Papers by Pengfei Liu
Agent-RewardBench: Towards a Unified Benchmark for Reward Modeling across Perception, Planning, and Safety in Real-World Multimodal Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are developing but lack external feedback . there is no clear on how to select reward models for agents . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agent reward modeling ability in MLLMs . they use multiple dimensions and real-world agent scenarios evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates agent performance in multimodal large language models . it covers perception, planning, and safety with 7 scenarios and is highly difficult and high-quality . |
Event Ontology Completion with Hierarchical Structure Evolution Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection require predefined schemas, but manual defining is expensive and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to achieve event clustering, hierarchy expansion and type naming . they propose 'neighbor Contrastive Clustering' module and a Hierarchy-Aware Linking module . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets. |
Beyond Under-Alignment: Atomic Preference Enhanced Factuality Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work evaluates the factuality of large language models on in-domain (ID) datasets and the factuality on out-of-domain datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances model’s awareness of factuality at the granularity of individual facts and propose 'Atomic Preference Enhanced Factuality Tuning' this framework enhances the model’ s awareness and accuracy of factual information at the level of individual factual facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance by an average of on ID and OOD datasets, which is highly effective. |
Continual Few-shot Event Detection via Hierarchical Augmentation Networks (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual few-shot event detection use labeled data, but in real-world applications, new event types emerge continually. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-based framework for continual few-shot event detection . they incorporate prototypical augmentation into the memory set to memorize previous event types . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in multiple continual few-shot event detection tasks. |
TIGS: An Inference Algorithm for Text Infilling with Gradient Search (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text infilling is an under-explored challenge in the field of text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative inference algorithm based on gradient search that can be broadly applied to any sequence generative model for text infilling tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on three different text infilling tasks with different mask ratios and mask strategies compared with five state-of-the-art methods. |
CitationIE: Leveraging the Citation Graph for Scientific Information Extraction (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on scientific information extraction (SciIE) considers extraction solely based on the content of an individual paper, without considering the paper’s place in the broader literature. |
| Approach: | They propose to automate the extraction of key information from scientific documents by leveraging a complementary source: the citation graph of referential links between citing and cited papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a set of English-language scientific documents. |
MARS2: Scaling Multi-Agent Tree Search via Reinforcement Learning for Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Pengfei Li, Shijie Wang, Fangyuan Li, Yikun Fu, Kaifeng Liu, Kaiyan Zhang, Dazhi Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning are decoupled from structured search due to limited trajectory diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified RL framework that integrates multiple agents within a shared tree-structured search environment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MARS2 improves performance across diverse model combinations and training settings. |
Does syntax matter? A strong baseline for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with RoBERTa (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained task in sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They compare a model with a dependency parser and a tree from a fine-tuned RoBERTa model to find the polarities for aspects in a sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the parser-provided tree on six datasets across four languages. |
LEGO: A Multi-agent Collaborative Framework with Role-playing and Iterative Feedback for Causality Explanation Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Causality explanation generation is a generative task that aims to explain why a given cause-effect pair is true using natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with role-playing and iterative feedback for causality explanation generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing frameworks on WIKIWHY and e-CARE datasets. |
Red-Teaming LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Communication Attacks (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) have revolutionized complex problem-solving capability by enabling agent collaboration through message-based communications. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack that exploits communication mechanisms in Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) by intercepting and manipulating inter-agent messages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack exploits communication mechanisms in large language model-based multi-agent systems by intercepting and manipulating inter-agencies. |
On Learning to Summarize with Large Language Models as References (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yixin Liu, Kejian Shi, Katherine He, Longtian Ye, Alexander Fabbri, Pengfei Liu, Dragomir Radev, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that summaries generated by large language models (LLMs) are favored by human annotators when compared to reference summary from widely used summarization datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models (LLMs) as reference learning settings for smaller text summarization models to investigate whether their performance can be substantially improved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning and human evaluations while retaining human-level performance. |
Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Zhong, Yang Liu, Da Yin, Yuning Mao, Yizhu Jiao, Pengfei Liu, Chenguang Zhu, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks for natural language generation are dominated by similarity-based metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional evaluator for natural language generation that integrates multiple dimensions into one evaluer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluator improves on three typical NLG tasks and improves with external knowledge. |
SciPedia: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Data for Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | High-quality scientific data is critical for advancing LLMs, yet academic literature remains underutilized. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale raw scientific corpus but identify a critical Learnability Gap . they develop a multi-stage pipeline featuring content cleaning and pedagogical augmentation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach boosts average performance by +2.12 (3B) and +2.95 (7B) on in-domain tasks. |
Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing open-source models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 12 multimodal tasks using 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in multimodal reasoning tasks, the authors show . they show that it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process. |
Graph-Structured Speculative Decoding (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuocheng Gong, Jiahao Liu, Ziyue Wang, Pengfei Wu, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding is a promising technique to accelerate the inference of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a token graph to record multiple sequence hypotheses within a single draft stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly accelerates the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) it allows the LLM to choose from and select the longest sequence that meets its standards. |
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Extractive Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models capture cross-sentence relations with recurrent neural networks, but they are hard to capture sentence-level long-distance dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based neural network for extractive summarization which contains semantic nodes apart from sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph-based neural network is the first to incorporate different types of nodes into it and perform a qualitative analysis. |
WilKE: Wise-Layer Knowledge Editor for Lifelong Knowledge Editing (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods focus on single editing, failing to meet the requirements for lifelong editing. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that selects editing layer based on the pattern matching degree of editing knowledge across different layers in language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on GPT2-XL and GPT-J in lifelong editing compared to state-of-the-art methods . |
Tug-of-War between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge conflicts in RALMs can ensnare them in a tug-of-war between knowledge and evidence, limiting their practical applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model’s confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can resolve knowledge conflicts in large language models with the help of conflict-disentangle contrast decoding (CD2) . |
Uncertain Local-to-Global Networks for Document-Level Event Factuality Identification (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on identifying event factuality at sentence level, which leads to conflicts between different mentions of the same event. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event factuality identification model that uses local uncertainty and global structure to model event factuality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on two widely used datasets. |
Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text-to-speech (TTS) has advanced from generating natural-sounding speech to enabling fine-grained control over speech attributes. |
| Approach: | They provide a review of controllable TTS methods from traditional control techniques to emerging approaches using natural language prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on models, strategies, and features, and summarize challenges, datasets, and evaluations. |
CogKTR: A Knowledge-Enhanced Text Representation Toolkit for Natural Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoran Jin, Tianyi Men, Hongbang Yuan, Yuyang Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Zhipeng Xue, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced methods are limited to knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced text representation toolkit for natural language understanding . it combines knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection and knowledge application . |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection, and knowledge application. |
Know-MRI: A Knowledge Mechanisms Revealer&Interpreter for Large Language Models (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaxiang Liu, Boxuan Xing, Chenhao Yuan, ChenxiangZhang ChenxiangZhang, Di Wu, Xiusheng Huang, Haida Yu, Chuhan Lang, Pengfei Cao, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing interpretation methods only support tasks with specific inputs, limiting their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an extensible module that matches different input data with interpretation methods and consolidates the interpreting outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can match different input data with interpretation methods and consolidate the interpreting outputs. |
No Black Boxes: Interpretable and Interactable Predictive Healthcare with Knowledge-Enhanced Agentic Causal Discovery (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Deep learning models lacking interpretability and interactivity, authors say . lack of interactive mechanisms prevents clinicians from incorporating their own knowledge into decision-making process. |
| Approach: | a new deep learning model is proposed to improve interpretability and interactivity . authors propose a knowledge-enhanced agent-driven causal discovery framework . |
| Outcome: | a new model improves interpretability and interactivity on EHR data . the proposed model improve interpretability through explicit reasoning and causal analysis . |
A Troublemaker with Contagious Jailbreak Makes Chaos in Honest Towns (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on single-agent attacks and shared memory attacks, but real-world scenarios often involve independent memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-agent, multitopology attack evaluation framework that exploits the memory of an agent to make it more vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the troublemaker makes chaos in Honest Town task with 23.51%, 18.95%, and 52.93% improvements in line, star topologies, and 100-agent settings. |
ExplainaBoard: An Explainable Leaderboard for NLP (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Pengfei Liu, Jinlan Fu, Yang Xiao, Weizhe Yuan, Shuaichen Chang, Junqi Dai, Yixin Liu, Zihuiwen Ye, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Using leaderboards, researchers can track the performance of various systems on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new conceptualization and implementation of NLP evaluation using a leaderboard. |
| Outcome: | The ExplainaBoard is an evaluation tool for natural language processing (NLP) it covers more than 400 systems, 50 datasets, 40 languages, and 12 tasks. |
DocLens: Multi-aspect Fine-grained Medical Text Evaluation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yiqing Xie, Sheng Zhang, Hao Cheng, Pengfei Liu, Zelalem Gero, Cliff Wong, Tristan Naumann, Hoifung Poon, Carolyn Rose
| Challenge: | Medical text generation systems are widely used to assist with administrative work and highlight salient information to support decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of metrics to evaluate completeness, conciseness, and attribution of medical text at a fine-grained level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits substantially higher agreement with medical experts than existing metrics. |
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters. |
DataFinder: Scientific Dataset Recommendation from Natural Language Descriptions (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset recommendation system that uses a training set and an evaluation set to help people find relevant datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model finds more relevant search results than existing third-party search engines. |
Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought-like method to elicit models' potential abilities to generate rationales and answers that are based on attribution tracing and causal tracers to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates Toxic CoT problems and improves the model’s overall commonsense reasoning performance by 5.5%. |
Re-evaluating Evaluation in Text Summarization (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Automated evaluation metrics are an essential part of the development of text-generation tasks such as summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use top-scoring system outputs to assess the reliability of automatic evaluation metrics for text summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation method is based on human judgments from 25 top-scoring neural summarization systems. |
MULFE: A Multi-Level Benchmark for Free Text Model Editing (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in comprehending human language and vast parametric knowledge obtained from large corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level benchmark for free text model editing to bridge the gap . they categorize probe queries into three levels of generalization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the generalization performance of large langugae models. |
Do LLMs Know Tool Irrelevance? Demystifying Structural Alignment Bias in Tool Invocations (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools, but in practice, they are often exposed to tools that are irrelevant to the user’s query, in which case the desired behavior is to refrain from invocations. |
| Approach: | They propose a new dataset that decouples structural alignment from semantic relevance and propose rebalancing strategies that effectively mitigates structural alignment bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach effectively mitigates structural alignment bias without degrading general tool-use capabilities. |
Towards More Fine-grained and Reliable NLP Performance Prediction (2021.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Performance prediction is a task of estimating a system’s performance without performing experiments. |
| Approach: | They propose to understand reliability of performance prediction models from two angles: confidence intervals and calibration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods demonstrate the feasibility of fine-grained performance prediction and the necessity to perform reliability analysis for performance prediction methods in the future. |
Metrics also Disagree in the Low Scoring Range: Revisiting Summarization Evaluation Metrics (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In text summarization evaluation, evaluating the efficacy of automated metrics without human judgments has become popular. |
| Approach: | They revisit their experiments and find that automatic metrics disagree when ranking high-scoring summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is a human judgment-free method, but it is not a meta-evaluation strategy. |
Dissecting Human and LLM Preferences (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that human and Large Language Model preferences are important for model fine-tuning and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They dissect the preferences of human and 32 different Large Language Models to understand their quantitative composition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with 32 different large language models using real-world user-model conversations. |
LLM-driven Instruction Following: Progresses and Concerns (2023.emnlp-tutorial)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a tutorial on task instruction is aimed at researchers and practitioners interested in NLP generalization . labeled examples are unlikely to be available in large numbers or do not exist . |
| Approach: | This tutorial will examine the progress of natural language processing (NLP) using labeled examples. authors propose that task instructions act as a novel resource for supervision. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to answer questions about instruction-driven NLP . it focuses on the use of task instructions in a low-shot scenario . |
HyperCore: Hyperbolic and Co-graph Representation for Automatic ICD Coding (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ICD coding ignore Code Hierarchy and Code Co-occurrence . cost of manual coding estimated to be $25 billion per year in the US . |
| Approach: | They propose a hyperbolic representation method to leverage the code hierarchy and a graph convolutional network to utilize the code co-occurrence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets. |
EVEDIT: Event-based Knowledge Editing for Deterministic Knowledge Propagation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing approaches only operate on (subject, relation, object) triple . current methods are limited to (substance, relation) triple, causing low confidence in their answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of event-based knowledge editing that pairs facts with event descriptions to improve model confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model confidence by 55.6% while maintaining the naturalness of generation. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
Weak-to-Strong Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to supervise large language models (LLMs) exceed human capabilities, but the effectiveness of this approach is still unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a weak-to-strong reasoning framework that enables strong models to refine training data . they use supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization to optimize weak models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the reasoning capabilities of a language model using three weak models. |
Whispers that Shake Foundations: Analyzing and Mitigating False Premise Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions . authors propose a method to mitigate false premises hallucinosity . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to constrain false premise attention heads during the model inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance by constraining false premise attention heads . it yields a notable increase of nearly 20% of model performance . |
LINKED: Eliciting, Filtering and Integrating Knowledge in Large Language Model for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiachun Li, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, such as commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to elicit, filter and integrate knowledge in large language models (LINKED) they propose 'reward model' to filter out noisy knowledge and 'take marginal consistent reasoning module' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SOTA baselines on two commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zhenwei Dai, Yan Han, Chen Luo, Jing Huang, Zhen Li, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) however, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT. |
DiffusionSL: Sequence Labeling via Tag Diffusion Process (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sequence Labeling (SL) is a long-standing field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes a conditional discrete diffusion model for generating discrete tag data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms gpt-3.5-turbo on multiple benchmark datasets and tasks. |
Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Text Summarization with In-Context Learning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Sameer Jain, Vaishakh Keshava, Swarnashree Mysore Sathyendra, Patrick Fernandes, Pengfei Liu, Graham Neubig, Chunting Zhou
| Challenge: | In-context learning-based evaluators are competitive with learned evaluation frameworks for text summarization tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as multi-dimensional evaluators using in-context learning to evaluate text summarization tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are competitive with existing frameworks on relevance and factual consistency, the authors show . |
ZhuJiu: A Multi-dimensional, Multi-faceted Chinese Benchmark for Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Baoli Zhang, Haining Xie, Pengfan Du, Junhao Chen, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Shengping Liu, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Various types of LLMs have recently been rapidly developing, such as Llama2 and ChatGLM2 . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that comprehensively evaluates LLMs across 7 ability dimensions covering 51 tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are comprehensive and systematic, with a high level of accuracy and authority. |
UniTabNet: Bridging Vision and Language Models for Enhanced Table Structure Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Table structure recognition technology is a critical tool for processing and analyzing large volumes of tabular data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for table structure parsing based on the image-to-text model and a vision guider to refine the model’s capability to understand textual semantics in table images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a dataset of PubTabNet, PubTables1M, WTW, and iFLYTAB and will be made publicly available. |
Combining Curriculum Learning and Knowledge Distillation for Dialogue Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that curriculum learning facilitates dialogue generation tasks while knowledge distillation can yield significant performance boosts for student models. |
| Approach: | They propose a combination of curriculum learning and knowledge distillation for dialogue generation models . they cluster training cases according to their complexity and employ an adversarial training strategy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves compared with baselines. |
Learning How to Remember: A Meta-Cognitive Management Method for Structured and Transferable Agent Memory (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches store memory in fixed representations and reuse it at a single or implicit level of abstraction, which limits generalization and often leads to negative transfer when distribution shift. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Cognitive Memory Abstraction method which decouples task execution from memory management by combining a frozen task model with a learned memory copilot. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and BabyAI show that the proposed method improves performance, out-of-distribution generalization, and cross-task transfer over several baselines. |
RefSum: Refactoring Neural Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text summarization are limited by limitations of reranking or stacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a unified view of text summarization and summaries combination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used by researchers as an off-the-shelf tool to achieve further performance improvements. |
Learning How and What to Memorize: Cognition-Inspired Two-Stage Optimization for Evolving Memory (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Derong Xu, Shuochen Liu, Pengfei Luo, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Yi Wen, Yimin Deng, Wenlin Zhang, Enhong Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems rely on static, hand-crafted update rules for personalization, but sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstable long-horizon optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory guideline optimization framework that learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
EvoNarrator: Modeling Scientific Evolution for Feasible Hypothesis Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Scientific discovery evolution does not occur ex nihilo but is characterized by structural deepening and reconfiguration of existing functionalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for hypothesis generation based on evolutionary narratives . they extract structured P-M-L-F quadruples from citation networks and introduce a mechanism to assess their semantic compatibility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces logical disconnects by evaluating its semantic compatibility. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
FewRel: A Large-Scale Supervised Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset with State-of-the-Art Evaluation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that even the most competitive few-shot learning models struggle on this task, especially as compared with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset consisting of 70, 000 sentences on 100 relations derived from Wikipedia and annotated by crowdworkers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well on the most competitive few-shot learning models, especially as compared with humans. |
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Yaxin Li, Jie Ren, Yiding Liu, Han Xu, Pengfei He, Yue Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks. |
CDEvalSumm: An Empirical Study of Cross-Dataset Evaluation for Neural Summarization Systems (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for text summarization systems are limited to in-domain setting, where supervised pre-trained models are evaluated on the same dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a cross-dataset evaluation approach to evaluate different summarization systems in a multi-domain setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to evaluate text summarization systems on different datasets. |
Understanding Reference Policies in Direct Preference Optimization (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used training method for the fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They explore the dependency on the reference model or policy in DPO and examine the necessity of the KL-constraint from the reference policies in D PO. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is sensitive to the KL divergence constraint, and the reference policy can penalize deviations from the reference constraint. |
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Yiding Liu, Yue Xing, Han Xu, Jie Ren, Yi Chang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is . a privacy issue that is currently under-explored, is posed by RAG. |
| Approach: | They propose to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data where data privacy is a pivotal concern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack methods demonstrate that RAG can mitigate the old risks, i.e., leakage of the LLMs’ training data. |
Data Poisoning for In-context Learning (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a capability of large language models (LLMs) but there is limited understanding of its vulnerability against data poisoning attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack method that exploits ICL’s unique learning mechanisms by identifying discrete text perturbations that influence LLM hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack method exploits ICL’s learning mechanisms by identifying discrete text perturbations that influence LLM hidden states. |
How well do you know your summarization datasets? (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art summarization systems are trained on massive datasets scraped from the web. |
| Approach: | They manually analyse 600 samples from three popular summarization datasets . they use a six-class typology which captures different noise types and degrees of summarizing difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on large datasets than on the current models. |
Reformatted Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current methods to improve data quality are labor-intensive or prone to factual errors caused by LLM hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reformats the responses of instruction data into a format that better aligns with pre-established criteria and the collated evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes human annotation, hallucination, and the difficulty in scaling, remaining orthogonal to existing alignment techniques. |
Towards Interpretable and Efficient Automatic Reference-Based Summarization Evaluation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Yilun Zhao, Pengfei Liu, Shafiq Joty, Chien-Sheng Wu, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Compared to neural systems, automatic metrics should be interpretable and provide intuitive insights into system performance and output quality. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a two-stage evaluation pipeline to extract basic information units from one text sequence and check the extracted units in another sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics can provide high interpretability at both the fine-grained unit level and summary level, and one-stage metrics that achieve a balance between efficiency and interpretability. |
Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompting to perform iterative refinement . they propose to combine the two methods to produce a more favorable outcome . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process . the results show that the prompt chaining method produces a more favorable outcome . |
GSum: A General Framework for Guided Neural Abstractive Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models are flexible, but they can be difficult to control. |
| Approach: | They propose a general and extensible guided summarization framework that takes different kinds of guidance as input and perform experiments across different varieties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate more faithful summaries and different types of guidance generate qualitatively different summary. |
DeepResearcher: Scaling Deep Research via Reinforcement Learning in Real-world Environments (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) with web search capabilities show significant potential for deep research. |
| Approach: | They introduce a framework for end-to-end training of LLM-based deep research agents . they implement a specialized multi-agent architecture where browsing agents extract relevant information from various webpage structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on open-domain research tasks by 28.9 points over prompt engineering and 7.2 points over RAG-based RL agents. |
GlobalBench: A Benchmark for Global Progress in Natural Language Processing (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yueqi Song, Simran Khanuja, Pengfei Liu, Fahim Faisal, Alissa Ostapenko, Genta Winata, Alham Aji, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Yulia Tsvetkov, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | despite advances in NLP, significant disparities in performance across languages still exist . prior benchmarks focused on a limited number of tasks and languages, but now GlobalBench tracks progress on all languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use global benchmarks to track progress on all NLP datasets in all languages. |
| Outcome: | a new tool tracks progress on all NLP datasets in all languages and tracks per-speaker utility and equity . globalbench is designed to identify the most under-served languages and reward research efforts . a globalbech is available at https://github.com/neulab/globalbench. |
Diversity-oriented Data Augmentation with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation methods focus on increasing sample numbers while neglecting sample distribution diversity, which can lead to model overfitting. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that focuses on sample distribution diversity and trains a large language model as a diverse paraphraser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average performance gain of 10.52% surpassing the runner-up baseline with more than three percentage points. |
Are All the Datasets in Benchmark Necessary? A Pilot Study of Dataset Evaluation for Text Classification (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark datasets contribute little to discriminating top-scoring systems, while those less used datasets exhibit impressive discriminative power. |
| Approach: | They examine the distinguishability of benchmark datasets when comparing different systems . they find that existing benchmark dataset contribute little to discriminating top-scoring systems - whereas those less used datasets exhibit impressive discriminative power. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets are released on DataLab. |
ZhuJiu-Knowledge: A Fairer Platform for Evaluating Multiple Knowledge Types in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | evaluating the knowledge of large language models (LLMs) is crucial, and rapid advancement in large language modeling has heightened the importance of model evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a fairer benchmark for evaluating multiple knowledge types of LLMs by focusing on commonsense knowledge, world knowledge, and language knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates 14 current mainstream LLMs and provides a detailed discussion and analysis of their results. |
How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zidi Xiong, Yuping Lin, Wenya Xie, Pengfei He, Zirui Liu, Jiliang Tang, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Zhen Xiang
| Challenge: | In practice, memory designs vary widely across agents due to their diverse objectives and functionalities. |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on how memory management choices impact the LLM agents’ behavior, especially their long-term performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that LLM agents display an experience-following property, which results in highly similar agent outputs. |
Universal Conditional Masked Language Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models have significantly improved Neural Machine Translation (NMT) this paper demonstrates that pre-training a sequence- to-squence model with a bidirectional decoder can produce notable performance gains for both Autoregressive and Non-autoregressive NMT tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional masked language model pre-trained on bilingual and monolingual corpora in many languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve significant performance improvements on all scenarios from low- to extremely high-resource languages. |
Knowledge-Centric Hallucination Detection (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangkun Hu, Dongyu Ru, Lin Qiu, Qipeng Guo, Tianhang Zhang, Yang Xu, Yun Luo, Pengfei Liu, Yue Zhang, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but a tendency to hallucinate. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces claim-triplets to represent claims in LLM responses and evaluates them against a reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior methods by 18.2 to 27.2 points on a benchmark spanning various NLP tasks and annotated 11k claim-triplets from 2.1k responses by seven LLMs. |
LearnDA: Learnable Knowledge-Guided Data Augmentation for Event Causality Identification (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event causality identification (ECI) rely on annotated training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to augment training data for event causality identification by iteratively generating new examples and classifying event causalities in a dual learning framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank. |
WIST: Web-Grounded Iterative Self-Play Tree for Domain-Targeted Reasoning Improvement (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for self-improvement of large language models with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can drift over iterations, while corpus-grounded approaches rely on curated data environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a Web-grounded Iterative Self-play Tree framework for domain-targeted reasoning improvement that learns directly from the open-web without requiring any pre-arranged domain corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both purely endogenous self-evolution and corpus-grounded self-play baselines and is domain-steerable. |
RICO: Improving Accuracy and Completeness in Image Recaptioning via Visual Reconstruction (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuchi Wang, Yishuo Cai, Shuhuai Ren, Sihan Yang, Linli Yao, Yuanxin Liu, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Xu Sun
| Challenge: | Existing recaptioning methods suffer from inaccuracies due to missing fine-grained details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines captions through visual reconstruction using a text-to-image model and a visual reconstruction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on CapsBench and CompreCap by 10%. |
Domain-Lifelong Learning for Dialogue State Tracking via Knowledge Preservation Networks (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qingbin Liu, Pengfei Cao, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Xunliang Cai, Fan Yang, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing offline DST models require a fixed dataset to train . Existing domain-lifelong learning methods are impractical in real-world applications . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-lifelong learning method to continuously train a DST model on new data to learn incessantly emerging new domains while avoiding catastrophically forgetting old learned domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art lifelong learning methods by 4.25% and 8.27% on the MultiWOZ and the SGD benchmarks. |
Searching for Effective Neural Extractive Summarization: What Works and What’s Next (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years have seen success in the use of deep neural networks on text summarization, but there is no clear understanding of why they perform so well or how they might be improved. |
| Approach: | They propose to use different types of model architectures to improve extractive summarization systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on CNN/DailyMail by a large margin based on observations and analysis. |
SAFETY-J: Evaluating Safety with Critique (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current methods focus on binary safety classifications and lack detailed critique, limiting their utility for model improvement and user trust. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual generative safety evaluator for English and Chinese with critique-based judgment that utilizes a robust training dataset and augmented query-response pairs to assess safety across various scenarios comprehensively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves safety evaluations by assessing the quality of critiques with minimal human intervention. |
FRoG: Evaluating Fuzzy Reasoning of Generalized Quantifiers in LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance reasoning do not consistently improve performance in tasks involving fuzzy logic. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for fuzzy reasoning that incorporates generalized quantifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing methods do not improve on FRoG . strong mathematical reasoning skills are not indicative of success, the authors show . |
Polyglot Prompt: Multilingual Multitask Prompt Training (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a monolithic framework for multilingual learning can be used without any task/language-specific module. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to exploit prompting methods for learning a unified semantic space for different languages and tasks with multilingual prompt engineering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn tasks from different languages in a monolithic framework without any task/language-specific module. |
InFoBench: Evaluating Instruction Following Ability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwei Qin, Kaiqiang Song, Yebowen Hu, Wenlin Yao, Sangwoo Cho, Xiaoyang Wang, Xuansheng Wu, Fei Liu, Pengfei Liu, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) ability to follow instructions have not been able to provide a detailed analysis of their compliance with instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric for evaluating Large Language Models' ability to follow instructions and a benchmark for DRFR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric and benchmark compared with traditional scoring methods and explores annotation sources including human experts, crowd-sourced workers, and GPT-4. |
OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxiang Zheng, Shichao Sun, Lin Qiu, Dongyu Ru, Cheng Jiayang, Xuefeng Li, Jifan Lin, Binjie Wang, Yun Luo, Renjie Pan, Yang Xu, Qingkai Min, Zizhao Zhang, Yiwen Wang, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Global scientific publications are growing annually by about 4%-5% (Pinedo et al., 2024). |
| Approach: | They introduce an AI-assisted platform that answers diverse questions from researchers using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) they develop various tools to understand queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine answers. |
| Outcome: | OpenResearcher is built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. |
Modeling Multi-turn Conversation with Deep Utterance Aggregation (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on retrieval-based context modeling for multi-turn conversation ignores interactions among previous utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose retrieval-based response matching for multi-turn conversation . they propose to combine previous utterances into context using a deep utterrance aggregation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three multi-turn conversation benchmarks including an e-commerce dialogue corpus. |
Unlocking the Future: Exploring Look-Ahead Planning Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models may possess preliminary planning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They examine the look-ahead planning mechanism in large language models from the perspectives of information flow and internal representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can decode the decision from the output of MHSA in the middle layers at the last token. |
DiagnosisArena: Benchmarking Diagnostic Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yakun Zhu, Zhongzhen Huang, Linjie Mu, Yutong Huang, Wei Nie, Jiaji Liu, Shaoting Zhang, Pengfei Liu, Xiaofan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing medical benchmarks for diagnostic reasoning are limited in their ability to perform complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark diagnostic capabilities of large language models to assess their accuracy and generalization bottlenecks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 45.82%, 31.09%, and 17.79% accuracy, compared to current models, o3-mini, e1 and DeepSeek-R1 . |
SimCLS: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Abstractive Summarization (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that SimCLS can improve existing top-performing models by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for abstractive summarization that is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of top-performing models by a large margin against existing top-scoring systems. |
On the Generalization of Training-based ChatGPT Detection Methods (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that training-based methods are ineffective to detect LLM generated texts from unseen tasks or topics which are not collected during training. |
| Approach: | They propose to train classification models to distinguish LLMs from human texts by a distribution shift caused by prompts, text lengths, topics, and language tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can detect LLMs from black-box models, but they suffer from distribution shifts due to a wide range of factors, including prompts, text lengths, topics, and language tasks. |
SegTune: Structured and Fine-Grained Control for Song Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuejiao Wang, Zihao Ji, Pengfei Cai, Xu Li, Haorui Zheng, Zewen Song, Zhongliang Liu, Chen Zhang, Pengfei Wan
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural song generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from lyrics and global textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to specify local musical descriptions aligned to song segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in musicality and controllability. |
Towards Context-Robust LLMs: A Gated Representation Fine-tuning Approach (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with external contexts face challenges in handling imperfect evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can balance internal knowledge with external contexts . they propose gating mechanisms and low-rank representation adapters to adjust hidden representations based on a lightweight intervention function . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can effectively balance internal knowledge with external context, similar to human cognitive processes. |
Clinical-Coder: Assigning Interpretable ICD-10 Codes to Chinese Clinical Notes (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods of automatic coding prediction have been successful, but the interpretability of predicted codes is a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an online system that can predict ICD codes for Chinese clinical notes by using a Dilated Convolutional Attention network with N-gram Matching mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is able to provide supporting information in clinical decision making. |
XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluation (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Sebastian Ruder, Noah Constant, Jan Botha, Aditya Siddhant, Orhan Firat, Jinlan Fu, Pengfei Liu, Junjie Hu, Dan Garrette, Graham Neubig, Melvin Johnson
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multilingual natural language processing have improved performance on benchmarks such as XTREME and XGLUE by 13 points . however, improvements have been easier to achieve in some tasks than others . |
| Approach: | They extend XTREME to XTRAME-R, which includes ten natural language understanding tasks and covers 50 typologically diverse languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance on the XTREME multilingual benchmark by 13 points compared to human-level performance on English transfer learning. |
Efficient Temporal Extrapolation of Multimodal Large Language Models with Temporal Grounding Bridge (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | despite advances in multimodal large language models, the challenge of interpreting long-form videos remains a challenge . despite advancements in video-language benchmarks, the inefficiency in temporal grounding and limited pre-trained context window size remains . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bootstraps MLLMs with advanced temporal grounding capabilities and broadens their contextual scope. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly enhances the temporal capabilities of existing MLLMs. |
PEAR: Planner-Executor Agent Robustness Benchmark (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies examine isolated attack surfaces or specific scenarios, leaving a lack of holistic understanding of MAS vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the utility and vulnerability of planner–executor MAS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates planner–executor MAS on a widely adopted design. |
Towards Understanding Jailbreak Attacks in LLMs: A Representation Space Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage hidden representations into existing jailbreak targets to move the attacks along the acceptance direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are validated using the objective of existing jailbreak attacks. |
Towards Better Chain-of-Thought: A Reflection on Effectiveness and Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to recall extra information from the question to enhance CoT generation and evaluate CoTs based on their information gain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both the faithfulness and effectiveness of CoT and evaluates it based on their information gain. |
Interpretable Multi-dataset Evaluation for Named Entity Recognition (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for named entity recognition tasks are difficult to interpret . authors present a general methodology for interpretable evaluation for named entities . |
| Approach: | They propose a general methodology for interpretable evaluation for named entity recognition task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation method enables researchers to interpret differences in models and datasets . it makes it easy for future researchers to run similar analyses and drive progress in this area . |
M3TQA: Massively Multilingual Multitask Table Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Daixin Shu, Jian Yang, Zhenhe Wu, Xianjie Wu, Xianfu Cheng, Guan Xiangyuan, Yanghai Wang, Pengfei Wu, Tingyang Yang, Hualei Zhu, Wei Zhang, Ge Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual table benchmarks suffer from geolinguistic imbalance - overrepresenting certain languages and lacking sufficient scale for rigorous cross-lingual analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for massively multilingual table question answering that includes tables expanded to 97 languages from Chinese and English sources. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs show that synthetically generated training data significantly boosts performance, especially for low-resource languages. |
BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models are often trained with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) . mLE assumes a deterministic (one-point) target distribution, but can cause performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a new training paradigm which assumes a non-deterministic distribution so that different candidate summaries are assigned probability mass according to their quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can estimate probabilities of candidate summaries that are more correlated with their level of quality. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving document-level DECI with low-resourced languages under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning for zero-shot cross-lingual ECI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on monolingual and multilingual scenarios by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score. |
Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Jiawen Chen, Yilun Zhao, Simeng Han, Shafiq Joty, Pengfei Liu, Dragomir Radev, Chien-Sheng Wu, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that large language models (LLMs) can achieve state-of-the-art performance on generic summarization benchmarks, but their performance on more complex summarizing task settings is less studied. |
| Approach: | They benchmark large language models on instruction controllable text summarization . they use 4 evaluation protocols and 11 LLMs to evaluate their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on instruction controllable text summarization tasks with 4 evaluation protocols and 11 LLMs. |
Extractive Summarization as Text Matching (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, most of the neural extractive summarization systems score and extract sentences individually and model the relationship between sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to instantiate a neural extractive summarization task as a semantic text matching problem and use it to match a source document and candidate summaries in a semantic space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is faster and more efficient than existing frameworks. |
Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human States (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess basic Theory of Mind abilities but neglect temporal evolution of mental states in real-world social contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate Large Language Models' ability to understand and track the temporal progression of mental states across interconnected scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks underperform humans by 44.7% and show that they can model the dynamic nature of human mental states better than existing models. |
Larger-Context Tagging: When and Why Does It Work? (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tagging systems that use sentence-level data are not well understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a larger-context approach to tagging tasks that incorporates contextual information into existing tapping systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed aggregators improve on four tagging tasks and 13 datasets. |
A Closer Look at Data Bias in Neural Extractive Summarization Models (D19-54)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In this paper, we examine the generalization behaviour of summarization models . we propose several properties of datasets that matter for generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose several properties of datasets which matter for generalization of summarization models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the state-of-the-art model by rethinking the model design process on a typical dataset. |
Mitigating the Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) via Pure Synthetic Data (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Jie Ren, Tianqi Zheng, Hanqing Lu, Han Xu, Hui Liu, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing literature suggests that RAG systems may face privacy issues when the retrieval process involves private data. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage synthetic data generation paradigm that uses attributes to preserve contextual information from the original data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach preserves key contextual information from the original data while reducing privacy risks. |
MoPS: Modular Story Premise Synthesis for Open-Ended Automatic Story Generation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing sources of story premises are limited by a lack of diversity, uneven quality, and high costs that make them difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which breaks down story premises into modules like background and persona for automated design and generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels in diversity, fascination, completeness, and originality compared to those induced from large language models and captured from public datasets. |
Complex Event Schema Induction with Knowledge-Enriched Diffusion Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on event schema induction have been hindered by errors and data quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enriched discrete diffusion model that distills event scenario knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves outstanding performance across evaluation metrics. |
The Critique of Critique (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MetaCritique builds specific quantification criteria to evaluate the quality of critique . a systematic method to evaluate critique is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a critique of critique, termed MetaCritique, which builds specific quantification criteria and aggregates each AIU's judgment for the overall score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve near-human performance across 16 datasets. |
SpanNER: Named Entity Re-/Recognition as Span Prediction (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years have seen the paradigm shift of Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems from sequence labeling to span prediction. |
| Approach: | They experimentally implement 154 named entity recognition models on 11 datasets and show that span prediction can serve as a system combiner to re-recognize named entities from different systems’ outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to re-recognize named entities from different systems’ outputs. |
Knowledge-Enriched Event Causality Identification via Latent Structure Induction Networks (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying causal relations of events are limited . Existing approaches cannot handle well the problem, especially in the condition of lacking training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Latent Structure Induction Network to integrate external structural knowledge into a causality reasoning task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets. |
Automatic ICD Coding via Interactive Shared Representation Networks with Self-distillation Mechanism (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ICD coding ignore the long-tail of code frequency or noisy clinical notes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an interactive shared representation network to model code co-occurrences while focusing on the clinical note's noteworthy part and extract valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism to solve the long-tail problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the long-tail of code frequency and noise in clinical notes and extracts valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism. |
Star-Transformer (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models with fully-connected attention connections are heavy and require large training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight alternative to the Transformer by sparsifying the fully-connected structure with a star-shaped topology. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant performance improvements on 22 datasets on four tasks. |
RAG-RewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoran Jin, Hongbang Yuan, Tianyi Men, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval augmented language models often overlook effective alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RMs in retrieval augmented language models . they incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity of data sources. |
GPTScore: Evaluate as You Desire (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks for text generation are not adequate to assess the quality of the generated outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes emergent abilities of generative pre-trained models to evaluate generated texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework can achieve what one desires to evaluate for texts simply by natural language instructions. |
LLMCrit: Teaching Large Language Models to Use Criteria (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current research on using criteria to provide feedback on tasks is limited . a general framework that can be used to teach large language models to use criteria is lacking . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables large language models to use criteria for feedback . criteria are extracted from guidelines and construct in-context demonstrations for each criterion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to provide natural language feedback on tasks. |
Hierarchical Relation Extraction with Coarse-to-Fine Grained Attention (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction use knowledge graphs to automatically label training data . but, it suffers from the wrong labeling problem because not all sentences containing two entities can express their relations in KGs . |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision approach to automatically label training instances . they integrate hierarchical information of relations into distantly supervised relation extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a large-scale dataset. |
DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing timeline summarizations lack flexibility to meet diverse granularity needs . a fine-grained timeline showing the technical details is preferred for news topics . |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm to construct adaptive timelines based on user instructions or requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed timelines are informative and granularly consistent, but they struggle to generate consistent timelines. |
DataLab: A Platform for Data Analysis and Intervention (2022.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yang Xiao, Jinlan Fu, Weizhe Yuan, Vijay Viswanathan, Zhoumianze Liu, Yixin Liu, Graham Neubig, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing tools and research focus on how to interpret and manipulate data, despite its crucial role in machine learning, . existing tools and researchers focus on systems on top of existing data, rather than how to use it. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified data-oriented platform that allows users to interactively analyze the characteristics of data and provides a standard interface for many data processing operations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform allows users to analyze the characteristics of data and provides a standardized interface so that many data processing operations can be provided within a single interface. |
From Signal Degradation to Computation Collapse: Uncovering the Two Failure Modes of LLM Quantization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on PTQ spans three primary directions. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic analysis of post-training quantization failures using PTQ . they show that targeted repair can mitigate Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse. |
Empowering GUI Agents via Autonomous Experience Exploration and Hindsight Experience Utilization for Task Planning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal web agents are cost-efficient and privacy-preserving, but suffer from weak planning and limited cross-website generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which autonomously explores environments to discover experiences and utilizes hindsight experience to synthesize strictly aligned, high-level training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Qwen2.5-VL-32B model on real-world benchmarks and demonstrates that mastering low-level atomic skills does not guarantee high-level planning competence. |
Target-Guided Structured Attention Network for Target-Dependent Sentiment Analysis (2020.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | TDSA aims to classify the sentiment of a text towards a given target. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Target-Guided Structured Attention Network (TG-SAN) which captures target-related contexts for TDSA in a fine-to-coarse manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and Marco-F1 on three benchmarks with three major findings. |
Task-Stratified Knowledge Scaling Laws for Post-Training Quantized Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws focus on general performance, overlooking crucial fine-grained factors and how quantization differentially impacts diverse knowledge capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies model size, bit-width, and fine-grained factors into memorization, application, and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows strong fit and cross-architecture consistency on 293 different PTQ configurations. |
InstructoR: Instructing Unsupervised Conversational Dense Retrieval with Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational retrieval only fine-tune on limited supervised data, making it difficult for the retriever to fully grasp the entire conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to instruct unsupervised conversational dense retrieval with large language models (LLMs) they use supervised data to discover the user's query intent from the conversation context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can bring significant improvements across various ad-hoc retrievers, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method. |
Alignment Precedes Fusion: Open-Vocabulary Named Entity Recognition as Context-Type Semantic Matching (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Continual learning and zero-shot learning approaches have not been adopted to scale to novel-emerging types. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to recognize entities in novel types by their textual names or descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three challenging OVNER benchmarks by 9.7%, 9.5%, and 1.8% F1-score of novel types. |
Rainier: Reinforced Knowledge Introspector for Commonsense Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research shows that relevant knowledge can provide useful context for commonsense tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns to generate contextually relevant knowledge in response to given questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows consistent gains over 9 commonsense benchmarks. |
A Reward-Guided Dual-Phase Framework for Adaptive Inference-Time Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yingqian Cui, Zhenwei Dai, Pengfei He, Bing He, Hui Liu, Zhan Shi, Xianfeng Tang, Jingying Zeng, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Benoit Dumoulin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made strong progress in reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-phase test-time scaling framework that separates planning and execution and performs search over each phase independently. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning and code generation benchmarks show that the proposed approach improves accuracy while reducing redundant computation. |
Cracking Factual Knowledge: A Comprehensive Analysis of Degenerate Knowledge Neurons in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are believed to store extensive factual knowledge, yet the mechanisms of knowledge storage in LLMs remain largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose that some multi-layer perceptron neurons can store "knowledge". |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can store "knowledge" in multi-layer perceptron neurons, but not redundancy. |
Revealing the Deceptiveness of Knowledge Editing: A Mechanistic Analysis of Superficial Editing (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing algorithms are prone to generating original knowledge . despite the fact that many models achieve near-perfect performance, superficial editing remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose to use "**superficial editing**" to describe the phenomenon . they investigate the internal mechanisms of the attention module and their corresponding left singular vectors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can modify specific knowledge in a pretrained large language model while ensuring that unrelated knowledge remains unaffected. |
The Law of Knowledge Overshadowing: Towards Understanding, Predicting and Preventing LLM Hallucination (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuji Zhang, Sha Li, Cheng Qian, Jiateng Liu, Pengfei Yu, Chi Han, Yi R. Fung, Kathleen McKeown, ChengXiang Zhai, Manling Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework to quantify factual hallucinations by modeling knowledge overshadowing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model factuality on Overshadow (27.9%), MemoTrap (13.1%) and NQ-Swap (18.3%). |
Are Factuality Checkers Reliable? Adversarial Meta-evaluation of Factuality in Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite the progress of factual evaluation methods, they are limited in their opacity and lack the ability to assess the factuality of the summaries. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a meta-evaluation methodology to diagnose the fine-grained strengths and weaknesses of 6 existing top-performing metrics over 24 diagnostic test datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method diagnoses the strengths and weaknesses of 6 existing top-performing metrics over 24 diagnostic test datasets and searches for directions for further improvement by data augmentation. |
ECON: On the Detection and Resolution of Evidence Conflicts (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Qianqian Zhuang, Lin Qiu, Tianhang Zhang, Tengxiao Liu, Yangqiu Song, Yue Zhang, Pengfei Liu, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that AI generated content is more likely to dominate search results, making it difficult to detect when compared to human-produced content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating diverse, validated evidence conflicts to simulate real-world misinformation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables the detection of conflicting information in real-world scenarios and shows that weaker models struggle with similar answer conflicts while stronger models show robust performance. |
Revisiting the Gold Standard: Grounding Summarization Evaluation with Robust Human Evaluation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yixin Liu, Alex Fabbri, Pengfei Liu, Yilun Zhao, Linyong Nan, Ruilin Han, Simeng Han, Shafiq Joty, Chien-Sheng Wu, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing studies for summarization evaluation exhibit low inter-annotator agreement or lack scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a modified summarization salience protocol based on fine-grained semantic units and a robust summarizing evaluation benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol is based on fine-grained semantic units and allows for high inter-annotator agreement. |
Lightweight Haar Wavelet Subband Pruning for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive performance but require computational and memory resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-training framework that uses a Haar wavelet transform to prune weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework reduces pruning time and computational costs by removing less important weights while preserving model architecture. |
KGxBoard: Explainable and Interactive Leaderboard for Evaluation of Knowledge Graph Completion Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Haris Widjaja, Kiril Gashteovski, Wiem Ben Rim, Pengfei Liu, Christopher Malon, Daniel Ruffinelli, Carolin Lawrence, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store information in the form of (head, predicate, tail)-triples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for performing fine-grained evaluation on meaningful subsets of data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework tests models on meaningful subsets of the data, which would have been impossible to detect with standard averaged single-score metrics. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Keyu Li, Junhao Shi, Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Yunze Wu, Dayuan Fu, Shijie Xia, Xiaojie Cai, Tianze Xu, Weiye Si, Wenjie Li, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates 6 agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that closed-source models outperform open-source model (48.4% vs 32.1%) integrating models with advanced scaffolds to form autonomous agents is a paradigm shift. |
RethinkCWS: Is Chinese Word Segmentation a Solved Task? (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years have seen remarkable success in the use of deep neural networks on Chinese word segmentation (CWS) however, the performance of CWS systems has gradually reached a plateau with the rapid development of deep networks. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained evaluation for existing Chinese word segmentation systems that allows us to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can diagnose strengths and weaknesses of existing models and alleviate negative transfer problem when doing multi-criteria learning. |
A Good Neighbor, A Found Treasure: Mining Treasured Neighbors for Knowledge Graph Entity Typing (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to infer missing types for knowledge graphs only leverage one-hop neighbor information of the central entity, ignoring multi-hop neighbors that can provide valuable clues for inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to infer missing types for knowledge graph entities by using neighbor information and co-occurrence relations between types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets. |
Improving Event Causality Identification via Self-Supervised Representation Learning on External Causal Statement (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event causality identification (ECI) rely on labeled data, but the scale of annotated datasets is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised framework to learn context-specific causal patterns from external causal statements and adopt a contrastive transfer strategy to incorporate the learned context- specific causal patterns into the target ECI model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on EventSto-ryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.0 and +3.4 points on F1 value respectively). |
MedPlan: A Two-Stage RAG-Based System for Personalized Medical Plan Generation (2025.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Hsin-Ling Hsu, Cong-Tinh Dao, Luning Wang, Zitao Shuai, Thao Nguyen Minh Phan, Jun-En Ding, Chun-Chieh Liao, Pengfei Hu, Xiaoxue Han, Chih-Ho Hsu, Dongsheng Luo, Wen-Chih Peng, Feng Liu, Fang-Ming Hung, Chenwei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing systems focus primarily on assessment rather than treatment planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that structures LLM reasoning to align with real-life workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches in assessment accuracy and treatment plan quality. |
AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhitao He, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have significantly impacted the legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for judicial decision-making that simulates the court trial process . they propose 420 Chinese judgment documents to support their framework and build a large-scale legal knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles. |
M2Edit: Locate and Edit Multi-Granularity Knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods for MLLMs lack multi-granularity knowledge . existing knowledge editing approaches lack multimodality knowledge and generalize to multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal knowledge editing method which integrates key knowledge layers within MLLMs and collaboratively edits them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves visual generality performance on knowledge data of different granularities. |
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs. |
DavIR: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haotian Zhou, Tingkai Liu, Qianli Ma, Yufeng Zhang, Jianbo Yuan, Pengfei Liu, Yang You, Hongxia Yang
| Challenge: | 6% of Alpaca dataset selected with DavIR can steer both LLaMA and Gemma models to produce superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based data selection method for post-training Large Language Models . they generalize Reducible Holdout Loss to core-set selection problem of causal language modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can steer both LLaMA and Gemma models to superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. |
Adversarial Transfer Learning for Chinese Named Entity Recognition with Self-Attention Mechanism (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition (NER) do not exploit word boundary information from CWS or cannot filter the specific information of CWS. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit task-shared boundary information to make full use of Chinese NER task and Chinese word segmentation (CWS) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets. |
Evaluating Personalized Tool-Augmented LLMs from the Perspectives of Personalization and Proactivity (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Personalized tool utilization is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user preference in interaction scenarios with various tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a key-point-based LLM evaluation method that mitigates biases by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates biases in the LLM-as-a-judge system by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference. |
T5Score: Discriminative Fine-tuning of Generative Evaluation Metrics (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating text quality are discriminative and generative . current methods use manual annotation of human judgements to train them . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines the best of both worlds by using supervised and unsupervised signals from whatever data we have available. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing metrics on 5 datasets, 19 languages and 280 systems. |
Leros: Learning Explicit Reasoning on Synthesized Data for Commonsense Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenhao Wang, Pengfei Cao, Jiachun Li, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Li Qiuxia, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent work shows large language models can generate useful rationales for commonsense question answering (CQA) however, the cost of deployment and further tuning is relatively expensive for the large models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages both knowledge graphs and large language models to synthesize rationale-augmented CQA data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate useful rationales on unseen CQA benchmarks. |
The Knowledge Microscope: Features as Better Analytical Lenses than Neurons (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that features are superior analytical units for understanding factual knowledge in Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature-based editing method that decomposes neurons into features rather than neurons to understand the mechanisms of factual knowledge in Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method demonstrates superior performance over neuron-based approaches in erasing privacy-sensitive information from LMs. |
RLShield: Dynamic Jailbreak Detection for LLMs via Reinforced Adaptive Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect jailbreak prompts rely on static model components or fixed decision thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic jailbreak detection framework that employs reinforcement learning for adaptive threshold selection. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the framework outperforms baselines in detection performance while maintaining high computational efficiency. |
Enhancing Agentic Textual Graph Retrieval with Synthetic Stepwise Supervision (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ge Chang, Jinbo Su, Jiacheng Liu, Pengfei Yang, Yuhao Shang, Huiwen Zheng, Hongli Ma, Yan Liang, Yuanchun Li, Yunxin Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating textual graphs with LLMs are limited by symbolic inference and high annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual graph reasoning framework that integrates textual diagrams with large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 15.6% accuracy and 17.2% in F1 score on three common datasets. |