026.acl-long)
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Junyi Zhou, Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Fuyuan Lyu, Yidong Ming, Can Xu, Qingfeng Sun, Kai Zheng, Peng Kang, Xue Liu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack discriminative complexity and ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they support diverse domains, exhibit discriminative ability, provide high-quality annotations, and include human-authored rubrics. |
A Semi-supervised Scalable Unified Framework for E-commerce Query Classification (2025.acl-industry)
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Chunyuan Yuan, Chong Zhang, Zhen Fang, Ming Pang, Xue Jiang, Changping Peng, Zhangang Lin, Ching Law
| Challenge: | Existing query classification methods rely on posterior click behavior to construct training samples, resulting in insufficient prior information for modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised scaleable unified framework that integrates enhanced modules to unify query classification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models in offline and online A/B experiments. |
Aligning Large Language Models with Implicit Preferences from User-Generated Content (2025.acl-long)
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Zhaoxuan Tan, Zheng Li, Tianyi Liu, Haodong Wang, Hyokun Yun, Ming Zeng, Pei Chen, Zhihan Zhang, Yifan Gao, Ruijie Wang, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing preference learning methods rely heavily on curated data from humans or advanced LLMs, which is costly and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages implicit preferences in unlabeled user-generated content to generate preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms user-generated content into user queries and generates responses from the policy model. |
Pre-training for Abstractive Document Summarization by Reinstating Source Text (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive document summarization models are often trained on limited supervised data . authors present three objectives for pretraining abstractive summarizing models . |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train a SEQ2SEQ based abstractive summarization model on unlabeled text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two benchmark summarization datasets with 19GB of text . the goal is sentence reordering, next sentence generation and masked document generation . |
Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC) when instructions are revealed progressively in multi-turn settings, models get "Lost in Conversation" |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encourages models to generate correct answers and judge solvability in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models' ability to balance problem-solving with abstention . it reduces premature answering behaviors that cause lost-in-conversation (LiC) |
Exploring the Compositional Deficiency of Large Language Models in Mathematical Reasoning Through Trap Problems (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current LLMs lack systematic compositionality, and therefore cannot serve as reliable cognitive models. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce logical traps into the original problems of MATH and GSM8K to investigate the compositionality of large language models in mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate infinite combinations from finite learned components. |
A Survey on Efficient Large Language Model Training: From Data-centric Perspectives (2025.acl-long)
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Junyu Luo, Bohan Wu, Xiao Luo, Zhiping Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Rong-Cheng Tu, Nan Yin, Yifan Wang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | achieving data-efficient post-training of Large Language Models is a key research question. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of data-efficient LLM post-training methods from a data-centric perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods cover data selection, data quality enhancement, synthetic data generation, data distillation and compression, and self-evolving data ecosystems. |
Governance in Motion: Co-evolution of Constitutions and AI models for Scalable Safety (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chenhao Huang, Ziyu Shen, Yicong Ren, Huiyuan Zheng, Jiazheng Zhang, Mingxu Chai, Ming Zhang, Shihan Dou, Fan Mo, Jie Shi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences lack flexibility . static alignment preferences lack the ability to correct misaligned behaviors as they emerge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables dynamic and continuous alignment of large language models with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves safety and accuracy of a 7B model with human annotations. |
PersonaBench: Evaluating AI Models on Understanding Personal Information through Accessing (Synthetic) Private User Data (2025.findings-acl)
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Juntao Tan, Liangwei Yang, Zuxin Liu, Zhiwei Liu, Rithesh R N, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Jianguo Zhang, Weiran Yao, Ming Zhu, Shirley Kokane, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong, Shelby Heinecke
| Challenge: | Existing research lacks direct access to such data, making benchmarking difficult due to privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data pipeline that generates realistic user profiles and private documents and a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to understand personal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates realistic user profiles and private documents, enabling PersonaBench, a benchmark for evaluating models’ ability to understand personal information. |
Selected Languages are All You Need for Cross-lingual Truthfulness Transfer (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for truthfulness enhancement in English are limited to multilingual scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for cross-lingual truthfulness transfer that uses language bias and transfer contributions to select an optimal subset of all tested languages and employ translation instruction tuning for cross language truthfulness transfers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces multilingual representation disparity and boosts cross-lingual truthfulness transfer of LLMs. |
MAPS: Motivation-Aware Personalized Search via LLM-Driven Consultation Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized product search methods assume that users’ query fully captures their real motivation, but in practice, user's queries do not always articulate the requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a Motivation-Aware Personalized Search method that embeds queries and consultations into a unified semantic space via LLMs and utilizes a Mixture of Attention Experts (MoAE) to prioritize critical semantics. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in retrieval and ranking tasks. |
Model Merging for Knowledge Editing (2025.acl-industry)
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Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Guojing Li, Yingying Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, Tianshi Ming, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing approaches struggle with sequential editing scenarios and harm the general capabilities of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines robust supervised fine-tuning and model merging for knowledge editing to combine supervised and supervised learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in sequential editing while preserving the original performance of the model. |
Instance Regularization for Discriminative Language Model Pre-training (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have optimized independent strategies of ennoising or denosing . Existing methods treat training instances equally throughout the training process . |
| Approach: | They propose to use ennoising and denoising to train discriminative pre-trained language models . they propose to model the complexity of restoring the original sentences from corrupted ones . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method improves pre-training efficiency, effectiveness, and robustness. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
TransferTOD: A Generalizable Chinese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Transfer Capabilities (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ming Zhang, Caishuang Huang, Yilong Wu, Shichun Liu, Huiyuan Zheng, Yurui Dong, Yujiong Shen, Shihan Dou, Jun Zhao, Junjie Ye, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current datasets cater to user-led systems and are limited to predefined specific scenarios and slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dialogue dataset to train a model that authentically simulates human-computer dialogues in 30 popular life service scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a joint accuracy of 75.09% in out-of-domain evaluations . it also achieves notable abilities in slot filling and questioning . |
Writing-RL: Advancing Long-form Writing via Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Xuanyu Lei, Chenliang Li, Yuning Wu, Kaiming Liu, Weizhou Shen, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Fei Huang, Ya-Qin Zhang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled strong performance in long-form writing, but current training paradigms remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework to advance long-form writing capabilities beyond SFT. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 7B-scale writer models show that Writing-RL improves long-form writing performance over strong SFT baselines. |
Don’t Change Me! User-Controllable Selective Paraphrase Generation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a new technique allows paraphrase generation to be user-controlled . a user looking for cheap hotels in New York would not find the other answer helpful . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides a user with explicit tags that can be placed around any arbitrary segment of text to mean "don't change me!" they propose allowing user-controllable paraphrase generation by fine-tuning model that exhibits this behavior . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique is language agnostic and tested in English and Chinese. |
RAG+: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Application-Aware Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Zhihu Wang, Ming Fan, Xicheng Zhang, Yubo Zhang, Zhengfan Wang, Heyuan Huang, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RAG paradigms often overlook the cognitive step of applying knowledge, leaving a gap between retrieved facts and task-specific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They introduce a module extension that integrates application-aware reasoning into the RAG pipeline. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAG+ outperforms standard RAG variants and achieves gains of 3–5% in complex scenarios. |
mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Jiabo Ye, Ming Yan, Liang Zhang, Bo Zhang, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models lack general structure understanding abilities for text-rich document images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use unified structure learning to boost the performance of MLLMs by encoding structure information into text-rich images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 10 visual document understanding benchmarks. |
Understanding and Improving the Robustness of Terminology Constraints in Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing terminology constraint test sets are blind to this issue due to oversimplified settings . PH methods retain high constraint accuracy but lower translation quality . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that replaces terminology terms with ordered labels . placeholder methods are better at retaining high constraint accuracy but lower translation quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high accuracy and translation quality regardless of the number or length of constraints. |
mPLUG-DocOwl2: High-resolution Compressing for OCR-free Multi-page Document Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have improved document understanding performance but generate thousands of visual tokens for a single document image, leading to excessive GPU memory and slower inference times. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-resolution document compression module to generate 324 tokens for a single document image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module reduces first token latency by more than 50% and improves document comprehension performance. |
AnnaAgent: Dynamic Evolution Agent System with Multi-Session Memory for Realistic Seeker Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Wang, Peidong Wang, Lin Wu, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yuxin Chen, Bixuan Wang, Yifei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models of seeker simulations are limited by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in mental health research. |
| Approach: | They propose an emotional and cognitive dynamic agent system equipped with tertiary memory to enable dynamic control of the simulator's configurations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves more realistic seeker simulation compared to baselines. |
Browse and Concentrate: Comprehending Multimodal Content via Prior-LLM Context Fusion (2024.acl-long)
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Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) lack understanding of multi-image and interleaved inputs due to the visual features encoded by frozen encoders before being fed into the LLM backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a two phase paradigm to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively. |
Smart-Start Decoding for Neural Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural machine translation models adopt a monotonic decoding order of either left-to-right or right-to left. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts decoding target words from the right side of a median word and generates words on the left. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on three datasets. |
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Yujiong Shen, Tingyi Yang, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Shihan Dou, Qinhao Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Zhihao Zhang, Yi Dong, Zhen Wang, Zhihui Fei, Mingyang Wan, Tao Liang, Guojun Ma, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset. |
Meta-Learning Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network for Few-Shot Text Classification (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for few-shot text classification rely on exploitation of lexical features and distributional signatures on training data, while neglecting to strengthen the model's ability to adapt to new tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework integrated with an adversarial domain adaptation network to improve the model's adaptive ability and generate high-quality text embedding for new classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models on four datasets and shows clear superiority over existing models. |
UniKER: A Unified Framework for Combining Embedding and Definite Horn Rule Reasoning for Knowledge Graph Inference (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph inference has been studied extensively due to its wide applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that restricts logical rules to be definite Horn rules and can exploit the knowledge in logical rule-based reasoning and KGE in an extremely efficient way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can exploit the knowledge in logical rules and improve KGE in an extremely efficient way. |
Quantifying and Improving the Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Against Spurious Features in Grounding Data (2026.acl-long)
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Shiping Yang, Jie Wu, Wenbiao Ding, Ning Wu, Shining Liang, Ming Gong, Hongzhi Li, Hengyuan Zhang, Angel X. Chang, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on robustness to explicit noise (e.g., document semantics) but overlook implicit noise (spurious features). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to quantify the robustness of RAGs against spurious features by integrating a data synthesis pipeline and a taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies the robustness of RALMs against spurious features. |
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)
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Shihan Dou, Jiazheng Zhang, Jianxiang Zang, Yunbo Tao, Weikang Zhou, Haoxiang Jia, Shichun Liu, Yuming Yang, Shenxi Wu, Zhiheng Xi, Muling Wu, Rui Zheng, Changze Lv, Limao Xiong, Shaoqing Zhang, Lin Zhang, Wenyu Zhan, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yueming Wu, Ming Wen, Yixin Cao, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs). |
A Simple and Effective Unified Encoder for Document-Level Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level machine translation use two separate encoders to model the source sentences and document- level contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified encoder that can outperform existing models of dual-encoder models . they propose to use document-level contexts to model the interaction between the contexts and the source sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models of dual-encoder models in terms of BLEU and METEOR scores. |
Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the likelihood of sequence prediction models are based on MLE and teacher forcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative Bridging Network (GBN) that extends the point-wise ground truth to a bridge distribution conditioned on it and optimizes their KL-divergence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bridge module can improve on two recognized sequence prediction tasks and minimize learning burden. |
LRQuant: Learnable and Robust Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for post-training quantization (PTQ) are limited by the complexity of the quantization parameter and performance degradations when tested on unseen datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a learnable smooth-based PTQ framework that allows for rapid adaptation during testing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on unseen datasets and reduces memory constraints. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
Coupling Global and Local Context for Unsupervised Aspect Extraction (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on aspect extraction focus on sequence tagging models trained on human-annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel neural model capable of coupling global and local representations to discover aspect words by combining global and locale contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on laptop and restaurant reviews on two benchmarks. |
ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-SequencePre-training (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing sequence-to-sequence models are optimized for future n-gram prediction and n stream self-attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised objective called future n-gram prediction and the proposed n stream self-attention mechanism to optimize the model for sequence-to-sequence learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and SQuAD 1.1 benchmarks compared to the models using the same scale pre-training corpus. |
DialCoT Meets PPO: Decomposing and Exploring Reasoning Paths in Smaller Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting has improved the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) but it is ineffective or detrimental to the performance on reasoning tasks in Smaller Language Model (SLMs) with less than 10 billion parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dialogue-guided Chain-of-Thought method to improve the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by generating intermediate reasoning steps in a dialogue format to guide the model to the final answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art competitors on four arithmetic reasoning datasets. |
NAG-NER: a Unified Non-Autoregressive Generation Framework for Various NER Tasks (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for general NER tasks require entities to be generated in a predefined order, causing error propagation and inefficient decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive generation framework for general NER tasks that generates entities as a set instead of a sequence, avoiding error propagation and inefficient decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three benchmark NER datasets and two of our proprietary NER tasks. |
GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Wang, Shuang Wu, Bixuan Wang, Lu Lin, Yuxin Chen, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Yufan Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) inherit contamination from training corpora, directional bias under social-desirability framing, and limited responsiveness to context beyond the item text. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with impressive capabilities, but they lack domain specificity, real-time information and face challenges in solving specialized problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by demonstrating its effectiveness and advantages in tool learning. |
Simple but Effective Compound Geometric Operations for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.acl-long)
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Rui Ying, Mengting Hu, Jianfeng Wu, Yalan Xie, Xiaoyi Liu, Zhunheng Wang, Ming Jiang, Hang Gao, Linlin Zhang, Renhong Cheng
| Challenge: | Current methods embed factual knowledge into continuous vector space and apply geometric operations to learn potential patterns in temporal knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph completion method that uses two geometric operations to learn missing facts in temporal graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing temporal knowledge graph embedding models. |
PRGC: Potential Relation and Global Correspondence Based Joint Relational Triple Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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Hengyi Zheng, Rui Wen, Xi Chen, Yifan Yang, Yunyan Zhang, Ziheng Zhang, Ningyu Zhang, Bin Qin, Xu Ming, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Recent methods for extracting entities and relations from unstructured texts suffer from limitations, such as redundancy of relation prediction and inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint relational triple extraction framework based on Potential Relation and Global Correspondence (PRGC) they propose overlapping triples for relation prediction and relation-relational alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks with higher efficiency and consistent performance gain on complex scenarios of overlapping triples. |
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications. |
MuTual: A Dataset for Multi-Turn Dialogue Reasoning (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-task oriented dialogue systems can yield a relevant and fluent response, but sometimes make logical mistakes because of weak reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for multi-turn dialogue reasoning that uses annotated dialogues to train a machine to handle various reasoning problems. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that state-of-the-art methods only reach 71%, far behind human performance of 94%. |
MolXPT: Wrapping Molecules with Text for Generative Pre-training (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Generative pre-trained Transformers (GPT) have great success in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified language model of text and molecules pre-trained on SMILES wrapped by text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines of molecular property prediction on MoleculeNet and performs comparably to the best model in text-molecule translation while using less than half of its parameters. |
TRUST: Towards Robust Social Bot Detection via Uncertainty-Guided Pseudo-Labeling and Graph Structure Purification (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruixuan Xu, Mengting Hu, Zhunheng Wang, Ming Jiang, Rui Ying, Zhen Zhang, Hang Gao, Shuaipeng Liu, Renhong Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing graph-based detection models are vulnerable to deceptive message propagation, where bots deliberately interact with legitimate users. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate deceptive message propagation by node-level uncertainty estimation and graph structure purification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three benchmark datasets and six GNN backbones on real-world social bots. |
PALT: Parameter-Lite Transfer of Language Models for Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (LMs) are a powerful transfer learning approach for knowledge graph (KG) completion. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-lite transfer learning approach for pretrained language models for knowledge graph (KG) completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a knowledge graph completion benchmark by tuning 1% of the parameters. |
I²B-LPO: Latent Policy Optimization via Iterative Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
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Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Yue Zhu, Long Li, Zhuoyue Chen, Xinghao Zhao, Ming LI, Chuyang Zhao, Jihai Zhang, MengChang Wang, Yang Cao, Yu Kang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model reasoning suffer from exploration collapse due to the semantic homogeneity of random rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent policy optimization via iterative information bottleneck to optimize reasoning trajectories by diversifying reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with margins of up to 5.3% in accuracy and 7.4% in diversity metrics. |
GAP: a Global Adaptive Pruning Method for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing structured pruning methods employ uniform compression rates across network layers, neglecting the varying importance of different network depths. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning framework that minimizes global capability loss by layer-adaptive pruning rates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods at high pruning rates and shows significant advantages at low pruning rates. |
TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan, Haiming Wang, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Lin Li, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks focus on symbolic inference but rarely involve understanding complex number combination reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proof and evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively. |
LLMEval-Fair: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study on Robust and Fair Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Jingyi Deng, Yuhui Wang, Huayu Sha, Kexin Tan, Qiyuan Peng, Yue Zhang, Junzhe Wang, Shichun Liu, Yueyuan Huang, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Zhihao Zhang, Mingqi Wu, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation of Large Language Models on static benchmarks is vulnerable to data contamination and leaderboard overfitting. |
| Approach: | LLMEval-Fair framework provides a framework for dynamic evaluation of Large Language Models . evaluators use a proprietary bank of 220k graduate-level questions to analyze model data . |
| Outcome: | LLMEval-Fair provides robust and credible evaluation framework for Large Language Models . it provides a strong empirical validation for the dynamic evaluation paradigm . |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
Weighted self Distillation for Chinese word segmentation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent researches show that multi-criteria resources and n-gram features are beneficial to Chinese word segmentation (CWS). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses weighted self distillation to learn Chinese word segmentation using unigram features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on SIGHAN Bakeoff datasets. |
Temporal Working Memory: Query-Guided Segment Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Understanding (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xingjian Diao, Chunhui Zhang, Weiyi Wu, Zhongyu Ouyang, Peijun Qing, Ming Cheng, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
| Challenge: | Multimodal foundation models have demonstrated significant success in tasks such as visual captioning, question answering, and image-text retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized cognitive module, temporal working memory, which selectively retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The module retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions, ensuring that critical details are preserved throughout the processing of video and audio content. |
Structure-Aware Zero-Shot Relational Learning for Knowledge Graphs without External Knowledge (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Zero-shot Relational Learning depend on external knowledge, resulting in increased annotation costs and limited practical applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware paradigm that performs ZRL without external knowledge . it leverages intrinsic structural patterns in KGs to bridge semantic correlations for new relations with existing ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves 10.66% improvement in MRR while reducing annotation costs and enhancing practical applicability on three real-world benchmarks. |
DSCD: Large Language Model Detoxification with Self-Constrained Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decoding large language models (LLMs) are based on external constraints and require additional resource overhead and loss of generation fluency. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for LLMs detoxification without parameter fine-tuning that strengthens the inner token distribution while weakening that of hallucination and toxic layer during output generation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on open-source LLMs and public datasets demonstrate DSCD's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in detoxification and generation fluency, with superior efficiency compared to existing methods. |
Embracing Large Language Models in Traffic Flow Forecasting (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict future traffic flows capture spatio-temporal dependencies, but they fail to adapt to test-time environmental changes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to help traffic flow forecasting by capturing spatio-temporal dependencies and using a large language model to select the most likely result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on large language models (LLMs) and an LLM-based selector. |
A Survey on Training-free Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Birong Pan, Yongqi Li, Weiyu Zhang, Wenpeng Lu, Mayi Xu, Shen Zhou, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | a survey of large language models (LLMs) aims to ensure outputs adhere to human values, ethical standards, and legal norms. |
| Approach: | They present the first systematic review of TF alignment methods . they categorize them by stages of pre-decoding, in-decoder and post-decoration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on training-free (TF) alignment techniques . they are able to be used in open-source and closed-source environments without retraining . |
Visual Attention Reasoning via Hierarchical Search and Self-Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification and replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on hallucination and safety benchmarks. |
Improving the Efficiency of Grammatical Error Correction with Erroneous Span Detection and Correction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the efficiency of GEC are not efficient enough for GEC. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-independent approach to improve the efficiency of GEC by dividing the task into two subtasks: ESD and ESC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs comparably to conventional seq2seq approaches in English and Chinese GEC benchmarks with less than 50% time cost for inference. |
Semantics-enhanced Cross-modal Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks. |
Weight-Aware Activation Sparsity with Constrained Bayesian Optimization Scheduling for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing activation sparsification methods rely on activation magnitude and weights for sparsity . authors propose a weight-aware activation-a-ware framework for large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a weight-aware activation sparsity framework that uses weight-based scoring to measure activation importance in sparsification and a custom GPU sparse kernel to support it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods at 60% model-level sparsity and significantly outperfies them at higher sparsities. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
Learning Sparsity for Effective and Efficient Music Performance Question Answering (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing Music AVQA methods rely on dense and unoptimized representations, leading to inefficiencies in the isolation of key information, reduction of redundancy, and prioritization of critical samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse learning framework specifically designed for Music AVQA to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training time by 28.32% while maintaining accuracy while maintaining state-of-the-art performance on the Music AVQA datasets. |
Neural Latent Extractive Document Summarization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization paradigms focus on extractive summarizing based on sentence level labels . |
| Approach: | They propose a latent variable extractive model where sentences are viewed as latent variables and sentences with activated variables are used to infer gold summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a strong extractive baseline trained on rule-based labels and performs competitively with several recent models. |
Unveiling Inherent Visual Grounding in Multimodal LLMs for Text-Rich Images (2026.findings-acl)
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Shijie Zhou, Jihyung Kil, Ming Li, Jiuxiang Gu, Curtis Wigington, Rajiv Jain, Changyou Chen, Ruiyi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language model (MLLM) approaches struggle to align query tokens with visual–text patches, heavily relying on lengthy OCR inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an OCR-free approach that leverages the MLLM's inherent multi-head attention for multi-patch grounding. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on challenging document grounding benchmarks. |
HIBERT: Document Level Pre-training of Hierarchical Bidirectional Transformers for Document Summarization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural extractive summarization models employ hierarchical encoders with inaccurate sentence-level labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train a hierarchical encoder with unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms its initialized counterpart by 1.25 ROUGE on CNN and 2.0 ROUGEE on a version of New York Times dataset. |
A Graph Representation of Semi-structured Data for Web Question Answering (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies treat semi-structured data as flat documents with pieces of text . semi-structural data is more effective to represent rich relational information . question answering is an important feature in most search engines . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph representation of Web tables and lists based on categorization of components and their relations . they also develop reasoning techniques on the graph model for the question answering task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph improves F1 score by 3.90 points over the state-of-the-art baselines on real datasets. |
Improving Neural Machine Translation with Soft Template Prediction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) depend on source text to generate translation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use extracted templates from tree structures as soft target templates to guide the translation procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on four benchmarks and demonstrates the effectiveness of soft target templates. |
Long Chain-of-Thought Fine-tuning via Understanding-to-Reasoning Transition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chenxin An, Zhihui Xie, Xiaonan Li, Ming Zhong, Shansan Gong, Lei Li, Jun Zhang, Jingjing Xu, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing research on long-context scaling in language models has focused on managing lengthy input prompts instead of producing long outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level curriculum learning framework that shifts a model’s focus from interpreting long chain-of-thoughts to generating them. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on rigorous reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and GPQA Diamond, show that the proposed approach surpasses standard fine-tuning by over 10% while maintaining robust performance on understanding tasks. |
TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that multimodal large language models can be useful for chart understanding, but their size limits their use in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient multimodal large language model with only 3B parameters for chart understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several chart-understanding MLLMs with up to 13B parameters on ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart to Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX. |
PTQ1.61: Push the Real Limit of Extremely Low-Bit Post-Training Quantization Methods for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sub 2-bit quantization introduce an extra 1-bit or more per weight. |
| Approach: | They propose a sub 2-bit post-training quantization method that enables weight quantization to 1.61-bit for the first time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the upper bound of quantization error to 1.61-bit for the first time. |
Focus-Driven Contrastive Learning for Medical Question Summarization (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to summarize health questions are not able to capture well question focus and lack the ability to understand sentence-level semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a question focus-driven contrastive learning framework to capture question focus and exploit contrastive training at both encoder and decoder to obtain better sentence representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5.33, 12.85 and 3.81 points over the baseline model on three medical benchmark datasets. |
DoCIA: An Online Document-Level Context Incorporation Agent for Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinglin Lyu, Wei Tang, Yuang Li, Xiaofeng Zhao, Ming Zhu, Junhui Li, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Daimeng Wei, Hao Yang, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Document-level context is crucial for speech translation due to noise from ASR . incorporating document-level contextual information into ST remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They develop an online framework that integrates document-level context into machine translation . they use document-based modules to integrate document- level context into ST . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in sentence and discourse metrics . it can correct ASR transcription errors and improve translation performance . |
MCGA: A Multi-task Classical Chinese Literary Genre Audio Corpus (2026.findings-acl)
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Yexing Du, Kaiyuan Liu, Bihe Zhang, Youcheng Pan, Bo Yang, Liangyu Huo, Xiyuan Zhang, Jian Xie, Daojing He, Yang Xiang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced Chinese Classical Studies (CCS) but the audio dimension of CCS remains underexplored due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific audio corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a 119-hour audio corpus comprising 22,000 audio samples to bridge this gap . it encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus encompasses a diverse range of literary genres across six tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT), Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC), Spoken Question Answering ( SQA), Speech Understanding (SU), and Speech Reasoning (SR). |
Distinguish Before Answer: Generating Contrastive Explanation as Knowledge for Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced methods have trouble obtaining knowledge from different knowledge bases . a concept-centric model can be used to generate a contrastive explanation for QA tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a Concept-centric Prompt-bAsed Contrastive Explanation Generation model which converts obtained symbolic knowledge into the contrastive explanation for better distinguishing the differences among given candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new SOTA on CSQA, QASC, and OBQA. |
A Generalizable Rhetorical Strategy Annotation Model Using LLM-based Debate Simulation and Labelling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Sophia Pan, Ming Cheng, Shubham Mohole, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi, Michael Macy
| Challenge: | Rhetorical strategies are important to persuasive communication, but their analysis relies on human annotation, which is costly, inconsistent and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate and label debate data . they fine-tune transformer-based classifiers on this dataset and validate it against human data a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high performance and strong generalization across topical domains. |
QueryLink: Leveraging Query-Memory Alignment for Long-Term Reasoning in LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrating external memory prioritize memory organization while overlooking a critical semantic gap between implicit, intent-driven queries and explicit, narrative-based memories. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Query-Memory Alignment to project both queries and memories into a shared semantic space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms SOTA methods on the LoCoMo and LongMemEval benchmarks and can be integrated as a plug-and-play component to boost existing vector-based systems like A-MEM. |
PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints and some are only accessible via APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter that integrates large language models as generators and trains them to refine the retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% compared to existing methods. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
Multi-View Document Representation Learning for Open-Domain Dense Retrieval (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dense retrieval are hard to match with multiple views. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view document representation learning framework to generate multiple embeddings through viewers to represent documents and enforce them to align with different queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms recent works and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
Enhancing Safe and Controllable Protein Generation via Knowledge Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Protein language models pose significant risks of generating harmful sequences, e.g., viral transmissibility, drug resistance, environmental imbalances, public health crises, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a protein-based model that integrates prior knowledge via a Protein Safety Knowledge Graph to minimize the risk of generating harmful sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the likelihood of producing hazardous sequences while maintaining high functionality. |
Deep Attentive Sentence Ordering Network (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentence ordering tasks rely on linguistic knowledge and are domain specific. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep attentive sentence ordering network which integrates self-attention mechanism with LSTMs in the encoding of input sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on Sentence Ordering and Order Discrimination tasks and is shown to be highly efficient. |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
EasyNLP: A Comprehensive and Easy-to-use Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Chengyu Wang, Minghui Qiu, Taolin Zhang, Tingting Liu, Lei Li, Jianing Wang, Ming Wang, Jun Huang, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) have reshaped the development of natural language processing (NLP) but it is not easy to obtain high-performing PTMs without a large amount of labeled training data and deploy them online with fast inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose to make it easy to build NLP applications with knowledge-enhanced pre-training and knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | EasyNLP supports a comprehensive suite of NLP algorithms and features knowledge-enhanced pre-training, knowledge distillation and few-shot learning functionalities. |
Music Audio-Visual Question Answering Requires Specialized Multimodal Designs (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenhao You, Xingjian Diao, Wenjun Huang, Chunhui Zhang, Keyi Kong, Weiyi Wu, Chiyu Ma, Zhongyu Ouyang, Tingxuan Wu, Ming Cheng, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
| Challenge: | Music audio-visual question answering presents unique challenges with dense audio-visual content, intricate temporal dynamics, and the need for domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They analyze Music AVQA datasets and analyze their results to identify key design patterns . they propose concrete future directions for incorporating musical priors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures are critical for success in Music AVQA, the authors argue . they suggest concrete future directions for incorporating musical priors . |
Pathway2Text: Dataset and Method for Biomedical Pathway Description Generation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Neural text generation is a novel technique to describe biomedical pathways without manually curation. |
| Approach: | They propose a new dataset Pathway2Text which contains 2,367 pairs of biomedical pathways and textual descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on both Graph2Text and Text2Graph tasks and can be used as a benchmark for biomedical named entity recognition. |
Generate & Rank: A Multi-task Framework for Math Word Problems (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies formalize MWP as a generation task but mathematical expressions are prone to minor mistakes. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking task for math word problem (MWP) that learns from its own mistakes and distinguishes between correct and incorrect expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the classical Math23k dataset and is 7% higher than the state-of-the-art. |
How Far are We from Robust Long Abstractive Summarization? (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization has made tremendous progress in recent years . however, even under a short document setting, abstractive models often generate summaries that are repetitive, ungrammatical, and factually inconsistent with the source. |
| Approach: | They perform fine-grained human annotations to evaluate long document abstractive summarization systems and develop factual consistency metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more relevant summaries but not factual ones. |
GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark (2021.findings-acl)
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Dayiheng Liu, Yu Yan, Yeyun Gong, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Weizhu Chen, Jie Fu, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Pengcheng Wang, Jiusheng Chen, Daxin Jiang, Jiancheng Lv, Ruofei Zhang, Winnie Wu, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Multi-task benchmarks focus on a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks without considering the Natural Language Generation (NLG) models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities of NLG models across eight language generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on GLUE and Su-perGLUE for English and several other languages. |
LAM SIMULATOR: Advancing Data Generation for Large Action Model Training via Online Exploration and Trajectory Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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Thai Quoc Hoang, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Shirley Kokane, Jianguo Zhang, Zuxin Liu, Ming Zhu, Jake Grigsby, Tian Lan, Michael S Ryoo, Chien-Sheng Wu, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Juan Carlos Niebles
| Challenge: | Large Action Models (LAMs) face challenges due to the need for high-quality training data, especially for multi-steps tasks that involve planning, executing tool calls, and responding to feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for online exploration of agentic tasks with high-quality feedback . they use a dynamic task query generator and an extensive collection of tools to create a high-level feedback environment for LLM Agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 49.3% performance improvement over baselines on toolbench and CRMArena. |
Exploring Continual Learning for Code Generation Models (2023.acl-short)
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Prateek Yadav, Qing Sun, Hantian Ding, Xiaopeng Li, Dejiao Zhang, Ming Tan, Parminder Bhatia, Xiaofei Ma, Ramesh Nallapati, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Mohit Bansal, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Large-scale code generation models such as Copilot and CodeT5 are expensive to train and re-train. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for Continual Learning (CL) that covers a wide range of tasks with different input and output programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on Prompt Pooling with Teacher Forcing, which suffers catastrophic forgetting due to stark distribution shifts in coding tasks. |
Instruct-of-Reflection: Enhancing Large Language Models Iterative Reflection Capabilities via Dynamic-Meta Instruction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches involve models iterating and improving their previous responses based on internal reflection ability or external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a reflection framework that leverages meta-thoughts and self-consistency to enhance the iterative reflection capability of Large LanguageModels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average improvement of 10.1% over established baselines in mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks, highlighting its efficacy and applicability. |
Unsupervised Extractive Summarization by Pre-training Hierarchical Transformers (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document summarization use graphs and unlabeled documents . Existing models require labeled data, and it is expensive to create summarized documents. |
| Approach: | They propose to rank sentences using transformer attentions and pre-training objectives by unlabeled documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on unsupervised summarization and is less dependent on sentence positions. |
Multitask Pretraining with Structured Knowledge for Text-to-SQL Generation (2023.acl-long)
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Robert Giaquinto, Dejiao Zhang, Benjamin Kleiner, Yang Li, Ming Tan, Parminder Bhatia, Ramesh Nallapati, Xiaofei Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning representations of structured knowledge are limited to the minority of people with technical skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a large pretraining dataset and strategy for learning representations of text, tables, and SQL code that leverages the entire context of the problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two SQL tasks and shows a 1.7 and 2.2 percentage point improvement over existing methods. |
Unsupervised Fine-tuning for Text Clustering (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text clustering fine-tune pre-trained models have been limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune pre-trained models unsupervisedly for text clustering by learning text representations and cluster assignments using a clustering oriented loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art results on three text clustering datasets. |
Automatic Grammatical Error Correction for Sequence-to-sequence Text Generation: An Empirical Study (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) models have a weakness: they cannot always generate sentences without grammatical errors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use automatic grammatical error correction to improve seq2seq models . they conduct experiments on machine translation, formality style transfer, sentence compression and simplification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can improve grammaticality of generated text and improve formal style tasks. |
Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Earlier studies of instruction tuning on Large Language Models focus on creating large, varied, and high-quality datasets with responses curated by human experts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a smaller and weaker model to fine tune a larger and stronger model . they find it can largely speed up the data filtering and improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can filter instruction data faster and better on benchmarks. |
TS-CLIP: Time Series Understanding by CLIP (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable success in aligning vision and language. |
| Approach: | They propose a synonym bank mechanism that generates synonym embeddings as alignment targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 51 datasets. |
MUSEG: Reinforcing Video Temporal Understanding via Timestamp-Aware Multi-Segment Grounding (2026.acl-long)
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Fuwen Luo, Shengfeng Lou, Chi Chen, Ziyue Wang, Chenliang Li, Weizhou Shen, Jiyue Guo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for MLLMs struggle with fine-grained temporal reasoning . despite advances in video understanding, current methods struggle with time-sensitive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a time-stamp-aware multi-segment grounding method that enhances temporal understanding by introducing timestamps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on time-sensitive tasks and generalizes well across diverse temporal understanding scenarios. |
How Do Large Language Models Perform in Dynamical System Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent data-driven methods often use graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn interactions between objects. |
| Approach: | They propose prompting techniques for dynamical system modeling and evaluate their performance . they find that large language models demonstrate competitive performance without training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show competitive performance without training compared to state-of-the-art methods in dynamical system modeling. |
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Improve Low-Resource Machine Translation Leveraging Domain Monolingual Data (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning domain adaptation have overfitting problem in low-resource domains . lack of parallel data makes it difficult for model to learn domain-specific knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a Reinforcement Learning Domain Adaptation method for Neural Machine Translation that uses in-domain source monolingual data to make up for the lack of parallel data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can alleviate overfitting and reinforce the model to learn domain-specific knowledge. |
Text2World: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Symbolic World Model Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Mengkang Hu, Tianxing Chen, Yude Zou, Yuheng Lei, Qiguang Chen, Ming Li, Yao Mu, Hongyuan Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Ping Luo
| Challenge: | Recent studies have encountered limitations in leveraging large language models to generate symbolic world models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking framework based on planning domain definition language (PDDL) that employs multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning, but lacks the robustness needed to perform in world modeling. |
LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Zelin Li, Huayu Sha, Binze Hu, Yuhui Wang, Chenhao Huang, Shichun Liu, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current medical benchmarks have limitations in question design, data sources and evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark covering five core medical areas . it includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers five core medical areas and includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records and expert-designed clinical scenarios. |
Multifaceted Evaluation of Audio-Visual Capability for MLLMs: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Generalizability and Robustness (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal large language models have been used for processing and understanding information from diverse modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the audio-visual capabilities of multi-modal large language models . they focus on effectiveness, efficiency, generalizability, and robustness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models exhibit strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization abilities . their success relies heavily on the vision modality, which impairs performance when visual input is corrupted or missing. |
Learned Adapters Are Better Than Manually Designed Adapters (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve adapter-based tuning are sub-optimal . a learning framework is proposed to learn the optimal adapter architectures . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically learn optimal adapter architectures for better task adaptation of pre-trained models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the previous parameter-efficient tuning baselines while tuning comparable or fewer parameters. |
BlonDe: An Automatic Evaluation Metric for Document-level Machine Translation (2022.naacl-main)
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Yuchen Jiang, Tianyu Liu, Shuming Ma, Dongdong Zhang, Jian Yang, Haoyang Huang, Rico Sennrich, Ryan Cotterell, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Standard evaluation metrics, e.g., BLEU, TER and METEOR, focus on the quality of translations at the sentence level and do not consider discourse-level features. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a metric to take discourse coherence into consideration by categorizing discourse-related spans and calculating the similarity-based F1 measure of categorized spans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric possesses better selectivity and interpretability at the document-level, and is more sensitive to document- level nuances. |
XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yeyun Gong, Ning Wu, Fenfei Guo, Weizhen Qi, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Guihong Cao, Xiaodong Fan, Ruofei Zhang, Rahul Agrawal, Edward Cui, Sining Wei, Taroon Bharti, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Winnie Wu, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Daniel Campos, Rangan Majumder, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | XGLUE provides a benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models . XCLUE provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both understanding and generation scenarios . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is labeled in English and includes only natural language understanding tasks. |
MetaFill: Text Infilling for Meta-Path Generation on Heterogeneous Information Networks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing meta-path generation methods cannot fully exploit rich textual information in HINs. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-infilling-based approach to generate meta-paths from textual information in HINs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can classify edges in the zero-shot setting, where existing methods cannot generate meta-paths. |
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention (2025.acl-long)
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Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Yuxing Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
| Challenge: | Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, but high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a natively trained Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithms with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. |
Learning Musical Representations for Music Performance Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for audio-visual learning fail to consider the distinctive characteristics of instruments and music. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate multimodal interactions within the context of music data and annotate and release rhythmic and music sources in the current music datasets to enable the model to learn music characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn music characteristics from the current music datasets and align its predictions with the temporal dimension. |
Less Is More: Domain Adaptation with Lottery Ticket for Reading Comprehension (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing domain adaptation paradigms for reading comprehension require large amounts of annotation data to achieve the desired task performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot domain adaptation paradigm for reading comprehension . they introduce self-attention attribution to weigh parameters and refine the lottery subnetwork . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the full model fine-tuning adaptation on four out of five domains with a small amount of data available for adaptation. |
Unsupervised Chunking as Syntactic Structure Induction with a Knowledge-Transfer Approach (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting linguistic structures require labeled data . unsupervised chunking is useful for understanding linguistic structure of human languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-transfer approach that heuristically induces chunk labels from unsupervised parsing models and a hierarchical recurrent neural network (HRNN) they show that their approach bridges the gap between supervised and unsupervised chunking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the gap between supervised and unsupervised chunking. |
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo
| Challenge: | Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. |
Text-like Encoding of Collaborative Information in Large Language Models for Recommendation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt Large Language Models for Recommendation (LLMRec) do not represent collaborative information in a text-like format, which may not align optimally with LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLMRec method that integrates collaborative information through text-like encoding. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that BinLLM integrates collaborative information better with LLMs. |
Coherent Entity Disambiguation via Modeling Topic and Categorical Dependency (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing entity disambiguation methods struggle to capture explicit discourse-level dependencies, resulting in incoherent predictions at the abstract level. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised variational autoencoder to extract latent topic vectors of context sentences to enhance coherence of entity predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art on popular ED benchmarks with an average improvement of 1.3 F1 points. |
Breaking Language Barriers in Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Insights and Observations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on developing powerful large language models for mathematical reasoning within monolingual languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translation to build powerful multilingual math reasoning models . they propose different training strategies to build xMR LLMs that outperform open-source LLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source LLMs and surpasses ChatGPT in few-shot scenarios. |
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| Challenge: | Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show . |
AlignMMBench: Evaluating Chinese Multimodal Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on basic abilities using nonverbal methods, such as yes-no and multiple-choice questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that provides more nuanced evaluations of alignment capabilities for large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) they use a rule-calibrated evaluator that exceeds GPT-4's evaluation ability and a “alignment score” to assess the robustness and stability of models across diverse prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 13 tasks across three categories and includes both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue scenarios. |
Knowledge Graph Embedding with Atrous Convolution and Residual Learning (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods are complex and require time for training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an atrous convolution based knowledge graph embedding method that increases feature interactions by using atrous . they evaluate method on six benchmark datasets with different evaluation metrics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results on six benchmark datasets than state-of-the-art methods on most evaluation metrics. |
InstructProtein: Aligning Human and Protein Language via Knowledge Instruction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising new approach to understanding biological sequences such as proteins. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM that can generate protein sequences in human and protein languages by pre-training an Lm on protein and natural language corpora and supervised instruction tuning to facilitate alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs on protein-text generation tasks by a large margin. |
Discover and Prove: An Open-source Agentic Framework for Hard Mode Automated Theorem Proving in Lean 4 (2026.acl-long)
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Chengwu Liu, Yichun Yin, Ye Yuan, Jiaxuan Xie, Botao Li, Siqi Li, Jianhao Shen, Yan Xu, Lifeng Shang, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solving mathematical problems fall into two broad categories: informal methods and formal methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLM natural-language reasoning to discover answers . they introduce Discover And Prove framework that rewrites Hard Mode statements into Easy Mode ones for existing ATP provers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to prove hard mode statements on ATP benchmarks. |
Customizing In-context Learning for Dynamic Interest Adaption in LLM-based Recommendation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based recommender systems face challenges to adapt to dynamic user interests without any model-level updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes recommendation-oriented in-context learning by structuring recent user interactions and current inputs into ICL formats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts to dynamic user interests without model updates without any model updates and is available online at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RecICL-8003. |
MT2: Towards a Multi-Task Machine Translation Model with Translation-Specific In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentence-level translation, document-level and terminology constrained translations are important in machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task machine translation model that integrates translation memory sentences . they propose 'in-context learning' paradigm that allows translation-specific context learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation memory, document-level translation, and document-constrained translation tasks. |
TIGEr: Text-to-Image Grounding for Image Caption Evaluation (D19-1)
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Ming Jiang, Qiuyuan Huang, Lei Zhang, Xin Wang, Pengchuan Zhang, Zhe Gan, Jana Diesner, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Existing metrics based on text-level comparisons fail to assess the quality of captions produced by machines. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a machine-learned text-image grounding model to measure the accuracy of machine-generated captions and their correlation with human judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric has higher consistency with human judgments and is more accurate than existing metrics. |
Understanding the Thinking Process of Reasoning Models: A Perspective from Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ming Li, Nan Zhang, Chenrui Fan, Hong Jiao, Yanbin Fu, Sydney Peters, Qingshu Xu, Robert Lissitz, Tianyi Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate extensive chain-of-thought reasoning, but we lack a principled framework for understanding how these thoughts are structured. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to analyze the reasoning traces of Large Reasoning Models using Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a theoretically grounded methodology for interpreting LRM cognition and enables future work on more controllable and transparent reasoning systems. |
AnchorCoT: Anchors Pave the Way for Multi-hop Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential reasoning capabilities through prompt design, such as the Chain of Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a new reasoning approach that predicts key entities which work as important “anchors” and employs a ranking algorithm to ensure the logical sequence of the predicted answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in multi-hop question reasoning and provides more accurate reasoning results in multihop question answering tasks. |
ContraCLM: Contrastive Learning For Causal Language Model (2023.acl-long)
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Nihal Jain, Dejiao Zhang, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Zijian Wang, Feng Nan, Xiaopeng Li, Ming Tan, Ramesh Nallapati, Baishakhi Ray, Parminder Bhatia, Xiaofei Ma, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that causal language models lack expressiveness due to poor discrimination ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework that enhances discrimination of representations and bridges the gap with encoder-only models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves discrimination and source code generation capabilities on a variety of downstream tasks. |
Revisiting Cross-Lingual Summarization: A Corpus-based Study and A New Benchmark with Improved Annotation (2023.acl-long)
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Yulong Chen, Huajian Zhang, Yijie Zhou, Xuefeng Bai, Yueguan Wang, Ming Zhong, Jianhao Yan, Yafu Li, Judy Li, Xianchao Zhu, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing work on cross-lingual summarization (CLS) does not consider crosslingual sources for summarizing. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual conversation summarization benchmark that explicitly considers source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines on ConvSumX and 3 widely-used manual annotations. |
Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that only provide information about user preferences can be inaccurate in e-commerce recommender systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which integrates the recommender system and dialog generation system by introducing information about users’ preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve better performance in both dialog generation and recommendation compared with baselines. |
mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)
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Chenliang Li, Haiyang Xu, Junfeng Tian, Wei Wang, Ming Yan, Bin Bi, Jiabo Ye, He Chen, Guohai Xu, Zheng Cao, Ji Zhang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained vision-language models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language foundation model with cross-modal skip-connections that can be pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering. |
Language Models as Continuous Self-Evolving Data Engineers (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their further evolution is often hampered by the scarcity of high-quality training data and the heavy reliance of traditional methods on expert-labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enables LLMs to train themselves by generating, cleaning, reviewing and annotating data with preference information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate, clean, review, and annotate data with preference information significantly reducing time and cost of post-training data construction. |
Rich Semantic Knowledge Enhanced Large Language Models for Few-shot Chinese Spell Checking (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) is a widely used technology for speech to text and optical character recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese rich semantic information to introduce large language models as the foundation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on few-shot CSC task than existing methods. |
Compare to The Knowledge: Graph Neural Fake News Detection with External Knowledge (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection rely on linguistic and semantic features from news content and do not exploit external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural model which compares news to knowledge base through entities for fake news detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
A Critical Analysis of Document Out-of-Distribution Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiuxiang Gu, Yifei Ming, Yi Zhou, Jason Kuen, Vlad Morariu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Nikolaos Barmpalios, Anqi Liu, Yixuan Li, Tong Sun, Ani Nenkova
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding models focus on single-modal inputs such as images or texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a spatial-aware adapter to adapt transformer-based language models to document domain to exploit multi-modal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the OOD detection performance compared to using a standard language model and to competitive baselines. |
Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Question answering (QA) and question generation (QG) are closely related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a training algorithm that generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network and Generating Domain-Adaptive Nets under the question answering scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training algorithm generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Generating Domain-Adaptive Nets (GDAN) under the question answering scenario. |
UrbanGeoEval: A City-Scale Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Geospatial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on 18 widely used LLMs uncover critical insights: (1) models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps; (2) failures in complex multi-hop tasks stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-module framework that disentangles factual recall and spatial logic from the model's real capabilities in urban environments. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests on 18 widely used LLMs reveal that models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps, and failures in complex multi-hop tasks often stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits. |
A Training-free LLM-based Approach to General Chinese Character Error Correction (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chinese spelling correction (CSC) is a crucial task that aims to correct character errors in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that handles missing and redundant characters and an additional prompt-based large language model to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a high-quality dataset and a prompt-based large language model. |
VRPO: Rethinking Value Modeling for Robust RL under Noisy Supervision in LLM Post-Training (2026.acl-long)
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Dingwei Zhu, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Guoqiang Zhang, Jiazheng Zhang, Junjie Ye, Mingxu Chai, Enyu Zhou, Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Caishuang Huang, Chenhao Huang, Yunke Zhang, Yuran Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world environments often suffers from ambiguous or incomplete supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances value modeling for robust RL in LLM post-training by integrating auxiliary losses guided by entropy and perplexity from a frozen language model and variational information bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multi-turn dialogue, math reasoning, and science QA with rule-based and model-based rewards. |
xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systems (2025.naacl-long)
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Jianguo Zhang, Tian Lan, Ming Zhu, Zuxin Liu, Thai Quoc Hoang, Shirley Kokane, Weiran Yao, Juntao Tan, Akshara Prabhakar, Haolin Chen, Zhiwei Liu, Yihao Feng, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Rithesh R N, Zeyuan Chen, Ran Xu, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant research interest, but there are few standards for developing specialized models for agent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of large action models with dense and mixture-of-expert architectures that unifies, augments, and synthesizes diverse datasets to enhance agent generalizability and performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform GPT-4, Claude-3, and many other models in terms of tool use and outperformed GPT-based models on multiple agent ability benchmarks. |
REO-Relevance, Extraness, Omission: A Fine-grained Evaluation for Image Captioning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics for image captioning evaluation provide an overall quality score, which is difficult to infer specific description errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained evaluation method REO for automatically measuring the performance of image captioning systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher consistency with human judgments and provides more intuitive evaluation results than other metrics. |
Unsupervised Multi-Granularity Summarization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Ming Zhong, Yang Liu, Suyu Ge, Yuning Mao, Yizhu Jiao, Xingxing Zhang, Yichong Xu, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Experimental results confirm the substantial superiority of GranuSum on multi-granularity summarization over strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to rank events by their salience and annotate a benchmark for GranuSum that contains multiple summaries at different granularities for each document cluster. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is capable of producing multi-granular summaries in unsupervised manner over strong baselines. |
From Scores to Preferences: Redefining Evaluation Paradigm for Speech Quality Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Cao, Changhao Jiang, Jiabao Zhuang, Jiajun Sun, Ming Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Hui Li, Shihan Dou, Yuran Wang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
| Approach: | They propose a MOS-aware reward model that incorporates MOS gap into reward function during reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
Decompose, Prioritize, and Eliminate: Dynamically Integrating Diverse Representations for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on multi-modal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) does not integrate all multi-modal representations to provide rich contextual information to improve NER. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative reasoning framework that integrates all the diverse multi-modal representations following the strategy of "decompose, prioritize, and eliminate" . they propose to use hierarchically connected fusion layers to prioritize transitions from "easy-to-hard" and "coarse-to fine" |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates all the diverse multi-modal representations following the strategy of "decompose, prioritize, and eliminate". |
When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Personalization can inadvertently distort factual reasoning when faced with factual queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions while preserving personalized behavior. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and personalization methods show that FPPS significantly improves factual accuracy while maintaining personalized performance. |
Similarity = Value? Consultation Value-Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on semantic similarity to align historical consultations with current queries due to the absence of ‘value’ labels, but this lacks exploration of needs in user consultations. |
| Approach: | They propose a consultation value assessment framework that evaluates historical consultations from three novel perspectives: (1) Scenario Scope Value, (2) Posterior Action Value, and (3) Time Decay Value. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and commercial datasets on both retrieval and ranking tasks. |
TRIPS: Efficient Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Text-Relevant Image Patch Selection (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-and-language pre-training models suffer from long visual sequences . experimental results show that TRIPS gains a speedup of 40% over previous similar VLP models . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient vision-and-language pre-training model with text-relevant image patch selection, TRIPS, which reduces the visual sequence progressively with a text-guided patch-selection layer in the visual backbone for efficient training and inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can speed up training and inference by 40% over previous models. |
STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-long)
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Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Mutian Bao, Jinjian Zhang, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo, Ming Kong, Jie Liu, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical group-based RL framework that leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA show that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect. |
Semi-supervised Fine-tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs require labeled data, which can be costly in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can fully exploit labeled and unlabeled data for LLM fine-tuning . they conducted experiments using GPT-4o-mini and Llama-3.1 on seven general or domain-specific datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can fully exploit labeled and unlabeled data for LLM alignment from a propagate-and-select manner. |
Unsolvable Problem Detection: Robust Understanding Evaluation for Large Multimodal Models (2025.acl-long)
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Atsuyuki Miyai, Jingkang Yang, Jingyang Zhang, Yifei Ming, Qing Yu, Go Irie, Yixuan Li, Hai Helen Li, Ziwei Liu, Kiyoharu Aizawa
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is widely used to assess the understanding capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a task to evaluate the robust understanding capability of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) they introduce a benchmark to assess performance across various ability dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can withhold answers when encountering unsolvable problems of MCQA, proving it understands the answer. |
Fine-tune BERT with Sparse Self-Attention Mechanism (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing sparse self-attention fine-tuning models have been used to improve sentiment analysis, question answering, and natural language inference tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse Self-Attention Fine-tuning model which integrates sparsity into self-attention mechanism to enhance the fine-tune performance of BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline models on sentiment analysis, question answering, and natural language inference tasks and is able to interpret the input better. |
Measuring Social Norms of Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets that evaluate a general understanding of social science are inadequate to understand social norms. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework to improve large language models’ ability to understand social norms by comparing them to elementary students. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves large language models to be on par with humans. |
The Digital Dunning-Kruger Effect: Decoupling Hallucinations via Geometric Hidden-state Observation for Semantic Truthfulness (2026.acl-long)
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Yueheng Mao, Min Yu, Gengwang Li, Jianguo Jiang, Gang Li, Meng Zhang, Zhen Xu, Weiqing Huang, Ming Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate overconfident yet factually incorrect hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box-based framework that captures stubborn hallucinations by integrating internal geometric dynamics with output probability distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms white-box methods and reduces computational overhead by over 90%. |
MCC-KD: Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in complex reasoning through chain of thought (CoT) prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate multiple rationales for each question and enforce consistency among their predictions by minimizing the bidirectional KL-divergence between the answer distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance on in-distribution and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. |
DRLK: Dynamic Hierarchical Reasoning with Language Model and Knowledge Graph for Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work only uses the same QA context representation to interact with multiple layers of KG, which results in a restricted interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that utilizes dynamic hierarchical interactions between QA context and KG for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets and competitively on the others. |
Profiling LLM’s Copyright Infringement Risks under Adversarial Persuasive Prompting (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in text generation but raise concerns regarding potential copyright infringement. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured persuasion workflow to analyze the influence of persuasive prompts on LLM outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method analyzes the influence of persuasive prompts on LLM outputs. |
MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinsheng Huang, Liang Chen, Taian Guo, Fu Zeng, Yusheng Zhao, Bohan Wu, Ye Yuan, Haozhe Zhao, Zhihui Guo, Yichi Zhang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Luchen Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, but many benchmarks suffer from systematic biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to avoid Type-I errors by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark avoids Type-I errors while maintaining reliability of MCQ evaluations. |
Learning to Customize Model Structures for Few-shot Dialogue Generation Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training generative models with minimal corpus are difficult . fine-tuning distinguishes tasks from parameter perspective but ignores model-structure perspective . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that can customize a unique dialogue model for each task in the few-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two datasets in task consistency, response quality, diversity and consistency. |
Multi-modal Semantic Understanding with Contrastive Cross-modal Feature Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work on multi-modal semantic understanding primarily exploits a dual-encoder structure to separate image and text, but fails to learn cross-modal feature alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a CLIP-guided contrastive-learning-based architecture to perform multi-modal feature alignment by projecting features from different modalities into a unified deep space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on sarcasm detection and sentiment analysis tasks and is simple to implement without using task-specific external knowledge. |
FinMME: Benchmark Dataset for Financial Multi-Modal Reasoning Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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Junyu Luo, Zhizhuo Kou, Liming Yang, Xiao Luo, Jinsheng Huang, Zhiping Xiao, Jingshu Peng, Chengzhong Liu, Jiaming Ji, Xuanzhe Liu, Sirui Han, Ming Zhang, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced rapid development in recent years, but there is a notable lack of effective and specialized multimodal evaluation datasets in the financial domain. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinMME, a multimodal large language model with 11,000 financial research samples and 20 annotators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than state-of-the-art models, highlighting its challenging nature. |
MORE-3S:Multimodal-based Offline Reinforcement Learning with Shared Semantic Spaces (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) focus on learning value functions or policy gradients, but they view it as a sequence modeling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates multimodal and pre-trained language models to transform offline reinforcement learning into a supervised learning task by integrating state information derived from images and action-related data obtained from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on Atari and OpenAI Gym environments while promoting long-term strategic thinking. |
PANDA: Preference Adaptation for Enhancing Domain-Specific Abilities of LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated considerable capabilities across various tasks . however, they often fall short of the performance achieved by domain-specific state-of-the-art models . |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free method to augment domain-specific abilities of Large language models . they leverage insights from the response preference of expert models to augment LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the expert model on 4 ScienceWorld tasks. |
Instructed Language Models with Retrievers Are Powerful Entity Linkers (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Generative approaches powered by large language models have demonstrated emergent abilities in tasks that require complex reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence training objective with instruction-tuning that enables casual language models to perform entity linking over knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches with +6.8 F1 points gain on average and huge advantage in training data efficiency and compute consumption. |
Beyond Scaling: Measuring and Predicting the Upper Bound of Knowledge Retention in Language Model Pre-Training (2026.acl-long)
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Changhao Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yifei Cao, Junjie Ye, Xiaoran Fan, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Jiajun Sun, Yi Dong, Yujiong Shen, Jingqi Tong, Baoyu Fan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict performance of large language models are lacking . authors propose a size-dependent mutual information predictor for closed-book question answering accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a size-dependent mutual information predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models and achieves R2 > 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy without additional training. |
PoD: Positional Dependency-Based Word Embedding for Aspect Term Extraction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings that capture the contextual information only produce moderate results in aspect term extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a positional dependency-based word embedding which takes both dependency context and positional context into account for aspect term extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other embedding methods in aspect term extraction. |