Papers by Pei Liu

50 papers
Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: High-quality post-training data is the primary engine driving LLM capabilities . datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking their true developmental context .
Approach: They propose a framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development using data lineage.
Outcome: The proposed framework characterizes domain-specific structural patterns in Math-oriented datasets and general-domain corpora.
Mitigating Geospatial Knowledge Hallucination in Large Language Models: Benchmarking and Dynamic Factuality Aligning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have extensive world knowledge, but often generate inaccurate geospatial knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework for evaluation of large language models to mitigate hallucinations . they use Kahneman-Tversky Optimization to align LLMs with their reality .
Outcome: The proposed evaluation framework uncovers hallucinations in 20 advanced LLMs.
Analytical FFN-to-MoE Restructuring via Activation Pattern Analysis (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are fast but require expensive pre-training . a new approach to scale large language models into MoEs reduces inference costs .
Approach: They propose an analytical post-training framework that rapidly restructures FFNs into sparse MoE architectures using only a small calibration dataset.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on a small calibration dataset.
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations .
Approach: They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch.
Outcome: Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models .
DocLLM: A Layout-Aware Generative Language Model for Multimodal Document Understanding (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Documents with rich layouts are a significant portion of enterprise corpora and document AI is still a challenge.
Approach: They propose a lightweight extension to traditional large language models for reasoning over visual documents that takes into account both textual semantics and spatial layout.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing large language models on 14 out of 16 datasets and generalizes well to 4 out of 5 previously unseen datasets.
Aligning Large Language Models with Implicit Preferences from User-Generated Content (2025.acl-long)

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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.
StoryMI: Steerable Multi-Agent Therapeutic Dialogue Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Motivational interviewing (MI) is a directive, client-centered counseling approach for eliciting clients' motivation for behavioral change.
Approach: They propose a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation . therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes .
Outcome: The proposed framework can generate fluent dialogues with minimal intervention time and a high level of evaluation.
ALERT: An LLM-powered Benchmark for Automatic Evaluation of Recommendation Explanations (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for recommendation explanation evaluation lack item diversity and user preferences data.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic recommendation explanation evaluation benchmark based on Amazon e-commerce categories with implicit preferences . they propose two novel automatic evaluators that enable scalable and human-preference aligned evaluation of explanations .
Outcome: The proposed model-agnostic evaluation benchmark outperforms existing methods in a variety of domains.
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability.
Approach: They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs .
Outcome: The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks.
Analyze Like a Venture Capitalist: Information-Gain and Knowledge Enhanced Graph Reasoning for Startup Success Prediction (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Most venture capital investments fail, while a few deliver outsized returns.
Approach: They propose a framework that synthesizes relational evidence across sources . they propose combining information-gain-driven retriever and knowledge base to ground reasoning .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves +5.9% F1 and +22.1% Precision@5 over state-of-the-art baselines.
AutoDetect: Towards a Unified Framework for Automated Weakness Detection in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant but subtle weaknesses, such as mistakes in instruction-following or coding tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework to automatically expose weaknesses in Large Language Models (LLMs) they use three LLM-powered agents to perform comprehensive weakness identification .
Outcome: The proposed framework shows that it is more effective than untargeted data augmentation methods like Self-Instruct to identify weaknesses in LLMs.
Instant Personalized Large Language Model Adaptation via Hypernetwork (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods require training a separate adapter for each user, making them computationally expensive and impractical for real-time updates.
Approach: They propose a scalable framework that maps a user's profile directly to a full set of adapter parameters.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms prompt-based personalization and OPPU while using substantially fewer computational resources at deployment.
UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses.
Approach: They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy.
Outcome: The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy.
Are ChatGPT and GPT-4 General-Purpose Solvers for Financial Text Analytics? A Study on Several Typical Tasks (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Recent large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown exceptional capabilities of generalist models . however, their applicability and effectiveness in specific domains like finance needs a better understanding .
Approach: They conduct empirical studies to compare the performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 on financial text analytical problems using eight benchmark datasets from five categories of tasks.
Outcome: The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on a wide range of financial text analytical tasks.
ShopSimulator: Evaluating and Exploring RL-Driven LLM Agent for Shopping Assistants (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on large language model-based agents focus on evaluation benchmarks without training support.
Approach: They propose a large-scale Chinese shopping simulation environment that uses large language models to train agents.
Outcome: The proposed model performs poorly in a large-scale and challenging shopping environment in China.
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment.
Approach: They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references.
Outcome: The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references.
DecompEval: Evaluating Generated Texts as Unsupervised Decomposed Question Answering (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation metrics for natural language generation (NLG) tasks face the challenges on generalization ability and interpretability.
Approach: They propose a metric that evaluates natural language generation tasks as an instruction-style question answering task and utilizes instruction-tuned pre-trained language models without training on evaluation datasets.
Outcome: The proposed metric achieves state-of-the-art performance in untrained metrics for evaluating text summarization and dialogue generation, which exhibits strong dimension-level / task-level generalization ability and interpretability.
STORM-BORN: A Challenging Mathematical Derivations Dataset Curated via a Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing datasets suffer from outdated and insufficient challenging content, neglecting human-like reasoning, and limited reliability due to single-LLM generation.
Approach: They propose a human-in-the-loop, multi-agent data generation framework that integrates reasoning-dense filters, multiagent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations to ensure the reliability and quality of the dataset.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves accuracy and quality of the 2,000-synthesized datasets by integrating reasoning-dense filters, multi-agent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations.
A Crosslingual Investigation of Conceptualization in 1335 Languages (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Conceptualizer is a method that creates a bipartite directed alignment graph between source language concepts and sets of target language strings.
Approach: They propose a method that creates a bipartite directed alignment graph between source language concepts and sets of target language strings.
Outcome: The proposed method has good alignment accuracy across all languages and on 32 Swadesh concepts.
ThinkAnswer Loss: Balancing Semantic Similarity and Exact Matching for LLM Reasoning Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for knowledge distillation use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and answer pairs, but they lack appropriate supervision signals.
Approach: They propose a framework that decouples CoT and answer supervision . the framework applies semantic similarity constraints while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer .
Outcome: The proposed framework decouples CoT and answer supervision while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer.
InterIntent: Investigating Social Intelligence of LLMs via Intention Understanding in an Interactive Game Context (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to mimic human social intelligence, but most studies focus on static self-report or performance-based tests.
Approach: They propose a framework to assess LLMs' ability to understand and manage intentions by mapping their ability to infer the intentions of others in a game setting.
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses LLMs' ability to understand and manage intentions in a game setting.
Beyond Task-Level Context: Class-Conditional Context Vectors for Implicit In-Context Learning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches aggregate demonstrations from all classes into a shared, task-level context vector, capturing global task information but without explicitly preserving fine-grained, class-conditional semantic distinctions.
Approach: They propose a class-conditional context vector extension to implicit in-context learning that explicitly models class-specific contextual information by constructing separate context vectors for each class.
Outcome: The proposed extension outperforms task-level context vector baselines and achieves higher average accuracy than conventional few-shot learning on most models.
Trajectory2Task: Training Robust Tool-Calling Agents with Synthesized Yet Verifiable Data for Complex User Intents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows . but most studies on tool-callers focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks.
Approach: They propose a tool-calling agent-based data pipeline that converts trajectories into user-facing tasks with controlled intent adaptations.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline can be used to study tool use under three scenarios.
Improving Large Language Models Function Calling and Interpretability via Guided-Structured Templates (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have strong reasoning and tool-use capabilities, yet fail in real-world tool-interactions due to incorrect parameterization, poor tool selection, or misinterpretation of user intent.
Approach: They propose a curriculum-inspired framework that leverages structured reasoning templates to guide LLMs through more deliberate step-by-step instructions for generating function calls.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces tool-use errors and improves interpretability and transparency of tool-using agents.
A Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese (2026.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Using sub-linear length normalized log-probabilities (SLLN-LP), we find unequal lengths of sentences in minimal pairs difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters.
Approach: They propose to use ZhoBLiMP as a linguistic minimal pair benchmark for Chinese language models to mitigate biases.
Outcome: The proposed metric mitigates biases in Chinese language models with over 100 paradigms . Anaphor, Quantifiers, and Ellipsis are difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters .
Intent Contrastive Learning Based on Multi-view Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on intent-related models fails to capture long-term dependencies in user behavior and fails to effectively utilize item relevance.
Approach: They propose a sequential recommendation framework that combine temporal variability with position encoding that has extrapolation properties to encode sequences, thereby expanding the model’s view of user behavior.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on three real datasets by 0.8% to 14.7% compared to baselines.
Black-Box Prompt Optimization: Aligning Large Language Models without Model Training (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models are often not well aligned with human intents, which requires additional training.
Approach: They propose to use Black-Box Prompt Optimization (BPO) to perform alignments on large language models that are not well aligned with human intents.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models and is model-agnostic.
Mosaic-IT: Cost-Free Compositional Data Synthesis for Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current instruction tuning relies on teacher models or human intervention to generate and refine the instructions and responses for training, which are costly, non-sustainable, and may lack diversity.
Approach: They propose a human/model-free compositional data synthesis method that can create rich and diverse augmentations from existing instruction tuning data to enhance large language models.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance over benchmarks and reduces training costs by 80% compared with original instruction tuning.
ProMediate: A Simulation Testbed for Evaluating Proactive Mediation in Multi-Party Negotiation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into agentic frameworks to assist individual users in completing diverse tasks.
Approach: They propose a simulation environment with a plug-and-play proactive AI mediator . they use a socio-cognitive evaluation framework to measure consensus changes, intervention latency, mediator effectiveness and intelligence.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms a generic baseline in multi-party negotiation scenarios while being 77% faster in response.
Think Before You Speak: Explicitly Generating Implicit Commonsense Knowledge for Response Generation (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current neural response generation models generate responses directly, omitting unstated implicit knowledge.
Approach: They propose a generative approach to externalize implicit commonsense knowledge and use it to generate responses.
Outcome: Empirical results show that TBS models outperform end-to-end RG models on most automatic metrics and generate more informative, specific, and commonsense-following responses.
Understanding In-Context Machine Translation for Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study on Manchu (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: In-context machine translation (MT) with large language models can take advantage of linguistic resources such as grammar books and dictionaries.
Approach: They propose to use in-context machine translation (MT) with large language models to take advantage of linguistic resources such as grammar books and dictionaries.
Outcome: The proposed approach can take advantage of dictionaries and grammar books, but its performance is poor for many lowresource languages.
Rethinking and Refining the Distinct Metric (2022.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing methods for calculating distinct scores have evident biases that assign higher penalties to longer sequences.
Approach: They propose to scale the number of distinct tokens based on their expectations.
Outcome: The proposed metric removes evident biases in the original distinct score . the proposed meter correlates better with human judgment in evaluating response diversity .
Reconstructing Event Regions for Event Extraction via Graph Attention Networks (2020.aacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches for event extraction focus on sentence-level event extraction, but they lack a broader view of the document context.
Approach: They build graphs with candidate event filler extractions enriched by sentential embeddings as nodes and use graph attention networks to identify event regions in a document and aggregate event information.
Outcome: The proposed method performs well on two languages and shows that it is faster than previous methods.
Probing into the Root: A Dataset for Reason Extraction of Structural Events from Financial Documents (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for event reason extraction are far from resolving this problem.
Approach: They propose a task to extract causal explanations from document-level texts . they use a dataset FinReason for evaluation to provide Reasons annotation for financial events .
Outcome: The proposed task performs better than existing methods on a dataset of 8,794 documents, 12,861 financial events and 11,006 reason spans.
ItD: Large Language Models Can Teach Themselves Induction through Deduction (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) have limited ability to conduct induction.
Approach: They propose a framework to enable LLMs to teach themselves induction through deduction.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance on two induction benchmarks and shows that it can be used to teach induction through deduction.
Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension with Language Branch Knowledge Distillation (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (CLMRC) is a challenging problem due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets in low-source languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, and Vietnamese.
Approach: They propose a novel approach to augment cross-lingual machine reading comprehension by combining knowledge from multiple language branch models into a single model for all target languages.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on two CLMRC benchmarks show the proposed method is effective and robust to data noises.
MATINF: A Jointly Labeled Large-Scale Dataset for Classification, Question Answering and Summarization (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing datasets labeled for one task hinder multi-task learning . task-specific data make models learn task-related leakage features rather than meaningful knowledge that could generalize to other tasks.
Approach: They propose to jointly label large-scale NLP dataset MATINF . it contains 1.07 million question-answer pairs with human-labeled categories .
Outcome: The proposed dataset is applicable for classification, question answering, and summarization.
SciText2Eq: Assessing LLMs for Explainable Equation Generation for Scientific Creativity (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior work has addressed problems in unstructured grounding, multi-equation dependency, and human-aligned evaluation.
Approach: They construct a dataset of scientific texts and evaluate it using an explainable equation generation workflow using automatic metrics and human judgments.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves moderate performance on lexical and syntactic similarity, but struggles with semantic accuracy.
Translationese-index: Using Likelihood Ratios for Graded and Generalizable Measurement of Translationese (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Translationese is a linguistic property that is often introduced in the translation process that is different from those of original texts.
Approach: They propose to use synthesized translations and translations in the wild to evaluate T-index's generalizability in cross-domain settings and its validity against human judgments.
Outcome: The proposed measure can generalize to unseen genres, authors, and language pairs.
DSRAG: A Double-Stream Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Countless Intent Detection (2025.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Current intent detection work experiments with minor intent categories.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses query-to-query and query- to-metadata approaches to retrieve intents from metadata.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on query-to-query (Q2Q) and query- to-metadata (Q 2M) approaches.
DREAM: Disentangling Risks to Enhance Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose unique safety challenges due to their integration of visual and textual data.
Approach: They propose a method to disentangle risks through step-by-step reasoning within multimodal inputs.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves safety alignment in MLLMs by fine-tuning and iterative Reinforcement Learning from AI feedback.
Competency-Aware Neural Machine Translation: Can Machine Translation Know its Own Translation Quality? (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation models are often criticized for failures that happen without competency awareness.
Approach: They propose a method that extends conventional NMT with a self-estimator to translate a source sentence and estimate its competency.
Outcome: The proposed method performs on translation tasks intact and on quality estimation tasks better than existing methods.
Socratic Style Chain-of-Thoughts Help LLMs to be a Better Reasoner (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Synthetic data generation is a promising approach to enhance reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent debate framework based on the Socratic questioning strategy . they use socratic questions to deepen the thinking process and broaden it to motivate self-reflection .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on math and code generation tasks while maintaining affordable costs.
CritiqueLLM: Towards an Informative Critique Generation Model for Evaluation of Large Language Model Generation (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for NLP evaluations lack the ability to generate informative critiques in pointwise grading and pairwise comparison especially without references.
Approach: They propose a method which can acquire pointwise grading critiques with pseudo references and revise these critiques via multi-path prompting to obtain informative evaluation data in different tasks and settings.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms all open-source models and even GPT-4 in system-level correlations of pointwise grading.
SentiLARE: Sentiment-Aware Language Representation Learning with Linguistic Knowledge (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing pre-trained models neglect to consider linguistic knowledge of texts . existing models neglect linguistic information, which is important for sentiment analysis .
Approach: They propose a model that introduces word-level linguistic knowledge into pre-trained models to enhance sentiment analysis by querying SentiWordNet to acquire sentiment polarity.
Outcome: The proposed model obtains state-of-the-art performance on a variety of sentiment analysis tasks.
EviReport: From Reasoned Outlines to Evidence Tracked Long-Form Reports (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Evidence-intensive reports often produce fluent but under-supported drafts . eviReport is an evidence-grounded workflow for automated long-form report generation .
Approach: They propose an evidence-tracked workflow that organizes corpus evidence into compact, traceable units and retrieves query-relevant subgraphs into retrieval-ready packages.
Outcome: The proposed workflow outperforms baselines in factual coverage, factual accuracy and visual evidence integration.
CAML: A Conflict-Aware Molecular Language Model Merging Framework for Multi-Constraint Molecular Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing paradigms struggle with this challenge due to catastrophic forgetting or gradient conflicts.
Approach: They propose a conflict-aware molecular language model merging framework that generates multiple constraints moleculaire as a cooperative game among property-specific fine-tune models.
Outcome: The proposed framework generates multiple constraints molecular as a cooperative game among property-specific fine-tune models (expert models) it minimizes conflicts among properties by exploring the optimal combination of the importance of the task parameter and relative fusion weights of each expert (fusion coefficient).
Crosslingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Languages Based on Multilingual Colexification Graphs (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing work on colexification patterns relies on annotated word lists, limiting scalability and usefulness in NLP.
Approach: They propose two methods to train multilingual graphs from colexification patterns using an unannotated parallel corpus.
Outcome: The proposed methods achieve high recall on CLICS and transfer learning in multilingual graphs.
GenTool: Enhancing Tool Generalization in Language Models through Zero-to-One and Weak-to-Strong Simulation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can expand their capabilities by integrating external tools.
Approach: They propose a training framework that prepares LLMs for diverse generalization challenges in tool utilization.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the tool-usage capabilities of LLMs by up to 8B parameters, surpassing GPT-4o.

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