Papers by Ning Chen

49 papers
Sequential LLM Framework for Fashion Recommendation (2024.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing fashion recommendation systems struggle with the unique challenges of the fashion domain.
Approach: They propose a sequential fashion recommendation framework that leverages a pre-trained large language model enhanced with recommendation-specific prompts.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves fashion recommendation performance on Amazon fashion.
Graph-GRPO: Stabilizing Multi-Agent Topology Learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent approaches to optimize communication topology rely on single-sample policy gradients with absolute rewards.
Approach: They propose a topology optimization framework that integrates Group Relative Policy Optimization.
Outcome: The proposed topology optimization framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on reasoning and code generation benchmarks.
CollabKG: A Learnable Human-Machine-Cooperative Information Extraction Toolkit for (Event) Knowledge Graph Construction (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing IE tools lack multi-task support and automatic updates for KG and EKG construction.
Approach: They propose a human-machine-cooperative IE toolkit for KG and EKG construction that unifies different IE subtasks and integrates LLMs as the assistant machine.
Outcome: The proposed tool improves annotation quality, efficiency, and stability simultaneously.
Sparse Low-rank Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained large language models in a parameter-efficient manner are gaining traction within the research community.
Approach: They propose a method of low-rank adaptation that enables dynamic adjustments to the intrinsic rank during the adaptation process.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms the current method with a fixed and unalterable intrinsic rank and a low-rank adaptation process.
From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing models of robustness evaluation are incomprehensive, impractical, and invalid .
Approach: They propose a framework for automatic robustness evaluation that shifts towards model-centric evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks.
Outcome: The proposed framework is based on a model-centric evaluation protocol and a robustness evaluation protocol.
An LLM-Embedding Semantic Adaptation Network for Post-level Semantic Drift Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Evaluating semantic drift is essential for understanding discourse evolution and opinion formation in online discussions.
Approach: They propose an LLM-embedding Semantic Adaptation Network to evaluate semantic drift . they use an LRU module, an LEM-Embedding graph convolutional network module and an adaptive fusion module to integrate features from event related posts.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the semantic drift evaluation task compared to baseline models.
OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning (2022.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Prompt-learning is a new paradigm in natural language processing, adapting pre-trained language models to cloze-style prediction, autoregressive modeling, or sequence to sequence generation.
Approach: They propose a framework for prompt-learning that integrates pre-trained language models with a unified framework.
Outcome: The proposed framework is easy to use and flexible enough to integrate with other frameworks.
Factorized Learning Assisted with Large Language Model for Gloss-free Sign Language Translation (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Previous Sign Language Translation methods have relied on gloss annotations to improve performance, but labeling high-quality glosses is labor-intensive and inefficient.
Approach: They propose to integrate Large Language Model (LLM) into SLT by factorizing learning into two stages to improve the learning curve.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on three SLT datasets conducted under the gloss-free setting.
LongTutor: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Long-term Personalized Tutoring (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations focus on isolated, short-term interactions, overlooking the inherently long-term nature of learning.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for long-term personalized tutoring based on an annotated learning log . they propose an automated generator–verifier pipeline to enable benchmark expansion .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks evaluate LLMs across three progressive tasks: evidence acquisition, knowledge state diagnosis, and adaptive teaching action.
Step Guided Reasoning: Improving Mathematical Reasoning using Guidance Generation and Step Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to improve mathematical reasoning require extensive datasets for training or depend on few-shot methods that compromise computational accuracy.
Approach: They propose a training-free adaptation framework that efficiently equips general-purpose pre-trained language models with enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms Qwen2.5-72B-Math-Instruct on MMLU-STEM with a score of 90.9%, compared to 87.3%.
Few-shot Classification with Hypersphere Modeling of Prototypes (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fewshot learning use embeddings in space, but they lack expressivity and are difficult to perform statistically.
Approach: They propose a method where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere’s center and the radius.
Outcome: The proposed method is much more expressive than embeddings and performs better than statistical modeling.
Exploring Lottery Prompts for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to optimize pre-trained language models are expensive and slow to scale.
Approach: They propose to search for instance-level lottery prompts and generalize them to unseen data . they validate the assumption that for every instance, there is almost always a lottery prompt that induces the correct prediction from the PLM .
Outcome: The proposed method can achieve comparable results with other gradient-free and optimization-free baselines.
Not All Modalities at Once: Dynamic Dropout and Bidirectional Fusion for Robust Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing MKGC methods train with all modalities available, implicitly assuming consistent complementarity . however, this often induces modality dependence and modality competition under heterogeneous noise, which can hinder robust multi-modal fusion and limit overall performance.
Approach: They propose a framework to infer missing links in multimodal knowledge graphs by leveraging structured triples together with auxiliary modalities such as text and images.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art results.
Few-NERD: A Few-shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to few-shot named entity recognition (NER) focus on coarse-grained entities with few examples, while most unseen entities are fine-grounded.
Approach: They present a human-annotated few-shot named entity recognition dataset . they construct benchmark tasks to assess the generalization capability of models .
Outcome: The proposed model is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER data set.
CAVGAN: Unifying Jailbreak and Defense of LLMs via Generative Adversarial Attacks on their Internal Representations (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies have isolated LLM jailbreak attacks and defenses . a new framework combines attack and defense to protect against malicious queries .
Approach: They propose a framework that combines attack and defense to protect the Large Language Model (LLM) by embedding harmful problems into the safe area.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves an average jailbreak success rate of 88.85% across three popular LLMs while the defense success rate reaches an average of 84.17%.
AdaFuse: Adaptive Ensemble Decoding for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing ensemble approaches to large language models lack flexibility for mid-generation adaptation.
Approach: They propose an adaptive ensemble decoding framework that dynamically selects semantically appropriate fusion units during generation.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing ensemble frameworks on open-domain QA, arithmetic reasoning, and machine translation tasks.
Controllable Preference Optimization: Toward Controllable Multi-Objective Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing algorithms for achieving optimal alignment are mostly unidirectional . a recent study suggests that large language models can be ground with evident preferences .
Approach: They propose to ground large language models with evident preferences . they propose to use controllable preference optimization to specify different objectives .
Outcome: The proposed models can provide responses that match various preferences among the ”3H” desiderata.
S2O: Early Stopping for Sparse Attention via Online Permutation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing block-granularity sparsification can reduce latency, but coarse blocks impose an intrinsic sparsity ceiling.
Approach: They propose a method that performs early stopping for sparse attention via online permutation.
Outcome: The proposed approach reduces the complexity of the model and its performance.
Align Voting Behavior with Public Statements for Legislator Representation Learning (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies rely on roll call data to estimate political preference of legislators.
Approach: They propose to integrate voting behavior and public statements on Twitter to jointly model legislators.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on the task of roll call vote prediction . it also shows that the model captures nuances in statements .
Event-Centric Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-tutorials)

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Challenge: This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating the extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations.
Approach: This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating events and their relations, and a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks.
Outcome: This tutorial will provide an introduction to various methods for automating extraction, conceptualization and prediction of events and their relations, and a wide range of NLU and commonsense understanding tasks.
LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: LongLeader aims to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . long-constext comprehension is a key bottleneck for many use cases .
Approach: They propose a leaderboard to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . they offer open-source access to the benchmarks and maintain a dedicated website .
Outcome: The proposed model assesses different LLMs on selected benchmarks and provides open-source access to the benchmarks.
Multi-Stage LLM Fine-Tuning with a Continual Learning Setting (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in knowledge-intensive applications, but they may face a multi-stage continuous learning scenario.
Approach: They propose a multi-stage continuous learning paradigm that includes a preference-based learning bias to identify potential knowledge conflicts and a self-distillation-based data augmentation strategy to expand and enrich the training corpus.
Outcome: The proposed learning paradigm achieves a significant improvement in accuracy after 7 stages of fine-tuning compared to previous methods while preserving general knowledge.
Fusing Highly Specialized Language Models for Comprehensive Expertise (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models that focus on language, programming code, and mathematical symbols are not able to achieve mastery of all three domains simultaneously.
Approach: They propose to fuse highly-specialized models that are already sufficiently trained on different domains to achieve a highly-specific model.
Outcome: The proposed model could achieve mastery of the three crucial domains simultaneously.
PInKS: Preconditioned Commonsense Inference with Minimal Supervision (2022.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for reasoning with preconditions lack data on the problem and lack of support for such reasoning.
Approach: They propose to improve the model for reasoning with preconditions through minimum supervision by PAC-Bayesian informativeness analysis and precision measures.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on benchmarks focused on reasoning with the preconditions of commonsense knowledge (up to 40% Macro-F1 scores) it also improves inferences on PAC-Bayesian informativeness analysis, precision measures, and ablation studies.
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)

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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.
Tooling or Not Tooling? The Impact of Tools on Language Agents for Chemistry Problem Solving (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) with tools are limited and qualitative . existing evaluations have been limited and only focus on 14 tasks focusing on compound synthesis.
Approach: They propose to develop an enhanced chemistry agent over ChemCrow to improve chemistry problem solving by integrating tools into LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed agent does not consistently outperform its base LLMs without tools on specialized chemistry tasks and general chemistry questions.
PAPERMIND: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks assess integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning in isolation . Existing systems assess integrated reasoning in isolated tasks .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over research papers.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over scientific papers.
The Linguistic Connectivities Within Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent studies have discovered notable disparities in their performance across different languages.
Approach: They conduct a systematic investigation into the behaviors of large language models across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios and reveals a Linguistic Map correlates with the richness of available resources and linguistic family relations.
Outcome: The proposed model demonstrates that there are significant disparities in performance across languages across 27 different languages on 3 different scenarios.
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions.
Approach: They construct a large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset with improved annotation schemes to address these drawbacks.
Outcome: The proposed dataset is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude.
Hybrid Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder Modeling for Speech-to-Text Tasks (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Neural based end-to-end frameworks have achieved remarkable success in speech-totext tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech- totext translation (ST).
Approach: They propose to combine Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) for speech-to-text tasks and leverage AED's strength in non-monotonic sequence to sequence learning while retaining Transducers streaming property.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms Transducer and Attention based Encoder-Decoder (TAED) on the MuST-C dataset and shows that it is not bound by any specific language model.
The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing work on instruction tuning has focused on task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations.
Approach: They propose a training data arrangement framework that allows for continual learning and loss reduction.
Outcome: The proposed framework promotes continual learning and loss reduction on unseen tasks.
CODIS: Benchmarking Context-dependent Visual Comprehension for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multimodal large language models have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of models to use contextual information in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension.
Outcome: The proposed model fails to extract and utilize contextual information to improve understanding of images.
V-GameGym: Visual Game Generation for Code Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing code-related benchmarks focus on single modality rather than visual game development.
Approach: They propose a multimodal benchmark for evaluating code large language models in visual game generation that integrates a clustering-based curation methodology and a pipeline for visual code synthesis.
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses code generation and visual game generation using a sandbox environment.
Evaluating Models’ Local Decision Boundaries via Contrast Sets (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Standard test sets for supervised learning evaluate in-distribution generalization but are misleading when a dataset has systematic gaps.
Approach: They propose a more rigorous annotation paradigm for NLP that helps to close systematic gaps in the test data.
Outcome: The proposed model performs significantly lower on contrast sets than on the original test sets—up to 25% in some cases.
Answer Consolidation: Formulation and Benchmarking (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Current question answering systems assume each question to have one correct answer.
Approach: They propose a problem where answers are partitioned into multiple groups . they construct a comprehensive and non-redundant set of answers by picking one answer from each group .
Outcome: The proposed model performs better than previous models, but it needs further improvements.
An Efficient Conversational Smart Compose System (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: a cloud-based smart compose system is designed to improve human-to-human conversation efficiency.
Approach: They propose a cloud-based smart compose system to improve conversation efficiency . they propose heuristics to achieve the best trade-off between quality and latency .
Outcome: The proposed system reduces latency without losing composing quality further.
XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation (2020.emnlp-main)

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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.
MuKA: Multimodal Knowledge Augmented Visual Information-Seeking (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for visual information-seeking tasks rely on textual knowledge . existing methods can impair information retrieval and confuse MLLMs .
Approach: They propose a framework which leverages a multimodal knowledge base to address these limitations.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the InfoSeek and E-VQA benchmarks.
Prompt-learning for Fine-grained Entity Typing (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments on fine-grained entity typing under fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of prompt-learning.
Approach: They propose a prompt-learning pipeline that stimulates versatile knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by constructing entity-oriented verbalizers and templates and conducting masked language modeling.
Outcome: The proposed approach can be applied to fine-grained entity typing in fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios.
ControlMath: Controllable Data Generation Promotes Math Generalist Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Currently, mathematical reasoning is one of the most challenging areas for closed-source LLMs.
Approach: They propose an iterative method involving an equation-generator module and two LLM-based agents that generate diverse equations and transform them into math word problems.
Outcome: The proposed method enables the generation of diverse math problems, not limited to specific domains or distributions.
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.
AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery.
Approach: They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages.
Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a recent study validates the effectiveness of chat language models by fine-tuning instruction data.
Approach: They propose to use a large-scale dataset of instructional conversations to fine-tune a conversational model on instruction data.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms open-source models in key metrics including scale, average length, diversity, coherence, etc.
Learning from Textual Radiology Reports: A Benchmark Dataset for Coronary CT Angiography (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: CCTA reports provide an assessment of coronary disease severity to guide patient management.
Approach: They propose a pipeline that decouples structuring from classification by an LLM-based parser . CCTA-RADS is the largest publicly available dataset of CCDA reports .
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the F1-score by 6%-13% compared with direct methods.
Different Tunes Played with Equal Skill: Exploring a Unified Optimization Subspace for Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing delta tuning algorithms freeze most of the parameters and only optimize minimal adaptive parameters.
Approach: They propose to decompose DETs into a unified optimization subspace and conduct optimization within the subspace.
Outcome: The proposed DETs achieve comparable performance to the original DET and can be transferred to another DET with non-trivial performance.
Indirectly Supervised Natural Language Processing (2023.acl-tutorials)

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Challenge: a tutorial on indirect supervision addresses challenges in ML for NLP . conventional approaches to NLP use taskspecific labeled examples of a large volume . indirect supervision is useful for a wide range of NLP tasks, but it is not enough for decoders .
Approach: This tutorial aims to address questions about indirect supervision in machine learning . authors discuss indirect supervision from T′ that handles T with outputs spanning from a moderate size to an open space .
Outcome: This tutorial aims to answer questions about how to provide supervision for ML tasks . it will discuss indirect supervision from T′ that handles T with outputs spanning from a moderate size to an open space .
FASTTRACK: Reliable Fact Tracing via Clustering and LLM-Powered Evidence Validation (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to fact tracing rely on assessing the similarity between training samples and the query along a certain dimension, such as lexical similarity, gradient, or embedding space.
Approach: They propose a new approach that harnesses the capabilities of Large Language Models to validate supportive evidence for queries and clusters the training database towards a reduced extent for LLMs to trace facts.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in accuracy and efficiency while being x33 faster than TracIn.
Structured Optimal Brain Pruning for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing pruning methods for Large Language Models rely on unstructured pruning or require special hardware to accelerate computation.
Approach: They propose a retraining-free structured pruning method called SoBP . they evaluate the effectiveness of SoBP across 14 models from 3 LLM families .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art pruning methods on 8 datasets.
VChain: Chain-of-Visual-Thought for Reasoning in Video Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent video generation models struggle to synthesize complex dynamics with a coherent chain of consequences.
Approach: They propose a framework that injects visual reasoning signals from multimodal models into video generation.
Outcome: a new framework that leverages multimodal models to generate sparse keyframes significantly improves quality of generated videos.

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