Papers by Philip S. Yu

48 papers
Position: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Significantly Advance Scientific Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current scientific reasoning models struggle with generalization across domains and fall short of multimodal perception.
Approach: They propose to use multimodal large language models to integrate text, images, and other modalities to enhance scientific reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed models can integrate text, images, and other modalities and improve reasoning across disciplines.
TestNUC: Enhancing Test-Time Computing Approaches and Scaling through Neighboring Unlabeled Data Consistency (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Test-time computing approaches that leverage additional computational resources during inference have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance.
Approach: They propose a linearly scaling approach that leverages local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data to improve test-time predictions.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods such as prompting and self-consistency across eight datasets and performs robustly across embedding models.
Automatic Table Union Search with Tabular Representation Learning (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to identify uniability based on column representations are insufficient to reveal latent relational features to describe column relation between pair of columns.
Approach: They propose a self-supervised table union search framework called AutoTUS to learn column relational representations in a multi-stage manner.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on the SOTA baseline and on real-world datasets.
ProvBench: A Benchmark of Legal Provision Recommendation for Contract Auto-Reviewing (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Contract review is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly . a benchmark is proposed to detect potential legal conflicts .
Approach: They propose a benchmark for legal provision recommendation and conflict detection for contract auto-reviewing which aims to recommend the legal provisions related to contract clauses and detect possible legal conflicts.
Outcome: The proposed task recommends legal provisions related to contract clauses and detects legal conflicts.
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting.
Approach: They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time.
Outcome: Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting.
TABGEN-ICL: Residual-Aware In-Context Example Selection for Tabular Data Generation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to tabular data generation require fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive.
Approach: They propose a new in-context learning framework to prompt a fixed LLM with in-constitut examples to enhance the in-text learning ability of LLMs for tabular data generation.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms random selection strategies on five real-world tabular datasets and reduces error rate by 42.2% on fidelity metric.
GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences . existing methods neither preserve semantic consistency of original sentences nor preserve syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations.
Approach: They propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures.
Outcome: The proposed technique can bring 2.0% F1 improvements in three datasets under low-resource setting.
LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents.
Approach: They propose to integrate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety.
Outcome: The proposed systems improve system performance, reliability, and safety by integrating human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system.
Emotion Transfer with Enhanced Prototype for Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing research on emotion recognition in conversation does not reach a consensus on classification theories . despite this, there is no clear consensus on how to recognize previously unseen emotions in real-world applications.
Approach: They propose a prototype-based emotion transfer framework that can be used in real-world applications.
Outcome: The proposed framework shows promise but still faces key challenges in the field of emotion recognition in conversation.
LLMInit: A Free Lunch from Large Language Models for Selective Initialization of Recommendation (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing algorithms for collaborative filtering are limited by their computational demands and latency.
Approach: They propose a framework to integrate pre-trained LLM embeddings into CF models through selective initialization strategies.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves recommendation performance while maintaining low computational costs.
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection.
Approach: They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization.
Outcome: The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models.
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences.
Approach: They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference .
Outcome: The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks.
Taxonomy-Guided Zero-Shot Recommendations with LLMs (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to deploy large language models (LLMs) into RecSys have limited prompt length, unstructured item information, and un-constrained generation of recommendations.
Approach: They propose a taxonomy-guided recommendation framework that empowers LLMs with category information in a systematic approach.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves recommendation quality compared to zero-shot approaches.
MultiFileTest: A Multi-File-Level LLM Unit Test Generation Benchmark and Impact of Error Fixing Mechanisms (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks for LLM unit test generation focus on function-level code rather than on more practical, challenging multi-file codebases.
Approach: They propose a multi-file-level benchmark for unit test generation covering Python, Java, and JavaScript.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that most LLMs exhibit moderate performance on MultiFileTest, highlighting the benchmark’s inherent difficulty.
Structure-adaptive Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Multi-Domain Fake News Detection (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing models for fake news detection capture domain-shared semantic features but fail to generalize well due to poor adaptability.
Approach: They propose a framework to enable structure knowledge transfer between multiple domains . they compare content-only and propagation-rich data to preserve structural patterns .
Outcome: The proposed framework can learn semantic and structural features across domains.
Prompting with Phonemes: Enhancing LLMs’ Multilinguality for Non-Latin Script Languages (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Multilingual LLMs have achieved remarkable benchmark performance, but continue to underperform on non-Latin script languages.
Approach: They propose to integrate phonemic transcriptions as complementary signals to induce script-invariant representations by integrating phonemic and orthographic transcriptions.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves performance for Latin and non-Latin script languages, with 12.6% performance improvement and 15.1% performance improvement compared to randomized ICL retrieval.
WaterSeeker: Pioneering Efficient Detection of Watermarked Segments in Large Documents (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on distinguishing fully watermarked text from non-watermarked text, overlooking real-world scenarios where LLMs generate only brief segments within longer documents.
Approach: They propose a method to detect watermarked segments in large documents using an anomaly extraction method and a local traversal.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves a superior balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency.
Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning for Low Resource Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to extract relation facts from limited labeled corpora are laborintensive to obtain . Existing approaches use self-training to generate pseudo labels that will cause gradual drift problem or leverage meta-learning scheme which does not solicit feedback explicitly.
Approach: They propose a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning method to encourage pseudo label data to imitate gradient descent direction on labeled data and bootstrap its optimization capability through trial and error.
Outcome: The proposed method handles two major scenarios in low-resource relation extraction when no unlabeled data is available.
LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are transforming education by automating complex tasks and enhancing both teaching and learning processes.
Approach: This survey analyzes recent advances in applying Large Language Model agents to educational settings . it highlights ethical issues, hallucination and overreliance, and integration with existing ecosystems .
Outcome: The authors analyze the technologies enabling LLM agents and highlight key challenges in deploying them in educational settings.
Teaching According to Talents! Instruction Tuning LLMs with Competence-Aware Curriculum Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models (LLMs) current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed and potentially sub-optimal learning trajectory.
Approach: a framework for efficient instruction tuning is proposed to address the issue of curriculum rigidity . current methods rely on static heuristic difficulty metrics and fail to adapt to evolving capabilities .
Outcome: Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models . current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed learning trajectory .
Why LLMs Hallucinate on Structured Knowledge: A Mechanistic Analysis of Reasoning over Linearized Representations (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing literature primarily addresses this problem through external interventions such as retrieval augmentation and prompt engineering at the input or output level.
Approach: They find that LLMs can still produce hallucinated outputs when using structured external knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed models fail to ground the provided knowledge, causing the model to revert to parametric memory.
Entity-to-Text based Data Augmentation for various Named Entity Recognition Tasks (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing augmentation techniques manipulate words in the original text that break the semantic coherence of the text, or exploit generative models that ignore preserving entities in the text.
Approach: They propose a novel Entity-to-Text based data augmentation technique called EnTDA to add, delete, replace or swap entities in the original text.
Outcome: The proposed technique generates semantically coherent and entity preserving texts on thirteen NER tasks and two settings.
Recurrent Knowledge Identification and Fusion for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Continual learning (CL) is crucial for large language models without costly retraining.
Approach: They propose a framework for recurrent knowledge identification and fusion that enables dynamic estimation of parameter importance distributions to enhance knowledge transfer.
Outcome: The proposed framework mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enhances knowledge transfer.
Many-Shot Scaling of In-Context Learning with Self-Generated Demonstrations (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: In-context learning methods that use self-generated annotations do not scale to many-shot scenarios.
Approach: They propose a framework analogous to semi-supervised learning that uses self-generated annotations instead of ground truth labels.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms ground truth ICL under zero-shot, few-shot and many-shot settings.
GAM: Hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to resolve conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on LoCoMo and LongDialQA.
Rethinking the Roles of Large Language Models in Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models’ performance as correctors on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) remains unsatisfactory due to the challenging nature of the task.
Approach: They propose a training framework EXAM that uses LLMs as explainers to enhance CGEC small models and a novel evaluation method SEE that utilizes LLM as evaluators to bring more reasonable evaluations.
Outcome: The proposed methods improve the performance of LLMs on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) task.
Paper2Web: Let’s Make Your Paper Alive! (2026.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Current approaches to creating layout-aware, interactive academic webpages are limited.
Approach: They propose a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework for assessing academic webpage generation that incorporates rule-based metrics like Connectivity, Completeness and PaperQuiz.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines like template-based webpages and arXiv/alphaXivo versions while maintaining low cost.
Double Embeddings and CNN-based Sequence Labeling for Aspect Extraction (P18-2)

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Challenge: Recent supervised deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance, but there are two other considerations that are important.
Approach: They propose a supervised aspect extraction model using general-purpose embeddings and domain-specific embeddables.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods without supervision and achieves very good results.
Can LLM Watermarks Robustly Prevent Unauthorized Knowledge Distillation? (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Model (LLM) watermarking is radioactive and enables the detection of watermarks inherited by student models when trained on the outputs of watermarked teacher models.
Approach: They propose two types of watermark removal attacks that allow student models to perform untraceable knowledge distillation while avoiding watermark inheritance.
Outcome: The proposed attacks eliminate inherited watermarks while maintaining knowledge transfer efficiency and low computational overhead.
Multi-View Incongruity Learning for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for multimodal sarcasm detection rely on spurious correlations, demonstrating poor generalizability beyond training environments.
Approach: They propose a method that integrates multimodal incongruities via contrastive learning for multimodal sarcasm detection by using three views to drive multi-view learning.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and shows that it is more generalizable than existing methods.
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs.
PDALN: Progressive Domain Adaptation over a Pre-trained Model for Low-Resource Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) are limited in labeled resources and domain shift.
Approach: They propose a progressive domain adaptation knowledge distillation approach to adapt high-resource domains to low-resourced target domains by employing three components to achieve superior domain adaptability.
Outcome: The proposed approach can adapt high-resource domains to low-resourced target domains even if they are diverse in terms and writing styles.
CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration - a Step towards Cross-lingual Transfer beyond Textual Scripts (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Naively assuming English as a source language may hinder cross-lingual transfer . despite recent advances in cross-linguistic research, most studies have restricted themselves to two major assumptions .
Approach: They propose to integrate Romanized transcription beyond textual scripts to capture contact between these languages . they propose to use a benchmark dataset to further encourage in-depth studies of language contact .
Outcome: The proposed method allows for enhanced cross-lingual representations and effective zero-shot cross-linguistic transfer.
Multifaceted Evaluation of Audio-Visual Capability for MLLMs: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Generalizability and Robustness (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multi-modal large language models have been used for processing and understanding information from diverse modalities.
Approach: They propose to evaluate the audio-visual capabilities of multi-modal large language models . they focus on effectiveness, efficiency, generalizability, and robustness .
Outcome: The proposed models exhibit strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization abilities . their success relies heavily on the vision modality, which impairs performance when visual input is corrupted or missing.
AMR-based Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have used dependency trees to extract relation between aspects and contexts, but there is a potential mismatch between the dependency tree and sentiment classification as a semantic task.
Approach: They propose to replace the syntactic dependency tree with a semantic structure to capture the relation between an aspect and a context.
Outcome: The proposed model improves ABSA on four public datasets with 1.13% improvement over baselines.
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences.
Approach: They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications.
MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detection (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with identifying and categorizing student errors in multimodal mathematical contexts.
Approach: They propose a new framework that decomposes error detection into three phases with specialized agents.
Outcome: The proposed framework shows higher accuracy in error step identification and 3% improvement in error categorization on real-world educational data.
Multi-Modal Generative Adversarial Network for Short Product Title Generation in Mobile E-Commerce (N19-2)

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Challenge: Existing methods for short product title generation only consider textual information from long titles . MM-GAN incorporates image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual info from original long titles.
Approach: They propose a multi-modal generative adversarial network for short product title generation in E-commerce . they incorporate image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual information from original long titles .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a large-scale E-commerce dataset.
Position: LLMs Can be Good Tutors in English Education (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent efforts to integrate large language models into English education lack adaptability to language learning.
Approach: They argue that large language models can be effective tutors in English education . they encourage interdisciplinary research to explore these roles, fostering innovation and risks .
Outcome: The proposed models can play three critical roles: 1) as data enhancers, 2) as task predictors, 3) as agents, enabling personalized and inclusive education.
Enhancing Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference by Soft Prompting with Multilingual Verbalizer (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to cross-lingual natural language inference lack annotated parallel corpora.
Approach: They propose a new prompt learning framework with the Multilingual Verbalizer for XNLI that uses a multilingual verbalizer to align the representations of original and augmented multilingual questions into a unified semantic space with consistency regularization.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods under few-shot and full-shot cross-lingual transfer settings.
Scene Graph Modification as Incremental Structure Expanding (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Scene graphs are used in cross-modal tasks such as image retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering.
Approach: They propose a model that iterates between nodes prediction and edges prediction . they frame scene graph modification as a graph expansion task by introducing incremental structure expanding .
Outcome: The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art model by large margins on four benchmarks.
Breaking the Reviewer: Assessing the Vulnerability of Large Language Models in Automated Peer Review Under Textual Adversarial Attacks (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are used to review academic papers, but are susceptible to textual adversarial attacks.
Approach: They evaluate the robustness of large language models as automated reviewers in the presence of adversarial attacks.
Outcome: The proposed model is robust against textual adversarial attacks, the authors argue . their findings highlight the importance of addressing adversarials to ensure integrity of scholarly communication.
GeoEdit: Geometric Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing training-based model editing methods struggle to incorporate new knowledge while preserving unrelated general knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework that uses geometric relationships to differentiate between neurons associated with new knowledge updates and those related to general knowledge perturbations.
Outcome: The proposed framework avoids updating neurons with directions approximately orthogonal to existing knowledge, thus preserving the model’s generalization ability.
Semi-supervised Relation Extraction via Incremental Meta Self-Training (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods suffer from the gradual drift problem, where noisy pseudo labels are incorporated during training.
Approach: They propose a method that uses pseudo labels to assess quality on unlabeled samples . they use a relation label generation network to learn from successful and failed attempts .
Outcome: Experimental results show the proposed method can improve on two public datasets.
Deep Research with Open-Domain Evaluation and Multi-Stage Guardrails for Safety (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing deep research frameworks lack adequate evaluation procedures and stage-specific protections.
Approach: They propose a framework with open-domain evaluation and a stage-wise safety benchmark to address this oversight.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves defense success rates by 16.53% while reducing over-refusal rates to approximately 6%.
Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Systems with Large Language Models: A Survey of Recent Advances, Resources, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are used to assist with driving decisions, but they face limitations in perception and computational demands.
Approach: They propose a survey of LLM-based multi-agent ADSs and their applications . they analyze agent-human interactions in scenarios where LLM agents engage with humans .
Outcome: The proposed approach reduces human intervention and improves safety and efficiency.
RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing selection methods rely on static, heuristic quality scores and are executed only once before training.
Approach: They propose a dynamic selection framework that integrates selection into every training step.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates selection into every training step.
Multimodal Relation Extraction with Cross-Modal Retrieval and Synthesis (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval-augmented approaches focus on modeling the retrieved textual knowledge but this may not be able to accurately identify complex relations.
Approach: They propose to retrieve multimodal relation extraction information based on object, sentence, and whole image . they propose to synthesize the object-level, image-level and sentence-level information .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on multimodal relation extraction.

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