Papers by Peng Zhou
ProUIE: A Macro-to-Micro Progressive Learning Method for LLM-based Universal Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenda Liu, Song Zhigang, Shuai Nie, Guangyao Liu, Lisung Chen, Binyu Yang, Yaran Chen, Peng Zhou, Hongzhen Wang, Yuchen Liu, Wenyue Hu, Jiaming Xu, Runyu Shi, Ying Huang
| Challenge: | ProUIE improves universal information extraction (UIE) without external information . many LLM-based methods rely on extra schema cues, external resources or complex alignment and verification pipelines . |
| Approach: | They propose a Macro-to-Micro progressive learning approach that improves UIE without external information. |
| Outcome: | ProUIE outperforms instruction-tuned baselines on average for NER and RE while using a smaller backbone. |
A Dialogue-based Information Extraction System for Medical Insurance Assessment (2021.findings-acl)
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Shuang Peng, Mengdi Zhou, Minghui Yang, Haitao Mi, Shaosheng Cao, Zujie Wen, Teng Xu, Hongbin Wang, Lei Liu
| Challenge: | a new system that integrates advanced NLP technologies for medical insurance assessment is proposed . the average time cost of the procedure is reduced from 55 minutes to 35 minutes . |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue-based information extraction system that integrates advanced NLP technologies for medical insurance assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces the time cost of the procedure from 55 minutes to 35 minutes and saves 30% human resources cost compared with the previous offline procedure. |
AT²PO: Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of autonomous agents capable of executing complex, multi-turn tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for agentic reinforcement learning that integrates turn-level tree search with tree search to address key challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses key challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. |
Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems perform poorly on unseen topics due to limited topics covered in training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model that homogenizes different knowledge sources to a unified knowledge representation for knowledge-grounded dialogue generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model generalizes well across knowledge-grounded dialogue tasks. |
SGA-MCTS: Decoupling Planning from Execution via Training-Free Atomic Experience Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval, but high latency of inference-time search and supervised fine-tuning are limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval . they leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore the solution space . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that SGA-MCTS can match the performance of SOTA systems without task-specific fine-tuning. |
RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Bo Peng, Eric Alcaide, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Samuel Arcadinho, Stella Biderman, Huanqi Cao, Xin Cheng, Michael Chung, Leon Derczynski, Xingjian Du, Matteo Grella, Kranthi Gv, Xuzheng He, Haowen Hou, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Jan Kocon, Jiaming Kong, Bartłomiej Koptyra, Hayden Lau, Jiaju Lin, Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri, Ferdinand Mom, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Xiangru Tang, Johan Wind, Stanisław Woźniak, Zhenyuan Zhang, Qinghua Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu
| Challenge: | recurrent neural networks struggle to match the performance of Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model architecture that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with similarly sized RNNs, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
Don’t Half-listen: Capturing Key-part Information in Continual Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yongquan He, Wenyuan Zhang, Xuancheng Huang, Peng Zhang, Lingxun Meng, Xiang Zhou, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve instruction tuning for large language models may cause catastrophic forgetting (CF) CF is a problem where previously learned abilities are degraded . |
| Approach: | They propose a continual instruction tuning method that uses key-part information gain to replay data and refine training objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance on both seen and held-out tasks. |
Taming System Complexity: Demystifying Software Engineering Agents in Diagnosing Linux Kernel Faults (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM agents struggle with identifying bugs in the Linux kernel . bugs can affect billions of users, affecting the Linux Foundation's research on the topic . |
| Approach: | They propose a LinuxFLBench benchmark to measure the accuracy of LLM agents on the Linux kernel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves FL accuracy with minimal costs. |
End-to-End Modeling via Information Tree for One-Shot Natural Language Spatial Video Grounding (2022.acl-long)
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Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Haoyu Zhang, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Wenming Tan, Jin Wang, Peng Wang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for grounding video frames with dense annotations require enormous amount of human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to ground natural language in video frames with only one frame labeled . they propose an end-to-end model that eliminates interference of irrelevant frames . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can ground natural language in all video frames with only one frame labeled . the proposed model eliminates interference of irrelevant frames based on branch search and cropping techniques . |
SocAoG: Incremental Graph Parsing for Social Relation Inference in Dialogues (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on identifying entities' relations from the semantics of dialogues-they utilize either the attention mechanism or a refined token graph to locate informative words. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential structure prediction task to incrementally parse SocAoG for dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model infers social relations more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. |
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. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
A Comprehensive Literary Chinese Reading Comprehension Dataset with an Evidence Curation Based Solution (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource language understanding is challenging for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a CompRehensive lIterary Chinese readIng comprehenSion procedure with a large dataset for CRISIS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure has the largest dataset and substantiates the effectiveness of the proposed procedure with a 7 percent hike in accuracy compared with the baseline. |
Knowledge Inheritance for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)
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Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Jing Yi, Jiajie Zhang, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Yusheng Su, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale pre-trained language models are mainly trained from scratch individually, ignoring that many well-taught PLMs are available. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training framework called knowledge inheritance and propose auxiliary supervision to efficiently learn larger PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to train large-scale language models with huge parameters and a large dataset can be adapted to domain adaptation and knowledge transfer. |
Attention-Guided Answer Distillation for Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reading comprehension systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from an ensemble to a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform the teacher on adversarial datasets and NarrativeQA benchmarks. |
MAVEN: A Massive General Domain Event Detection Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)
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Xiaozhi Wang, Ziqi Wang, Xu Han, Wangyi Jiang, Rong Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Peng Li, Yankai Lin, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing datasets exhibit data scarcity and limited coverage of general-domain events. |
| Approach: | They present a MAssive eVENt detection dataset which contains 4,480 Wikipedia documents and 168 event types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing methods cannot achieve promising results on the small datasets. |
MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation (2024.acl-long)
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Xiaozhi Wang, Hao Peng, Yong Guan, Kaisheng Zeng, Jianhui Chen, Lei Hou, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Jie Zhou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for event understanding have limited coverage due to complexity of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations . they propose 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction, and event relation extraction. |
C-World: A Computer Use Agent Environment Creator (2026.acl-long)
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Ziqiao Xi, Shuang Liang, Qi Liu, Jiaqing Zhang, Letian Peng, Fang Nan, Meshal Nayim, Tianhui Zhang, Rishika Mundada, Lianhui Qin, Biwei Huang, Kun Zhou
| Challenge: | C-World enables users to build agent environments on demand. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that enables users to build agent environments on demand. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines on 119k samples and achieves Spearman = 0.883 ranking correlation with real execution. |
Towards Fine-grained Text Sentiment Transfer (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained text sentiment transfer only reverse the sentiment polarity of text, but they lack a robust and parallel learning algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-grained text sentiment transfer task that revises a sequence to satisfy a given sentiment intensity while preserving the original semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in automatic evaluation and human evaluation. |
Learning to Plan for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models from Knowledge Graphs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Junjie Wang, Mingyang Chen, Binbin Hu, Dan Yang, Ziqi Liu, Yue Shen, Peng Wei, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jinjie Gu, Jun Zhou, Jeff Pan, Wen Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Recent studies have attempted to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in complex question-answering (QA) tasks by combining step-wise planning with external retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing LLMs’ planning capabilities by using planning data derived from knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLMs’ planning capabilities by using knowledge graphs (KGs) the proposed framework is compared with existing frameworks on multiple datasets and shows that it is effective for large language models. |
Question Generation from SQL Queries Improves Neural Semantic Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using question generation, we learn a semantic parser with 30% of the supervised training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question generation to learn a semantic parser with less supervised training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art model with less training data. |
LyapLock: Bounded Knowledge Preservation in Sequential Large Language Model Editing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for enhancing knowledge updating are prone to performance degradation due to incomplete knowledge preservation mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for locate-then-edit that decomposes long-term constrained programming into tractable stepwise subproblems for efficient solving. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves asymptotic optimal editing performance while meeting the constraints of long-term knowledge preservation. |
Sub-Sentence Encoder: Contrastive Learning of Propositional Semantic Representations (2024.naacl-long)
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Sihao Chen, Hongming Zhang, Tong Chen, Ben Zhou, Wenhao Yu, Dian Yu, Baolin Peng, Hongwei Wang, Dan Roth, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Sentence embeddings are typically learned to recognize the semantic relation between two text inputs. |
| Approach: | They introduce a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to produce contextual embeddings corresponding to different atomic propositions, i.e. semantic equivalence between propositions across different text sequences. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
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Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field. |
Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to addressing factual inaccuracies require high-quality human factuality annotations to mitigate these hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the self-evaluation capability of an LLM to provide training signals that steer the model towards factuality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves factual accuracy over LLMs across three key knowledge-intensive tasks on TruthfulQA and BioGEN. |
PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao, Kaiwen Yan, Ailin Huang, Hongyu Zhou, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum
| Challenge: | Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) overcomes a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-and-inference framework to overcome a central limitation of language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) under a fixed context window. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. |
BoolQuestions: Does Dense Retrieval Understand Boolean Logic in Language? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrieval systems focus on optimizing text embedding space while overlooking Boolean logic in language. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate whether retrieval systems can comprehend Boolean logic in language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a benchmark dataset covering complex queries containing basic Boolean logic and corresponding annotated passages. |
Measuring Psychological Depth in Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fabrice Harel-Canada, Hanyu Zhou, Sreya Muppalla, Zeynep Yildiz, Miryung Kim, Amit Sahai, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Current evaluations of creative stories focus on objective properties of the text, such as its style, coherence, diversity, and creativity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures an LLM's ability to produce authentic and narratively complex stories that provoke emotion, empathy, and engagement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that humans can consistently evaluate stories based on the PDS (0.72 Krippendorff’s alpha). |
A Table-to-Text Framework with Heterogeneous Multidominance Attention and Self-Evaluated Multi-Pass Deliberation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Table-to-text works have been widely applied in different domains, such as weather forecast and financial report generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-to-text approach on top of Self-evaluated multi-pass Generation and Heterogenous Multidominance Attention to explore the hierarchical structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several SOTA methods quantitatively and qualitatively on three public datasets. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
CTRLEval: An Unsupervised Reference-Free Metric for Evaluating Controlled Text Generation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-free metrics have obvious limitations for evaluating controlled text generation models. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised reference-free metric which evaluates controlled text generation from different aspects by formulating each aspect into multiple text infilling tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric has higher correlations with human judgments while obtaining better generalization of evaluating generated texts from different models and with different qualities. |
Firewall Routing: Blocking Leads to Better Hybrid Inference for LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have significantly enhanced performance across various NLP tasks . high computational costs and latency associated with deploying such models pose bottlenecks . |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic hybrid inference framework that efficiently selects between a strong and a weak LLM based on the complexity of the query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing routing strategies by up to 5.29% in APGR . large models often introduce higher latency, making them less suitable for real-time or resource-constrained applications. |
Neural Gibbs Sampling for Joint Event Argument Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event argument extraction cannot adequately model the correlation between event arguments and their roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian model to jointly extract event arguments using Gibbs sampling . they train two neural networks to model prior distribution and conditional distribution over event arguments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve comparable results to existing methods on two widely-used datasets. |
Turn-PPO: Turn-Level Advantage Estimation with PPO for Improved Multi-Turn RL in Agentic LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has re-emerged as a natural approach for training interactive LLM agents in real-world environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a variant that operates on a turn-level MDP formulation, instead of the commonly used token-level one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust than the widely used GRPO algorithm and more efficient than token-level MDPs. |
K-PLUG: Knowledge-injected Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding and Generation in E-Commerce (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are not explicitly aware of domain-specific knowledge, which is essential for downstream tasks in many domains, such as tasks in e-commerce scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-injected pre-trained language model that can be transferred to both natural language understanding and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms baselines across the board in e-commerce scenarios. |
PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruixiang Feng, Yuntao Wen, Silin Zhou, Ke Shi, Yifan Wang, Ran Le, Zhenwei An, Zongchao Chen, Chen Yang, Guangyue Peng, Yiming Jia, Dongsheng Wang, Tao Zhang, Lisi Chen, Yang Song, Shen Gao, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing LRMs often suffer from "overthinking" and excessively long reasoning traces . a dual-level framework for length compression of LRM is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prefix-protected and difficulty-aware compression under hierarchical supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage while improving accuracy on math benchmarks. |
HammerBench: Fine-Grained Function-Calling Evaluation in Real Mobile Assistant Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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Jun Wang, Jiamu Zhou, Xihuai Wang, Xiaoyun Mo, Haoyu Zhang, Qiqiang Lin, Jincheng Jincheng, Muning Wen, Weinan Zhang, Qiuying Peng, Jun Wang
| Challenge: | Evaluating the performance of LLMs in multi-turn interactions presents significant challenges due to the complexity and variability of user behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark framework for assessing LLMs’ function-calling capabilities in multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a dataset derived from popular mobile apps and anonymized user logs. |
ORANGE: Text-video Retrieval via Watch-time-aware Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning (2023.emnlp-industry)
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Yucheng Lin, Tim Chang, Yaning Chang, Jianqiang Ma, Donghui Li, Ting Peng, Zang Li, Zhiyi Zhou, Feng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-video retrieval focus on informative representations and delicate matching mechanisms, but real-world scenarios often involve brief, ambiguous queries and low-quality videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to learn informative embeddings for queries and videos . they use a watch-time-aware contrastive learning paradigm to capture dependencies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in a real-world video-search service. |
Disentangle-based Continual Graph Representation Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph embedding methods overlook streaming nature of incoming data in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a disentangle-based continual graph representation learning framework inspired by the human’s ability to learn procedural knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art continual graph representation learning framework and alleviate catastrophic forgetting problem. |
A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have various models that research reviews and interactions for different kinds of tasks, such as predicting restaurant survival. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two datasets showing that it can model restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
MulDimIF: A Multi-Dimensional Constraint Framework for Evaluating and Improving Instruction Following in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Junjie Ye, Caishuang Huang, Zhuohan Chen, Wenjie Fu, Chenyuan Yang, Leyi Yang, Yilong Wu, Peng Wang, Meng Zhou, Xiaolong Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on constraint categories, offering little guidance for improving instruction following abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional constraint framework that allows for instruction following . they construct 9,106 code-verifiable samples and evaluate 18 LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction following performance without compromising general performance. |
Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma
| Challenge: | Recent studies have looked into the ability of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc. However, few studies investigate the controllability of large languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare large language models with state-of-the-start finetuned smaller models to find that large language model controls are comparable to smaller models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can meet hard constraints and perform better than state-of-the-art models. |
SimpleOCR: Rendering Visual Questions to Teach MLLMs to Read (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Peng, Peng Xia, Ding Zhong, Kaide Zeng, Siwei Han, Yiyang Zhou, Jiaqi Liu, Ruiyi Zhang, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | MLLMs lack visual grounding mechanism to read text embedded in images, or rely on parametric shortcuts . despite strong OCR capabilities, models suffer performance degradation of 12.7% in the VQ setting . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play training strategy that invalidates shortcuts in text prompts . they propose 'vq' setting where text queries are rendered directly onto images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy surpasses the base model by 5.4% and GRPO based on original images by 2.7% on four representative OOD benchmarks. |
CLEVE: Contrastive Pre-training for Event Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing EE methods do not model event characteristics from large unsupervised data. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive pre-training framework for event extraction to better learn event knowledge from large unsupervised data and their semantic structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on ACE 2005 and MAVEN datasets on event extraction tasks. |
From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)
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Lei Yang, Leiyu Pan, Bojian Xiong, Renren Jin, Shaowei Zhang, Yue Chen, Ling Shi, Jiang Zhou, Junru Wu, Zhen Wang, Jianxiang Peng, Juesi Xiao, Tianyu Dong, Zhuowen Han, Zhuo Chen, Yuqi Ren, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks. |
Graph Ensemble Learning over Multiple Dependency Trees for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on aspect-level sentiment classification has shown that syntactic information is effective in capturing long-range syntaktic relations that are obscure from the surface form. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph ensemble technique that integrates syntactic structures with GNNs to better leverage syntaktic information in the face of parsing errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models with single dependency tree and beats other models without adding model parameters. |
Layer-Level Self-Exposure and Patch: Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Attack Defense (2025.naacl-long)
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Yang Ouyang, Hengrui Gu, Shuhang Lin, Wenyue Hua, Jie Peng, Bhavya Kailkhura, Meijun Gao, Tianlong Chen, Kaixiong Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods to defend against jailbreak attacks exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to defend against jailbreak attacks by patching specific layers within large language models through self-augmented datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to previous methods. |
On the Safety of Conversational Models: Taxonomy, Dataset, and Benchmark (2022.findings-acl)
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Hao Sun, Guangxuan Xu, Jiawen Deng, Jiale Cheng, Chujie Zheng, Hao Zhou, Nanyun Peng, Xiaoyan Zhu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Dialogue safety problems severely limit the real-world deployment of generative conversational models. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy for dialogue safety specifically designed to capture unsafe behaviors in human-bot dialogue settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy captures unsafe behaviors in human-bot dialogue settings with rich context-sensitive unsafe examples. |
CoRE: A Fine-Grained Code Reasoning Benchmark Beyond Output Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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Jun Gao, Yun Peng, Qian Qiao, Changhai Zhou, Yuhua Zhou, Shiyang Zhang, Shichao Weng, Zhenchang Xing, Xiaoxue Ren
| Challenge: | Existing code reasoning benchmarks evaluate final output correctness under a single implementation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Code Reasoning benchmark that evaluates code reasoning through implementation invariance and process transparency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks lack implementation invariance and process transparency . they observe superficial execution where models arrive at correct outputs without reasoning . |
Worldwide LiveVQA: Real-Time Visual Knowledge Seeking and Updating Across Languages (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing resources for visual knowledge remain confined to English, creating a "Worldwide Knowledge Gap" eric liu: production and dissemination of knowledge exhibit a distinct trend toward decentralization and linguistic fragmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for multilingual visual knowledge seeking and updating across ten major languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first dynamic-updating dataset for multilingual visual knowledge seeking and updating across ten major languages. |
MedWriter: Knowledge-Aware Medical Text Generation (2020.coling-main)
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Youcheng Pan, Qingcai Chen, Weihua Peng, Xiaolong Wang, Baotian Hu, Xin Liu, Junying Chen, Wenxiu Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on the information of unstructured text rather than structured information of the knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-aware text generation model for medical domains that incorporates knowledge graphs into the model to improve the quality of generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the quality of generated text and has robust superiority over other methods. |
CogCompTime: A Tool for Understanding Time in Natural Language (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that extract temporal information from text can be useful for natural language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that extracts temporal information from text and normalizes it to a standard format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance and incorporates the most recent progress. |
FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot domain adaptation and NOTA detection are two real-world challenges for few-shot relation classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate two aspects of few-shot relation classification models . they build upon the FewRel dataset by adding a new test set in a different domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can evaluate few-shot domain adaptation and few- shot none-of-the-above detection on a new domain and NOTA relation choice. |
Self-Attention Guided Copy Mechanism for Abstractive Summarization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models have been widely used to extract words from source into summary, but how to ensure that important words in source are copied remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based model to enhance copy mechanism by identifying the importance of each source word based on the degree centrality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods on CNN/Daily Mail and Gigaword datasets. |
WorkTeam: Constructing Workflows from Natural Language with Multi-Agents (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing workflow construction methods require specialized knowledge and task-switching skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent workflow framework that incorporates a supervisor, orchestrator, and filler agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly increases the success rate of workflow construction . the proposed framework is based on a dataset of 3,695 real-world business samples . |
Wrong-of-Thought: An Integrated Reasoning Framework with Multi-Perspective Verification and Wrong Information (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a key technique for enhancing the performance of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes outputs by utilizing wrong information and multi-perspective verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses all baselines on 8 datasets and 5 LLMs. |
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou
| 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. |
What Media Frames Reveal About Stance: A Dataset and Study about Memes in Climate Change Discourse (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Media framing is a method of shaping public perceptions of issues, but the interaction between stance and media frame remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of climate-change memes annotated with stance and media frames to conceptualize and computationally explore this interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1,184 climate-change memes sourced from 47 subreddits and enables analysis of frame prominence over time and communities. |
MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in pre-trained Transformers are a key component, storing various linguistic and factual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert a model into its MoE version with the same parameters and build expert routers to decide which experts will be used for each input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can use 10% to 30% of FFN parameters while maintaining over 95% original performance. |
CDConv: A Benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations (2022.emnlp-main)
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Chujie Zheng, Jinfeng Zhou, Yinhe Zheng, Libiao Peng, Zhen Guo, Wenquan Wu, Zheng-Yu Niu, Hua Wu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting dialogue contradictions are difficult due to contextualization nature of conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations . they use automatic conversation generation to simulate common user behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark simulated the user behaviors that trigger chatbots to make contradictions . the results show that the current state-of-the-art chatbot can be easily goaded into making contradictions. |
Unsupervised Knowledge Selection for Dialogue Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge selection tasks require the preidentified knowledge to generate informative dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to supervise knowledge selection when the gold knowledge label is unknown by obtaining an oracle knowledge label via distant supervision and leverage knowledge distillation to alleviate the noisy labeling problem of distant supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong supervised baselines on two knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets and generates more informative responses. |
Training-Free Test-Time Contrastive Learning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing training-free alternatives to training-based models are static or depend on external guidance. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free adaptation framework that enables a frozen LLM to improve online by distilling supervision from its own inference experiences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing test-time adaptation methods under online evaluation. |
FinReporting: An Agentic Workflow for Localized Reporting of Cross-Jurisdiction Financial Disclosure (2026.acl-demo)
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Fan Zhang, Mingzi Song, Rania Elbadry, Yankai Chen, Shaobo Wang, Yixi Zhou, Xunwen Zheng, Yueru He, Yuyang Dai, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Ayesha Gull, Muhammad Usman Safder, Fan Wu, Liyuan Meng, Fengxian Ji, Junning Zhao, Xueqing Peng, Jimin Huang, YU Chen, Xue Liu, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
| Challenge: | FinReporting is an agentic workflow for localized cross-jurisdiction financial reporting . existing approaches assume a single-market setting and overlook structural differences across jurisdictions . |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow that decomposes financial reporting into auditable stages . they use Large Language Models to extract and summarize corporate disclosures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system decomposes reporting into auditable stages . it improves consistency and reliability under heterogeneous reporting regimes. |
Sketch and Refine: Towards Faithful and Informative Table-to-Text Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation suffer from poor faithfulness and low coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines Autoregressive and Non-Autoregressive generation to generate a table-to-text from a key-value table using a skeleton and an edit-based non-autoregressively generation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on WikiPerson and WikiBio datasets on coverage and faithfulness. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Unsupervised Dependency Graph Network (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has identified properties of pretrained self-attention models that mirror those of dependency parse structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encourages attention heads to model different dependency relations from raw corpora and a masked language modeling task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can induce dependency structures from raw corpora and the masked language modeling task without gold POS tags and any external information. |
Capability Decomposition for Unified Information Extraction via Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for IE tasks suffer from inconsistent schema representation and implicitly intermediate reasoning . UC-UIE adopts a low-rank adapted hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts adapter for UIE tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes IE reasoning into three universal capabilities . UC-UIE adopts a low-rank Adaptation adapter to fine-tune LLMs for IE tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms full-parameter tuning methods with 1.24% trainable parameters and outperformed existing methods in generalization and interpretability. |
Simplify-Pro: A Two-level and Progressive LLM-based Framework for Auto Long Text Simplification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on lexical- and sentence-level simplification, leaving long text simplification comparatively unexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose a two-level and progressive LLM-based framework that establishes an effective paradigm for automatic long text simplification under diverse test scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms advanced and proprietary LLMs in in-domain and out-of-domain simplification tasks and matches or outperformed existing LLM frameworks. |
Negative-Aware Diffusion Process for Temporal Knowledge Graph Extrapolation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) are dynamic structures representing entities and their evolving relationships through time. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric model that encodes subject-centric histories into sequential embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model encodes subject-centric histories of entities, relations and temporal intervals into sequential embeddings. |
DLPO: Towards a Robust, Efficient, and Generalizable Prompt Optimization Framework from a Deep-Learning Perspective (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt optimization still face challenges in robustness, efficiency, and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose 7 new approaches inspired by traditional deep learning paradigms for prompt optimization that integrate text-based gradient optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods integrate deep learning paradigms into text-based gradient optimization. |
Large Language and Protein Assistant for Protein-Protein Interactions Prediction (2025.acl-long)
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Peng Zhou, Pengsen Ma, Jianmin Wang, Xibao Cai, Haitao Huang, Wei Liu, Longyue Wang, Lai Hou Tim, Xiangxiang Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting protein-protein interactions oversimplify the problem of PPI prediction in a semi-supervised manner. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model that integrates proteins and PPI networks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LLaPA can predict protein-protein interactions (mPPI) types and affinities based on sequence data. |
On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing (2022.naacl-main)
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Yusheng Su, Xiaozhi Wang, Yujia Qin, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Kaiyue Wen, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but require much more training time than fine-timing. |
| Approach: | They empirically investigate the transferability of soft prompts across different downstream tasks and PLMs to determine what decides prompt transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but requires much more training time than fine-timing. |
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Deming Ye, Chaojun Xiao, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection methods are not suitable for enhancing pre-trained language models with external knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play knowledge injection method where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a knowledge plugin. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of knowledge injection on knowledge-driven tasks while keeping model parameters frozen. |
Towards Robust Visual Question Answering: Making the Most of Biased Samples via Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that biased samples can be brittle for VQA models . however, the improvements on OOD data severely sacrifice the performance on the in-distribution (ID) data. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning approach that exploits biased samples for unbiased information that contributes to reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance on the OOD dataset while maintaining robustness on the ID dataset. |
A2ATS: Retrieval-Based KV Cache Reduction via Windowed Rotary Position Embedding and Query-Aware Vector Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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Junhui He, Junna Xing, Nan Wang, Rui Xu, Shangyu Wu, Peng Zhou, Qiang Liu, Chun Jason Xue, Qingan Li
| Challenge: | Long context large language models (LLMs) pose significant challenges for efficient serving due to the large memory footprint and high access overhead of KV cache. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based method to reduce the memory footprint of LLMs . they propose Windowed Rotary Position Embedding and query-aware vector quantization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve lower performance degradation with lower overhead compared to existing methods . it can reduce the memory footprint and access overhead of long context large language models . |
Self-Tuning: Instructing LLMs to Effectively Acquire New Knowledge through Self-Teaching (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to keeping large language models current involve continued pre-training on new documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning framework that augments documents with knowledge-intensive tasks created in a self-supervised manner, focusing on memorization, comprehension, and self-reflection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning framework improves an LLM’s ability to acquire new knowledge from unseen raw documents through self-teaching. |
Multimodal Chemical Structure-Text Coreference in Intellectual Property via Rule-guided Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for identifying chemical structures and textual referents are inadequate for this multimodal task. |
| Approach: | They propose a RULE-guided multimodal Reinforcement learning framework for chemical structure-text coreference . RULER is a rule-driven reinforcement learning framework that uses rule-based reward functions to obtain the correct domain knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the baseline framework and shows superior efficacy. |
RAP: Robustness-Aware Perturbations for Defending against Backdoor Attacks on NLP Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a serious threat to the safety of reusing deep neural networks (DNNs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient online defense mechanism based on robustness-aware perturbations to distinguish poisoned and clean samples to defend against backdoor attacks on natural language processing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better defending performance and lower computational costs than existing defense methods. |
SLIP: Soft Label Mechanism and Key-Extraction-Guided CoT-based Defense Against Instruction Backdoor in APIs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing black-box instruction backdoors can detect poisoned inputs, but fail to recover correct outputs once the backdoor is activated. |
| Approach: | They propose a soft label mechanism and key-extraction-guided CoT-based defense against instruction backdoors in APIs (SLIP) they propose KCOT-based model to extract task-relevant keywords and phrases rather than only considering the single trigger or overall text semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the average attack success rate to 25.13% and improves clean accuracy to 87.15% and outperforms state-of-the-art black-box defenses. |
QiMeng-Attention: SOTA Attention Operator is generated by SOTA Attention Algorithm (2025.findings-acl)
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Qirui Zhou, Shaohui Peng, Weiqiang Xiong, Haixin Chen, Yuanbo Wen, Haochen Li, Ling Li, Qi Guo, Yongwei Zhao, Ke Gao, Ruizhi Chen, Yanjun Wu, Zhao Chen, Yunji Chen
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs cannot comprehend the complex data flow and computation process of the attention operator and utilize low-level primitive to exploit GPU performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-friendly Thinking Language (LLM-TL) that can decouple the generation of high-level optimization logic and low-level implementation on GPU and enhance LLMs’ understanding of attention operator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outshines existing LLMs on A100, RTX8000, and T4 GPUs, achieving a speed-up of up to 35.16. |
NumNet: Machine Reading Comprehension with Numerical Reasoning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing numerical MRC models are weak in numerical reasoning, such as addition, subtraction, sorting and counting. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerical MRC model that integrates numerical reasoning into existing MRC models and achieves an EM-score of 64.56% on the DROP dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all existing machine reading comprehension models by considering the numerical relations among numbers on the DROP dataset. |
InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Contrastive Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity . existing methods for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropic-based ranking. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that InstructDiff outperforms baseline training on reasoning tasks while using only 10% of the data. |
Localizing Active Objects from Egocentric Vision with Symbolic World Knowledge (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on active object grounding from an egocentric perspective is focusing on localizing and tracking active objects that undergo major state change as a result of human actions/interactions to the environment without being told exactly what/where to ground. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a narrated egocentric video dataset to localize and track active objects that undergo major state change as a result of human actions/interactions to the environment without being told exactly what/where to ground. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leads to 54% improvement in standard metrics on the TREK-150-OPE-Det localization + tracking task, and >7% improvement in all standard metrics. |
Key Fact as Pivot: A Two-Stage Model for Low Resource Table-to-Text Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation use encoder-decoder framework, but lack of large parallel data is a problem for many domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to separate table-to-text generation into two stages: key fact prediction and surface realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 27.34 BLEU score with only 1,000 parallel data, while the baseline model only achieves 9.71 BLUE score. |
Improving Chinese Pop Song and Hokkien Gezi Opera Singing Voice Synthesis by Enhancing Local Modeling (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) synthesizes pleasing vocals based on music scores and lyrics . current acoustic models ignore the significance of local modeling within the sequence and the hard-to-synthesize parts in the predicted mel-spectrogram . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance local modeling in the acoustic model by focusing on phoneme tokens located before and after the phoneme. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves local modeling in the acoustic model by focusing on the hard-to-synthesize parts of the predicted mel-spectrogram. |
EffiQA: Efficient Question-Answering with Strategic Multi-Model Collaboration on Knowledge Graphs (2025.coling-main)
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Zixuan Dong, Baoyun Peng, Yufei Wang, Jia Fu, Xiaodong Wang, Xin Zhou, Yongxue Shan, Kangchen Zhu, Weiguo Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that integrate LLMs and KGs either underutilize the reasoning abilities of LLM or suffer from prohibitive computational costs due to tight coupling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models capture factual knowledge from massive texts . but they are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance . |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-world assumption to evaluate PLM-based knowledge graph completion models . they propose to convert each triple and its support information into natural prompt sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more accurate under the open-world assumption (OWA) this setting manual checks the correctness of knowledge that is not in KGs. |
On the Faithfulness for E-commerce Product Summarization (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | e-commerce product summarization requires consistency between product attributes and summary . inconsistent product summaries can mislead users and decrease public credibility . |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate e-commerce product summaries with product attributes . they encode product attribute table and constrain attribute words to be presented only through copying . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the faithfulness of e-commerce product summarization tasks. |
Predicting Rewards Alongside Tokens: Non-disruptive Parameter Insertion for Efficient Inference Intervention in Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine tune LLMs produce unsafe responses and unreliable reasoning, but this solution introduces substantial time and space overhead due to the separate models required. |
| Approach: | They propose to insert extra parameters into transformer architecture to predict calibration signals along with original LLM output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces time and space costs while enabling seamless online deployment. |
Manual Evaluation Matters: Reviewing Test Protocols of Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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Tianyu Gao, Xu Han, Yuzhuo Bai, Keyue Qiu, Zhiyu Xie, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Distantly supervised relation extraction (RE) has attracted much attention in the past few years . previous methods to evaluate models manually or directly on autolabeled data have produced inaccurate evaluations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use distant supervision to generate large-scale autolabeled data . they build manually-annotated test sets for two DS-RE datasets and evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces 53% wrong labels at the entity pair level in the popular NYT10 dataset. |
Learning to Recover from Multi-Modality Errors for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation models suffer from multi-modality problem . despite their autoregressivity, most NMT models suffer with slow decoding speed . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-autoregressive model which generates a translation as a sequence of segments while each segment is predicted token-by-token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve 4 times speedup while maintaining comparable performance. |
Context Tracking Network: Graph-based Context Modeling for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to fully utilize contextual information which plays an important role in interpreting sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based Context Tracking Network to model the discourse context for IDRR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can integrate sentence-level and token-level contextual semantics better than existing models. |
MPBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark for Process Errors Identification (2025.findings-acl)
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xu Zhao Pan, Pengfei Zhou, Jiaxin Ai, Wangbo Zhao, Kai Wang, Xiaojiang Peng, Wenqi Shao, Hongxun Yao, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks of large language models focus on error detection, neglecting other scenarios like reasoning search. |
| Approach: | et al. propose a multi-task, multimodal benchmark to assess effectiveness of PRMs . step correctness, answers aggregation and reasoning process search are evaluated . ethical principles of MPBench are based on a set of evaluation paradigms based in a text-based benchmark . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in multiple scenarios . it uses three evaluation paradigms to assess the effectiveness and compares them with existing models . a the proposed model improves reasoning accuracy by providing stepwise feedback for multi-step reasoning results . |
Learning to Win Lottery Tickets in BERT Transfer via Task-agnostic Mask Training (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show pre-trained language models contain matching subnetworks that have similar transfer learning performance as the original PLM. |
| Approach: | They propose to prune matching subnetworks using magnitude-based pruning . they propose to optimize the subnetwork structure towards the pre-training objectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more efficient in searching subnetworks and advantageous when fine-tuning within a range of data scarcity. |
ChatVLA: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Robot Control with Vision-Language-Action Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhongyi Zhou, Yichen Zhu, Minjie Zhu, Junjie Wen, Ning Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Weibin Meng, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng, Yi Xu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language-action models prioritize robotic action mastery . however, models trained on visual-text pairs struggle to interpret multimodal data . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multimodal data after initial control mastery and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to minimize task interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) methods on multimodal understanding benchmarks and achieves six times higher performance on visual question-answering datasets. |
Rethinking Stealthiness of Backdoor Attack against NLP Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks are not stealthy to system deployers or users. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel backdoor attack method based on negative data augmentation and modifying word embeddings that is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
Kill two birds with one stone: generalized and robust AI-generated text detection via dynamic perturbations (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on model generalization or focus on robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based AIGT detection method that can be generalized and robust under two adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for generalization and robustness under two text adversarial attacks. |
Prompt Tuning for Unified Multimodal Pretrained Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has demonstrated success in natural language pretraining and even vision pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply prompt tuning to a unified sequence-to-sequence pretrained model by adding a sequence of learnable embeddings to each layer and finetuning the pretrained models on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other parameter-efficient tuning methods on multimodal models and is robust against adversarial attacks. |
FoodieQA: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-Grained Understanding of Chinese Food Culture (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenyan Li, Crystina Zhang, Jiaang Li, Qiwei Peng, Raphael Tang, Li Zhou, Weijia Zhang, Guimin Hu, Yifei Yuan, Anders Søgaard, Daniel Hershcovich, Desmond Elliott
| Challenge: | FoodieQA is a manually curated, fine-grained image-text dataset capturing the intricate features of food cultures across various regions in China. |
| Approach: | They evaluate vision–language Models and large language models on unseen food images and corresponding questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates vision–language Models and large language models on unseen food images and corresponding questions. |
DIONYSUS: A Pre-trained Model for Low-Resource Dialogue Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for summarizing dialogues lack in taking into account the structure of dialogues and rely heavily on labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained encoder-decoder model for summarizing dialogues in any new domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on six datasets and shows ROUGE scores in zero-shot and few-shot settings. |
Hidding the Ghostwriters: An Adversarial Evaluation of AI-Generated Student Essay Detection (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in text generation tasks, but their utilization carries inherent risks, including plagiarism and the dissemination of fake news. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to construct an AI-generated student essay that employs a range of text perturbation methods to evade detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods evade detection and maintain quality of the generated essays while avoiding plagiarism and fake news. |
Evolving Agentic Workflow Driven by Human-Agent Collaboration (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxin Liu, Jinxuan Zhang, Yuezhang Peng, Hefeng Zhou, Xiangfeng Wang, Jiong Lou, Chentao Wu, Jie LI, Jingjing Qu, Chaochao Lu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate agentic workflows using large language models are limited by high manual design costs, inefficient agentic search, and poor dynamic adaptability to new tasks and human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose an evolutionary framework for generating agentic workflows through human-agent collaboration using evolutionary algorithms that mutate and cross over their structures, prompts, and LLM backbones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses other automated baselines by 27.34% while achieving comparable performance to o1-preview at only one-fourth of the cost. |
Contextual Modeling for Document-level ASR Error Correction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on document-level ASR error correction ignores contextual information . however, there are limited studies on incorporating contextual information into AEC . |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware method that retrieves contextual information from a datastore . they use two English and two Chinese datasets to model document-level AEC . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can utilize contextual information to improve document-level AEC . the data store containing contextual information provides even better results . |
A Meta-framework for Spatiotemporal Quantity Extraction from Text (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a meta-framework for news events that extracts quantities from text is proposed . a previous work on news events focused on extracting event mentions, attributes, and relationships . |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-framework for solving the NLP problem of spatiotemporal quantity extraction . they demonstrate the framework is general and extensible, and shareable crowdsourcing pipeline and baseline models are used . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is general and extensible, the authors say . it can extract quantity from news streams, quickly respond to emergencies, investigate incidents . |
Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing hyperbolic neural networks encode features in the hyperbolical space yet formalize most of their operations in the tangent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully hyperbolic framework to build hyperbolical networks based on the Lorentz model by adapting Lorentzer transformations to formalize essential operations of neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has better performance on four NLP tasks compared with existing hyperbolic models . |
Dense Procedure Captioning in Narrated Instructional Videos (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for video dense captioning learn video segments and generate captions without considering transcripts. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate procedure captions from narrated instructional videos . they extract procedures by a cross-modality module and generate captions by encoding video frames and transcripts within each extracted procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract procedures from narrated instructional videos and generate procedure captions by encoding video frames and transcripts. |
Deriving Character Logic from Storyline as Codified Decision Trees (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing behavioral profiles are unstructured, weakly validated, and unusable . existing models are weakly valid, leading to brittle agent behavior . Using codified decision trees, we show that CDT outperforms previous methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven framework that induces an executable decision structure from narrative data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms human-written profiles and prior profiles on multiple benchmarks. |
OneGen: Efficient One-Pass Unified Generation and Retrieval for LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jintian Zhang, Cheng Peng, Mengshu Sun, Xiang Chen, Lei Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the generative capabilities for various NLP tasks, but they still suffer from hallucinations due to their exclusive reliance on parametric knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates retrieval tokens generated autoregressively into a single LLM to handle both tasks simultaneously in a unified forward pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the traditionally separate training approaches for generation and retrieval by incorporating retrieval tokens generated autoregressively. |
Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph Modeling over Key Utterances for Dialogue Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Compared to standard RC tasks, dialogue reading comprehension (DRC) has raised challenges because of the complex speaker information and noisy dialogue context. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method for dialogue reading comprehension that extracts answers from dialogues by using key-utterances-extracting methods and a Question-Interlocutor Scope Realized Graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance against previous works. |
On the Role of Discriminative Models in Generative Relation Extraction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction (RE) are discriminative and generative . previous studies show that discriminative models can support generative RE . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages discriminative models to produce a top-k set of candidate relations and integrates this knowledge into generative models via in-context or prompt learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on five widely used RE benchmarks. |
MirrorQA: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Mirror-Orientation Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, yet their ability to perform left–right reasoning in mirror contexts remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate MLLMs' ability to distinguish left from right from a subject-centered perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that even the best performing models achieve only 65.40% accuracy, far below the 99.28% accuracy of humans. |
HMEAE: Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing event extraction methods classify each argument role independently, ignoring conceptual correlations between different argument roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction model to provide inductive bias from the concept hierarchy of event argument roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on real-world datasets and shows that it leverages useful knowledge from the concept hierarchy. |
A + B: A General Generator-Reader Framework for Optimizing LLMs to Unleash Synergy Potential (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective solution to supplement necessary knowledge to large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a "generate-then-read" pipeline to replace retrieval stage with generation from the LLM itself. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms single models in the base and chat versions and addresses safety and helpfulness post-adaptation challenges. |
Teaching Language Models to Self-Improve through Interactive Demonstrations (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to improve performance on downstream tasks by prompting them to analyze and revise their outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a training algorithm that prompts large language models to analyze and revise their own outputs and uses this feedback to train the small model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves LLaMA-7B's performance on math and reasoning tasks by up to 7.13%. |
Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Senjie Jin, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Sirui Song, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbo Zhang, Peng Sun, Hong Lu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline. |
From Feedback to Checklists: Grounded Evaluation of AI-Generated Clinical Notes (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated metrics fail to align with real-world physician preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that distills real user feedback into structured checklists for note evaluation that are interpretable, grounded in human feedback, and enforceable by LLM-based evaluators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed checklist outperforms baseline evaluations in coverage, diversity, and predictive power for human ratings. |
Multimodal Incremental Transformer with Visual Grounding for Visual Dialogue Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on implicit exploration of multimodal coreference but neglect the importance of locating the objects explicitly in the visual content, which is associated with textual entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal incremental transformer with visual grounding which aims to explicitly locate related objects in the image guided by textual entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance on the VisDial v0.9 and v1.0 datasets. |
ROSE: Robust Selective Fine-tuning for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted the lack of adversarial robustness in pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning approach that conducts selective updates when adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves adversarial robustness on downstream tasks . it eliminates spurious updates, leading to flatter and wider optima than the conventional method . |
RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Noah Wang, Z.y. Peng, Haoran Que, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuhan Wu, Hongcheng Guo, Ruitong Gan, Zehao Ni, Jian Yang, Man Zhang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Ke Xu, Wenhao Huang, Jie Fu, Junran Peng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for complex tasks such as role-playing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to benchmark, elicit, and enhance role-playing abilities in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves role-playing abilities with 168,093 samples. |
From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) are fine-tuned and released for research and deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a PLM reuse paradigm that merges teacher-PLM knowledge into a student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can reduce the computational cost and environmental side-effects of retraining the PLM from scratch. |
Calibrating the Confidence of Large Language Models by Eliciting Fidelity (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models with RLHF and RLAIF have good alignment but exhibit overconfidence post-alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method to estimate the confidence of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has shown good calibration performance on 6 RLHF-LMs on four MCQA datasets. |
SGP-TOD: Building Task Bots Effortlessly via Schema-Guided LLM Prompting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that SGP-TOD provides state-of-the-art zero-shot performance . prevailing approach for creating task bots is to fine-tune pre-trained language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a Schema-Guided Prompting for building Task-Oriented Dialog systems . they use predefined task schema and dialog policy to instruct fixed LLMs to generate appropriate responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms few-shot approaches on multiwoz, RADDLE, and STAR datasets. |
ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
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Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Heng Ji, Minlie Huang, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text . Experimental results show that ERICA can improve typical PLMs on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of entities and relations in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve PLMs on several language understanding tasks, especially under low-resource settings. |
CodRED: A Cross-Document Relation Extraction Dataset for Acquiring Knowledge in the Wild (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting relational facts between entity pairs within single sentences or documents. |
| Approach: | They present a problem of cross-document relation extraction (CRE) using human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first human-annotated cross-document RE dataset . it shows that it is challenging to existing RE methods including strong BERT-based models. |
Inhibitory Attacks on Backdoor-based Fingerprinting for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor-based LLM fingerprinting is a promising solution for intellectual property protection . however, the vulnerability of existing LLMs for the ensemble scenario is unexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose two new fingerprinting attack methods to assess the robustness of LLM fingerprinting by token filter attack and sentence verification attack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods inhibit the fingerprint response while maintaining ensemble performance. |
Learn to Copy from the Copying History: Correlational Copy Network for Abstractive Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for abstractive summarization use encoder-decoder attention, but this leads to incomplete copying. |
| Approach: | They propose a copying scheme that takes advantage of prior copying distributions and explicitly encourages the model to copy the input word that is relevant to the previously copied one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art on summarization benchmarks . it takes advantage of prior copying distributions and explicitly encourages copying . |
FABLE: Fine-grained Fact Anchoring for Unstructured Model Editing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for model editing memorize text holistically without reliable fine-grained fact access. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical framework that decouples fine-grained fact injection from holistic text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves fine-grained question answering while maintaining state-of-the-art holistic editing performance. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
The Dominance of Text Space: Unveiling the Asymmetric Nature of Cross-Modal Alignment in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for cross-modal alignment assume a symmetric interaction between visual and textual modalities, implying that both spaces adapt to each other. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that regularizes the projector to maintain the geometric structure of the text embedding space via spectral filtering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves the LLM’s inherent linguistic capabilities and reduces object hallucination significantly better than standard fine-tuning methods. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
Continual Relation Learning via Episodic Memory Activation and Reconsolidation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn incessantly emerging novel relations are overfitting the few memorized examples of old relations, causing confusion among existing relations. |
| Approach: | They introduce episodic memory activation and reconsolidation (EMAR) to continual relation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in catastrophic forgetting old relations. |
Domain Knowledge Empowered Structured Neural Net for End-to-End Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract event temporal relations from text data are limited by hard constraints and large datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances deep neural network with distributional constraints constructed by probabilistic domain knowledge to improve the baseline neural network models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves baseline models with strong statistical significance on two widely used datasets in news and clinical domains. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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He Zhu, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Heyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jinxiang Xia, Hanhao Li, Yi Yao, Ningning Wang, Pai Liu, Tianhao Peng, Xin Gui, Li Xiaowan, Yuhui Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. |
Crisp: Cognitive Restructuring of Negative Thoughts through Multi-turn Supportive Dialogues (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Jianing Yin, Yongkang Huang, Yihan Shi, Xikun Zhang, Libiao Peng, Rongsheng Zhang, Tangjie Lv, Zhipeng Hu, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cognitive restructuring (CR) are limited by entrenched cognitive distortions, emotional resistance, and individual differences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that structures CR as theory-grounded multi-stage multi-turn dialogue and a multi-channel loop mechanism to account for diverse individual distortions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates supportive strategies for emotional management and a multi-channel loop mechanism to account for diverse individual distortions. |
GoG: Relation-aware Graph-over-Graph Network for Visual Dialog (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model outperforms the strong baseline in both generative and discriminative settings by a significant margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware graph-over-graph network (GoG) for visual dialog . their model outperforms the strong baseline in both generative and discriminative settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in both generative and discriminative settings by a significant margin. |
Bridging the Gap between Prior and Posterior Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue models lack prior and posterior knowledge selection . prior selection module may not learn to select knowledge properly because of lack of posterior information . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation-based training strategy to remove the exposure bias of knowledge selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets. |
Frame First, Then Extract: A Frame-Semantic Reasoning Pipeline for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract triplets for unseen relations rely on costly fine-tuning and lack structured semantic guidance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adopts a "frame first, then extract" paradigm to extract triplets from unstructured text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive zero-shot performance on multiple benchmarks and can be used to enhance existing extraction methods. |
ELLE: Efficient Lifelong Pre-training for Emerging Data (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are typically trained with static data, ignoring that streaming data of various sources may continuously grow. |
| Approach: | They propose to use function preserved model expansion to expand existing PLM's width and depth to improve efficiency of knowledge acquisition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves pre-training efficiency and performance over existing models on BERT and GPT. |
FastBERT: a Self-distilling BERT with Adaptive Inference Time (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models like BERT have proven to be highly performant, but are often computationally expensive in many practical scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a speed-tunable FastBERT with adaptive inference time that can be flexibly adjusted under varying demands. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves promising results in English and Chinese datasets. |
Leveraging Capsule Routing to Associate Knowledge with Medical Literature Hierarchically (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate knowledge into text can confuse the representation and import unexpected noises. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage capsule routing to associate knowledge with medical literature hierarchically . they extract two fragments from medical literature and encode them into fragment representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can more accurately associate knowledge with medical literature than mainstream methods. |
Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets may leak shallow heuristics via entity mentions, thus contributing to the high performance on RE benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-masked contrastive framework for relation extraction to gain a deeper understanding on textual context and type information while avoiding rote memorization of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the effectiveness and robustness of neural models in different RE scenarios. |
Language Prior Is Not the Only Shortcut: A Benchmark for Shortcut Learning in VQA (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Qingyi Si, Fandong Meng, Mingyu Zheng, Zheng Lin, Yuanxin Liu, Peng Fu, Yanan Cao, Weiping Wang, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are prone to learn the shortcut solution formed by dataset biases rather than the intended solution. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that considers varying types of shortcuts by constructing different distribution shifts in multiple OOD test sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset considers varying types of shortcuts by constructing different distribution shifts in multiple OOD test sets. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
Transferring General Multimodal Pretrained Models to Text Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text recognition rely on large-scale pretraining on human-annotated or synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transfer multimodal pretrained models to text recognition using image captioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Chinese text recognition benchmark. |
Bridging the Gap between Decision and Logits in Decision-based Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods require access to internal information of teachers . however, such information is not always accessible for large pre-trained language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to estimate logits from the decision distributions using logits theoretically and empirically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on natural language understanding and machine reading comprehension datasets. |
Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods conduct knowledge distillation statically, e.g., student model aligns output distribution to teacher model on pre-defined training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic knowledge distillation that empowers the student to adjust the learning procedure according to its competency . they find it is promising and provide discussions on potential future directions towards more efficient methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost student model performance while accelerating training . the proposed method reduces memory usage and accelerates model inference . |
CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which emits predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing methods on six classification tasks yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions. |
Query-aware Multi-modal based Ranking Relevance in Video Search (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing relevance ranking methods focus on text modality, incapable of fully exploiting cross-modal cues present in video. |
| Approach: | They propose a QUery-Aware pre-training model with multi-modality that integrates video tag information as alignment targets and enhances ranking optimization method based on ordinal regression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves video search performance. |
DocRED: A Large-Scale Document-Level Relation Extraction Dataset (P19-1)
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Yuan Yao, Deming Ye, Peng Li, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Lixin Huang, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods focus on extracting intra-sentence relations for single entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation extraction dataset from Wikipedia and Wikidata with three features . document-level relation extraction is a task to identify relational facts between entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest human-annotated dataset for document-level RE from plain text. |