Papers by Nuo Chen
Incentivizing In-depth Reasoning over Long Contexts with Process Advantage Shaping (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing LLMs’ short-context reasoning but falters in long-contemporal scenarios requiring precise grounding and multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs high-difficulty, multi-hop long-context QA pairs with inherent reasoning chains to overcome this bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms RLVR baselines and matches frontier LLMs while using far fewer parameters. |
EmoMM: Benchmarking and Steering MLLM for Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Conflict and Missingness (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in MER, but their internal decision-making mechanisms under modality conflict and missingness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model that can detect and control modality conflicts and missing subsets by a lightweight mechanism that detects and controls modality conflict. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance across settings, showing it can handle conflict and missing behaviors. |
Evaluating and Enhancing the Robustness of Code Pre-trained Models through Structure-Aware Adversarial Samples Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained code models have made significant strides in the field of neural code intelligence, but they are susceptible to adversarial attacks that subtly modify the input sequence and can impair generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of novel robustness evaluation methods based on the intrinsic structure of the code to explore the impact of imperceptible perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods have demonstrated their effectiveness across a wide range of models and tasks, and are able to predict the performance of perturbed models. |
Make Prompt-based Black-Box Tuning Colorful: Boosting Model Generalization from Three Orthogonal Perspectives (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing power on NLP tasks. however, tuning these models for downstream tasks usually requires exorbitant costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box tuning technique that optimizes task-specific prompts without accessing gradients and hidden representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance under few-shot learning scenarios. |
MegaAgent: A Large-Scale Autonomous LLM-based Multi-Agent System Without Predefined SOPs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent systems lack agent coordination and rely on predefined procedures . existing systems lack adaptive task coordination when task is big and complex . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale autonomous LLM-based multi-agent system that generates agents based on task complexity and enables dynamic task decomposition, parallel execution, efficient communication and comprehensive system monitoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing systems in task completion efficiency and scalability. |
DRBO: Mitigating Short Board Effect via Dynamic Reward Balancing in Multi-reward LLM Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new framework to optimize large language models (LLMs) for evaluation metrics is needed to balance weaker metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Reward Balancing Optimization framework to mitigate the "short-board effect" they apply it to single-task and multi-type task scenarios . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and balances performance across multiple metrics. |
Bridging the Gap between Language Models and Cross-Lingual Sequence Labeling (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train cross-lingual pre-trained language models have shown great success in cross-linguistic sequence labeling tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual language informative span masking task to eliminate the objective gap between pre-training and fine-tuning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks even with limited pre-training data. |
A Transformer-based Threshold-Free Framework for Multi-Intent NLU (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-intent natural language understanding mainly detect multiple intents on threshold settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based multi-intent NLU model with multi-task learning that exploits the information of the number of multiple intents in each utterance without additional manual annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior results on two public multi-intent datasets. |
Retrieving, Rethinking and Revising: The Chain-of-Verification Can Improve Retrieval Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance Large Language Models . however, such approach can generate inconsistent answer with external references . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate the verification module into the RAG to improve external retrieval correctness and internal generation consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly surpass the state-of-the-art baselines using different LLM backbones. |
AlgBench: To What Extent Do Large Reasoning Models Understand Algorithms? (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for algorithmic reasoning fail to answer a critical question: do LRMs master algorithmic thinking? Empirical evaluations on leading LRM models reveal substantial performance heterogeneity, while models perform well on non-optimized tasks, accuracy drops sharply to around 49% on globally optimized algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm-centric benchmark that evaluates large reasoning models under an algorithmic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations on leading LRMs reveal substantial performance heterogeneity . models perform well on non-optimized tasks, accuracy drops sharply to around 49% . |
Natural Response Generation for Chinese Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MRC models trained on labeled answers are limited in generating human-like responses in real QA scenarios. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset called Penguin to promote machine reading comprehension . they use 200k training data with fluent, well-informed responses to train models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first benchmark towards natural response generation in Chinese MRC on a relatively large scale. |
XtraGPT: Context-Aware and Controllable Academic Paper Revision via Human-AI Collaboration (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Nuo Chen, Andre Lin HuiKai, Jiaying Wu, Junyi Hou, Zining Zhang, Qian Wang, Xidong Wang, Bingsheng He
| Challenge: | Existing systems are designed for general-purpose scientific text generation and fail to support high-quality scientific writing beyond surface-level polishing. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-AI collaboration framework for academic paper revision based on criteria-guided intent alignment and context-aware modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs and rivals the quality of proprietary ones. |
RelEdit: Evaluating Conceptual Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Relational Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods struggle to reason about related conceptual knowledge effectively, despite a lack of model-level relational reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess concept-level and instance-level relational reasoning abilities of edited models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains the best scores on the memory-based in-context editing baseline, MICE, suggesting a promising direction for model editing. |
How does Misinformation Affect Large Language Model Behaviors and Preferences? (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored the role of Large Language Models in combating misinformation, but there is still a lack of detailed analysis on the specific aspects and extent to which LLMs are influenced by misinformation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' behavior and knowledge preference toward misinformation to identify their models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on 10,346,712 pieces of misinformation and examines knowledge conflicts and stylistic variations. |
TransCoder: Towards Unified Transferable Code Representation Learning Inspired by Human Skills (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune code intelligence models to individual tasks are costly and require large data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transferable fine-tuning strategy for Code representation learning that uses a tunable prefix encoder to capture cross-task and cross-language transferable knowledge and apply it to downstream adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can lead to superior performance on code-related tasks and encourage mutual reinforcement. |
CapArena: Benchmarking and Analyzing Detailed Image Captioning in the LLM Era (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kanzhi Cheng, Wenpo Song, Jiaxin Fan, Zheng Ma, Qiushi Sun, Fangzhi Xu, Chenyang Yan, Nuo Chen, Jianbing Zhang, Jiajun Chen
| Challenge: | Image captioning has been a challenge for vision-language researchers for decades . current VLMs focus on tasks like visual question answering (YA) but image captioning is not as advanced as expected. |
| Approach: | They evaluate VLMs' performance on image captioning using human annotations . they find that some metrics show high caption-level agreement with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models on image captioning . it achieves 93.4% correlation with human rankings at $4 per test . |
MLLM-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs with Per-sample Criteria (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wentao Ge, Shunian Chen, Hardy Chen, Nuo Chen, Junying Chen, Zhihong Chen, Wenya Xie, Shuo Yan, ChenghaoZhu ChenghaoZhu, Ziyue Lin, Dingjie Song, Xidong Wang, Anningzhe Gao, Zhang Zhiyi, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methodologies for multimodal large language models are limited in evaluating objective queries without considering real-world user experiences. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria using potent MLLM as the judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm shows that it can be used to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria. |
Revisiting LoRA through the Lens of Parameter Redundancy: Spectral Encoding Helps (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a prominent technique for fine-tuning large foundation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation technique that harnesses the expressiveness of spectral bases to re-parameterize LoRA from a sparse spectral subspace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves greater efficiency with fewer parameters than baselines on various downstream tasks, including commonsense reasoning, math reasoning, and code generation. |
Uncertainty-aware Parameter-Efficient Self-training for Semi-supervised Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-trained language models rely on noisy data, which can be expensive if all parameters are updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training framework that incorporates Monte Carlo dropouts into the model and judiciously selects reliable pseudo-labeled examples based on confidence and certainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and efficiency over multiple tasks over multiple datasets. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
Distinguish Confusing Law Articles for Legal Judgment Prediction (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to assist legal judgment are limited and can't solve confusing charges issue. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model to predict a legal judgment based on a textual description of the case and a graph neural network to learn subtle differences between confusing law articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn subtle differences between confusing law articles and extract effective discriminative features from fact descriptions. |
Beyond Code Pairs: Dialogue-Based Data Generation for LLM Code Translation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Le Chen, Nuo Xu, Winson Chen, Bin Lei, Pei-Hung Lin, Dunzhi Zhou, Rajeev Thakur, Caiwen Ding, Ali Jannesari, Chunhua Liao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in code translation, yet their performance deteriorates in low-resource programming domains such as Fortran and emerging frameworks like CUDA . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-LLM Questioner–Solver pipeline that integrates external knowledge from compilers and runtime feedback to generate verified translations and multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms proprietary models on key metrics like compilation success and accuracy. |
Alleviating Over-smoothing for Unsupervised Sentence Representation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn better unsupervised sentence representations have been successful . over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentences reduces the capacity of powerful PLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve the over-smoothing problem in unsupervised sentence representations by combining negatives from PLMs intermediate layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on different strong baselines on Semantic Textual Similarity and Transfer datasets. |
Orca: A Few-shot Benchmark for Chinese Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Nuo Chen, Hongguang Li, Junqing He, Yinan Bao, Xinshi Lin, Qi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Baoyuan Wang, Jia Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for conversational machine reading comprehension are inconsistent with real scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese CMRC benchmark to evaluate model's generalization ability towards diverse domains by using zero-shot/few-shot settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 831 hot-topic driven conversations with 4,742 turns and cover 33 domains. |
Compress to Impress: Unleashing the Potential of Compressive Memory in Real-World Long-Term Conversations (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based methods for long-term conversations face challenges in memory database management and accurate memory retrieval, hindering their efficacy in dynamic, real-world interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that eschews traditional retrieval modules and memory databases and adopts a “One-for-All” approach to manage memory generation, compression, and response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces more nuanced and human-like experiences than retrieval-based methods. |
Diversity Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: Structural Coupling and Collective Failure in Open-Ended Idea Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used for open-ended idea generation . when and why collective interaction expands the solution space remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to study diversity in multi-agent systems across three bottom-up levels: model intelligence, agent cognition, and system dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields diminishing diversity despite higher quality . the proposed model fails to expand diversity and causes it to collapse . |
Structural Contrastive Pretraining for Cross-Lingual Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train multilingual language models using pretraining tasks like mask language modeling have yielded promising results on a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to align the structural words in a parallel sentence, enhancing models’ ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves model's ability to comprehend cross-lingual representations by increasing the frequency of negative pairings. |
ControlMath: Controllable Data Generation Promotes Math Generalist Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Structure-aware Fine-tuning for Code Pre-trained Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing CodePTMs are mainly structure-free and structurebased, but how to fine-tune them remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play fine-tuning method that incorporates structural knowledge into pre-trained code models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can benefit CodePTMs more with limited training data. |
Is Your LLM Outdated? A Deep Look at Temporal Generalization (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate large language models are limited due to their inherent dynamic nature and the inherent dynamicity of language and information. |
| Approach: | They introduce a new evaluation framework that employs fresh text and event prediction for assessing LLMs’ temporal adaptability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant temporal biases and a decline in performance over time. |
Pass-Tuning: Towards Structure-Aware Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Code Representation Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Code pre-trained models have been proposed and widely applied in the domain of code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a plug-and-play graph neural network module as a tunable prefix to exploit structural information of source code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits structural information of source code and could replace full fine-tuning. |
CAT-probing: A Metric-based Approach to Interpret How Pre-trained Models for Programming Language Attend Code Structure (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing code pre-trained models fail to consider inherent characteristics of codes . Existing methods to interpret code pretrained model fail to take into account inherent characteristics . |
| Approach: | They propose a probing method to quantitatively interpret how CodePTMs attend code structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method denoises input code sequences and measures commonality between token-level attention scores and pair-wise distances between corresponding AST nodes. |
Self-supervised Contrastive Cross-Modality Representation Learning for Spoken Question Answering (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three SQA benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised training stage and a contrastive representation learning stage for spoken question answering with auxiliary tasks and augmentation strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on three SQA benchmarks. |
CryptoTrade: A Reflective LLM-based Agent to Guide Zero-shot Cryptocurrency Trading (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for financial decision-making and stock market prediction for years. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to analyze on-chain and off-chain data to provide a comprehensive overview of the cryptocurrency market. |
| Outcome: | The proposed trading agent leverages the transparency and immutability of on-chain data, as well as the timeliness and influence of off-chain signals, providing a comprehensive overview of the cryptocurrency market. |
End-to-end Spoken Conversational Question Answering: Task, Dataset and Model (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational question answering significantly degrade on datasets . a new task aims to enable systems to model complex dialogues flow given the speech documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a new Spoken Conversational Question Answering task to model human conversations . they propose DDNet, which ingests cross-modal information to achieve fine-grained representations of speech and language modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance in spoken conversational question answering. |
When Gradient Descent Meets Derivative-Free Optimization: A Match Made in Black-Box Scenario (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are expensive and may not be open-sourced due to commercial considerations and potential risks of misuse. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce gradient descent into black-box tuning scenario . they propose a method which integrates gradient descent and derivative-free optimization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant performance gains over previous state-of-the-art methods. |
Large Language Models Meet Harry Potter: A Dataset for Aligning Dialogue Agents with Characters (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that can create open-domain dialogue agents lack character representation and annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to study character alignment and character representation . it includes all dialogue sessions from the Harry Potter series and includes annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used as a universal benchmark for character-driven LLMs. |