Papers by Pengfei Sun
Continual Few-shot Event Detection via Hierarchical Augmentation Networks (2024.lrec-main)
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| 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. |
Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps (2022.naacl-main)
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Jiangang Bai, Yujing Wang, Hong Sun, Ruonan Wu, Tianmeng Yang, Pengfei Tang, Defu Cao, Mingliang Zhang1, Yunhai Tong, Yaming Yang, Jing Bai, Ruofei Zhang, Hao Sun, Wei Shen
| Challenge: | Existing works of knowledge infusion depend on multi-task learning frameworks, which are inefficient and require large-scale retraining when new knowledge is considered. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates knowledge-generated attention maps into the self-attention mechanism and integrates it into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on academic datasets and industry-scale ad relevance applications. |
Does syntax matter? A strong baseline for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with RoBERTa (2021.naacl-main)
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| 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)
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| 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. |
VALU: A Benchmark for Video Anomaly Temporal Localization and Understanding at Multiple Semantic Levels (2026.acl-long)
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Yixiao He, Menghao Zhang, Haifeng Sun, Jing Wang, Kangheng Lin, Jinghan Wang, Chenye Xu, Pengfei Ren, Qi Qi, Jingyu Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) enhance the ability of VAU models to describe and interpret anomalies. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that explicitly defines anomalies across five semantic levels and provides detailed temporal boundaries and detailed textual descriptions for each. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark defines anomalies across five semantic levels and provides detailed descriptions for each. |
Uncertainty Guided Label Denoising for Document-level Distant Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract semantic relations between entities in a document. |
| Approach: | They propose a Document-level distant relation extraction framework with unreliable pseudo labels to denoise DS data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on two public datasets. |
Unveiling Internal Reasoning Modes in LLMs: A Deep Dive into Latent Reasoning vs. Factual Shortcuts with Attribute Rate Ratio (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yiran Yang, Haifeng Sun, Jingyu Wang, Qi Qi, Zirui Zhuang, Huazheng Wang, Pengfei Ren, Jing Wang, Jianxin Liao
| Challenge: | Existing research in multi-hop questions has identified two reasoning modes, but has not investigated how these modes differ during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a classification metric that compares latent reasoning and factual shortcuts in multi-hop questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric achieves 90% accuracy on the proposed datasets and demonstrates effectiveness in RAG conflict scenarios. |
Dissecting Human and LLM Preferences (2024.acl-long)
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| 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. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
Human-in-the-loop Robotic Grasping Using BERT Scene Representation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes are expensive and lack structure information. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop framework for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes . they substitute scene-graph representation with a text representation of the scene using BERT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms object-agnostic and scene-graph based methods on robots and physical robots. |
CogGen: A Cognitively Inspired Recursive Framework for Deep Research Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deep research report generation rely on rigid predefined linear workflows, which cause error accumulation and limit in-depth multimodal fusion and report quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cognitively inspired recursive framework for deep research report Generation that simulates cognitive writing and abstract visual representation (AVR) they also propose CLEF, a cognitive load evaluation framework, and a benchmark from our world in data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art among open-source systems, surpassing Gemini Deep Research. |
FewRel: A Large-Scale Supervised Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset with State-of-the-Art Evaluation (D18-1)
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| 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. |
Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| 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 . |
Emma-X: An Embodied Multimodal Action Model with Grounded Chain of Thought and Look-ahead Spatial Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Visual-Language-Action models lack the ability to generate actionable policies tailored to specific robotic embodiments. |
| Approach: | They propose an embodied multimodal action model with Grounded Chain of Thought and Look-ahead Spatial Reasoning that enhances spatial reasoning and task planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing baselines in tasks requiring spatial reasoning and grounding reasoning. |
RICO: Improving Accuracy and Completeness in Image Recaptioning via Visual Reconstruction (2025.emnlp-main)
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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%. |
FRoG: Evaluating Fuzzy Reasoning of Generalized Quantifiers in LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| 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 . |
OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)
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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. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| 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. |
The Critique of Critique (2024.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Hierarchical Relation Extraction with Coarse-to-Fine Grained Attention (D18-1)
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| 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. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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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. |
Evaluating and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models: Can They Still See Removed Objects? (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | LVLMs often mistakenly determine objects as present in images where they do not exist . authors propose a new benchmark to evaluate object hallucinations by removing objects from images and asking the model whether it can still see the removed objects. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate object hallucinations by removing objects from images . they propose oDPO, a direct preference optimization objective based on visual objects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reduces the likelihood of object hallucinations by removing objects from images and asking the model whether it can still see the removed objects. |
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
Few-shot Joint Multimodal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis Based on Generative Multimodal Prompt (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies require massive labeled data to train models for multimodal data analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multimodal prompt model that captures specific aspect terms in a few-shot scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on two MABSA-related tasks on a few-shot dataset. |