Papers by Qi He

Neural Topic Modeling with Large Language Models in the Loop (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for code retrieval struggle to balance scalability and annotation quality.
Approach:	They propose a method that integrates functions called within the repository and information on third-party APIs to enhance the annotation context.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the annotation context by incorporating functions called within the repository and information on third-party API functionalities.

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Xiaohao Yang, He Zhao, Weijie Xu, Yuanyuan Qi, Jueqing Lu, Dinh Phung, Lan Du

VLA-Mark: A cross modal watermark for large vision-language alignment models (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in topic discovery, but their direct application to topic modeling suffers from issues such as incomplete topic coverage, misalignment of topics, and inefficiency.
Approach:	They propose a novel LLM-in-the-loop framework that integrates Large Language Models with Neural Topic Models (NTMs) global topics and document representations are learned through the NTM, while an LLM refines these topics using an Optimal Transport (OT)-based alignment objective.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves topic interpretability while preserving the efficiency of existing NTMs.

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Shuliang Liu, Zheng Qi, Jesse Jiaxi Xu, Yibo Yan, Junyan Zhang, He Geng, Aiwei Liu, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Yik-Cheung Tam, Xuming Hu

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing text watermarking methods disrupt visual-textual alignment, leaving semantic-critical concepts vulnerable.
Approach:	They propose a vision-aligned framework that embeds detectable watermarks into outputs . they combine localized patch affinity, global semantic coherence, contextual attention patterns .
Outcome:	The proposed framework shows lower PPL and higher BLEU than conventional methods with near-perfect detection (98.8% AUC).

Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals (2025.findings-acl)

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Wenxiang Chen, Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Boyang Hong, Jiazheng Zhang, Nijun Li, Tao Gui, Yun Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Sharp Nearby, Fuzzy Far Away: How Neural Language Models Use Context (P18-1)

Challenge:	Existing processes that reward for each step are one-directional and lack a mechanism to model the distance to the final target.
Approach:	They propose a process supervision model that evaluates the correctness of previous steps and the probability of future success.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing supervision models like ORM and PRM on reasoning tasks and improves solution re-design.

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Urvashi Khandelwal, He He, Peng Qi, Dan Jurafsky

Rethinking Smoothness for Fast and Adaptable Entity Alignment Decoding (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Recent studies have shed light on the information encoded by long-term memory networks.
Approach:	They propose to use a neural caching model to model the role of context in an LSTM LM . they analyze the increase in perplexity when prior context words are shuffled, replaced, or dropped .
Outcome:	The proposed model is highly sensitive to the order of words within the most recent sentence, but ignores word order in the long-range context, suggesting the distant past is modeled only as a rough semantic field or topic.

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Yuanyi Wang, Han Li, Haifeng Sun, Lei Zhang, Bo He, Wei Tang, Tianhao Yan, Qi Qi, Jingyu Wang

Veri-R1: Toward Precise and Faithful Claim Verification via Online Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs rely on entity and relation embeddings . Fig. 1 shows how to decode knowledge graph in under 6 seconds .
Approach:	They propose a framework that only utilizes entity embeddings to decode knowledge graphs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reconstructs KG representation by maximizing smoothness of entity embeddings.

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Qi He, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen, Bingxiang He, Yi R. Fung, Heng Ji

To Answer or Not to Answer (TAONA): A Robust Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering Approach (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to online claim verification rely on prompt engineering or pre-designed reasoning workflows.
Approach:	They propose an online reinforcement learning framework that enables an LLM to interact with a search engine and receive reward signals that explicitly shape its planning, retrieval, and reasoning behaviors.
Outcome:	Empirical results show that Veri-R1 improves joint accuracy by 30% and doubles evidence score, often surpassing larger-scale model counterparts.

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Yuchen Yan, Aakash Kolekar, Sahika Genc, Wenju Xu, Edward W Huang, Anirudh Srinivasan, Mukesh Jain, Qi He, Hanghang Tong

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing studies assume that generated answers integrate all relevant information from the textual graph.
Approach:	They propose a novel GraphRAG model that integrates all relevant information from the textual graph into the generated answer.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments validate TAONA’s superior performance for both A-side and B-side tasks.

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

UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interaction (2025.naacl-long)

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.

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Chaoyun Zhang, Liqun Li, Shilin He, Xu Zhang, Bo Qiao, Si Qin, Minghua Ma, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	UFO is a UI-Fcused agent designed to fulfill user requests tailored to Windows OS applications . it decomposes user requests using divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications.
Approach:	They propose a UI-Fcused Windows OS agent that decomposes user requests using a divide-and-conquer approach and incorporates a control interaction module tailored for Windows OS.
Outcome:	The proposed agent decomposes user requests using divide-and-conquer approach, enabling seamless navigation and addressing sub-tasks across multiple applications.

DI-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Dependency Inference with Testable Repositories at Scale (2025.findings-acl)

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Linghao Zhang, Junhao Wang, Shilin He, Chaoyun Zhang, Yu Kang, Bowen Li, Jiaheng Wen, Chengxing Xie, Maoquan Wang, Yufan Huang, Elsie Nallipogu, Qingwei Lin, Yingnong Dang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang

Granular Entity Mapper: Advancing Fine-grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing studies highlight that dependency-related issues cause over 40% of observed runtime errors on the generated repository.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale benchmark and evaluation framework specifically designed to assess LLMs’ capability on dependency inference.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves only a 48% execution pass rate on Python, indicating room for improvement.

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Ziqi Wang, Chen Zhu, Zhi Zheng, Xinhang Li, Tong Xu, Yongyi He, Qi Liu, Ying Yu, Enhong Chen

NOVER: Incentive Training for Language Models via Verifier-Free Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods for fine-grained content extraction are limited by long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and performance of object detectors.
Approach:	They propose a multi-granularity entity recognition module and a reranking module to integrate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the fine-grained content extraction task.

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Wei Liu, Siya Qi, Xinyu Wang, Chen Qian, Yali Du, Yulan He

A Multi-Format Transfer Learning Model for Event Argument Extraction via Variational Information Bottleneck (2022.coling-1)

Challenge:	Recent advances in reinforcement learning, such as DeepSeek R1-Zero, highlight the effectiveness of incentive training, but these methods rely on external verifiers, which limits their applicability to domains like mathematics and coding, where such verifier is readily available.
Approach:	They propose a general reinforcement learning framework that requires only standard supervised fine-tuning data with no need for an external verifier.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms the model of the same size distilled from large reasoning models such as DeepSeek R1 671B by 7.7%.

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Jie Zhou, Qi Zhang, Qin Chen, Qi Zhang, Liang He, Xuanjing Huang

AgentV-RL: Scaling Reward Modeling with Agentic Verifier (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Event argument extraction (EAE) aims to extract arguments with given roles from texts.
Approach:	They propose a multi-format transfer learning model with variational information bottleneck to learn from existing datasets.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on three benchmark datasets and obtains state-of-the-art performance on EAE.

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Jiazheng Zhang, Ziche Fu, Zhiheng Xi, Wenqing Jing, Mingxu Chai, Wei He, Guoqiang Zhang, Chenghao Fan, Chenxin An, Wenxiang Chen, Zhicheng Liu, Haojie Pan, Dingwei Zhu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

ResoFilter: Fine-grained Synthetic Data Filtering for Large Language Models through Data-Parameter Resonance Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to improve LLM reasoning are limited in complex domains and lack external grounding makes verifiers unreliable on computation-intensive tasks.
Approach:	They propose a framework that transforms reward modeling into a multi-turn, tool-augmented deliberative process.
Outcome:	The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art ORMs by 25.2% under parallel and sequential TTS.

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Zeao Tu, Xiangdi Meng, Yu He, Zihan Yao, Tianyu Qi, Jun Liu, Ming Li

Mitigating Tail Narrowing in LLM Self-Improvement via Socratic-Guided Sampling (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for enhancing large language models lack clear metrics for evaluating data characteristics.
Approach:	They propose a method that integrates models, data, and tasks to refine datasets.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves comparable results to full-scale fine-tuning using only half the data in mathematical tasks and exhibits strong generalization across different models and domains.

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Yiwen Ding, Zhiheng Xi, Wei He, Lizhuoyuan Lizhuoyuan, Yitao Zhai, Shi Xiaowei, Xunliang Cai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) generate solutions themselves and iteratively train on filtered, high-quality rationales, but performance reaches a ceiling after a few iterations.
Approach:	They propose a strategy to improve the efficiency of sampling heavy-tailed data by using Socratic-style guidance signals to help LLMs reasoning with complex queries.
Outcome:	The proposed approach is effective on difficult queries and on held-out tasks, while requiring human supervision.

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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang

ChatHLS: Towards Systematic Design Automation and Optimization for High-Level Synthesis (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents.
Approach:	They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction.
Outcome:	The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction.

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Runkai Li, Jia Xiong, Xiuyuan He, Jieru Zhao, Jiaqi Lv, Haowen Fang, Lei Qi, Xi Wang

Light-R1: Curriculum SFT, DPO and RL for Long COT from Scratch and Beyond (2025.acl-industry)

Challenge:	High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a hardware design tool that can be used to design hardware from C-like languages, but its widespread adoption is limited by strict coding constraints and design-specific optimizations.
Approach:	They propose a multi-agent HLS design framework that leverages specialized LLMs for automated debugging and directive tuning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-3-pro in debugging and speedups across various HLS kernels and neural network accelerators.

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Liang Wen, Yunke Cai, Fenrui Xiao, Xin He, Qi An, Zhenyu Duan, Yimin Du, Junchen Liu, Tanglifu Tanglifu, Xiaowei Lv, Haosheng Zou, Yongchao Deng, Shousheng Jia, Xiangzheng Zhang

Divide-Verify-Refine: Can LLMs Self-align with Complex Instructions? (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that opensource curriculum training is more effective when distinct datasets are available for different training stages.
Approach:	They propose an opensource suite for training long reasoning models using publicdata and models.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms DeepSeek-R1-DistillQwen-32B models in math reasoning.

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Xianren Zhang, Xianfeng Tang, Hui Liu, Zongyu Wu, Qi He, Dongwon Lee, Suhang Wang

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing research shows LLMs struggle with complex instructions involving multiple constraints.
Approach:	They propose a framework to divide complex instructions into single constraints and prepare appropriate tools to verify responses.
Outcome:	The proposed framework doubles Llama3.1-8B’s constraint adherence and triples Mistral-7B’ s performance.

Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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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

Harnessing Consistency for Robust Test-Time LLM Ensemble (2026.findings-eacl)

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.

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Zhichen Zeng, Qi Yu, Xiao Lin, Ruizhong Qiu, Xuying Ning, Tianxin Wei, Yuchen Yan, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing efforts to improve LLM ensemble quality have focused on model consistency, but failures are often due to heterogeneous tokenization schemes and varying model expertise.
Approach:	They propose a plug-and-play technique that harnesses model consistency for robust LLM ensemble.
Outcome:	The proposed technique improves ensemble performance and robustness against erroneous signals.

A Flexible Multi-Task Model for BERT Serving (2022.acl-short)

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Tianwen Wei, Jianwei Qi, Shenghuan He

UCS: Estimating Unseen Coverage for Improved In-Context Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	a proposed BERT-based multi-task framework is suitable for iterative and incremental development of the tasks.
Approach:	They propose an efficient BERT-based multi-task framework that is suitable for iterative and incremental development of the tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves 99.6% of performance of the full fine-tuning method while reducing up to two thirds of its overhead.

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Jiayi Xin, Xiang Li, Evan Qiang, Weiqing He, Tianqi Shang, Weijie J Su, Qi Long

Text Clustering

Challenge:	Existing selection methods prioritize heuristic notions of relevance or diversity and provide limited insight into the coverage of a demonstration set.
Approach:	They propose a training-free, subset-level coverage prior that is unrevealed by a model-consistent embedding and a Smoothed Good-Turing estimator to estimate the number of unrevelled clusters within a candidate subset.
Outcome:	Experiments on multiple intent-classification and reasoning benchmarks show that augmenting strong baselines with UCS improves ICL accuracy by 2-6% under the same selection budget.

Stealthy Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Benign Data Mirroring (2025.naacl-long)

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Honglin Mu, Han He, Yuxin Zhou, Yunlong Feng, Yang Xu, Libo Qin, Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Xudong Han, Qi Shi, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che

LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing black-box jailbreak methods often rely on model feedback . existing methods may be intercepted by content moderators during the search process .
Approach:	They propose a method that guides malicious prompt construction by local training a mirror model of the target black-box model through benign data distillation.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves a 92% attack success rate and 80% stealth rate on a subset of AdvBench.

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Yi Lu, Xin Zhou, Wei He, Jun Zhao, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Large language models struggle to process lengthy inputs due to limited length generalization and attention’s quadratic computational demands.
Approach:	They propose a training-free framework that allows each head to attend to important context chunks instead of allowing each head a full sentence .
Outcome:	The proposed framework unlocks multi-head attention's untapped potential by allowing each head to attend to important context chunks instead of the full sentence.

LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)

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Jun Zhao, Can Zu, Xu Hao, Yi Lu, Wei He, Yiwen Ding, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Question Answering

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in understanding language and processing text, but their cost prohibits their practical applications.
Approach:	They propose a multi-agent collaboration method that breaks down lengthy documents into smaller, more manageable chunks and organizes the member agents to read their assigned chunks.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves 16.42% and 1.63% accuracy gains over existing models on single-hop and multi-hop QA settings.

Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)

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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions?
Approach:	They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values.
Outcome:	The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure.

Your Vision-Language Model Itself Is a Strong Filter: Towards High-Quality Instruction Tuning with Data Selection (2024.findings-acl)

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Ruibo Chen, Yihan Wu, Lichang Chen, Guodong Liu, Qi He, Tianyi Xiong, Chenxi Liu, Junfeng Guo, Heng Huang

FacLens: Transferable Probe for Foreseeing Non-Factuality in Fact-Seeking Question Answering of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing data selection methods for instruction-following large language models rely on unreliable scores or use downstream tasks for selection.
Approach:	They propose a method that utilizes the VLM itself as a filter to select high-quality instruction-tuning data.
Outcome:	The proposed method can reach better results compared to full data settings with merely about 15% samples and can achieve superior performance against competitive baselines.

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Yanling Wang, Haoyang Li, Hao Zou, Jing Zhang, Xinlei He, Qi Li, Ke Xu

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Existing non-factuality detection methods require response generation, which incurs significant computational overhead.
Approach:	They propose a lightweight model called Factuality Lens which effectively probes hidden representations of fact-seeking questions for the NFP task.
Outcome:	The proposed model is able to probe hidden representations of fact-seeking questions and reduce development costs.

EnigmaToM: Improve LLMs’ Theory-of-Mind Reasoning Capabilities with Neural Knowledge Base of Entity States (2025.findings-acl)

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Hainiu Xu, Siya Qi, Jiazheng Li, Yuxiang Zhou, Jinhua Du, Caroline Catmur, Yulan He

Knowledge Representation

Challenge:	Existing ToM reasoning methods rely excessively on off-the-shelf LLMs, reducing their efficiency and limiting their applicability to high-order ToM.
Approach:	They propose a neuro-symbolic framework that integrates a Neural Knowledge Base of Entity States and knowledge injection to enhance ToM reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves ToM reasoning on ToMi, HiToM, and FANToM benchmarks.

UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang

Evaluating LLMs’ Assessment of Mixed-Context Hallucination Through the Lens of Summarization (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information.
Approach:	They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots.

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Siya Qi, Rui Cao, Yulan He, Zheng Yuan

Text Generation

Challenge:	Large language models generate coherent text and follow instructions across diverse tasks, but a critical challenge in scaling LLM applications is hallucination, where the generated content lacks factual grounding or deviates from the intended discourse context.
Approach:	They use summarization as a representative task to evaluate LLMs' capability in detecting mixed-context hallucinations, specifically distinguishing between factual and non-factual hallucinos.
Outcome:	The proposed model distinguishes between factual and non-factual hallucinations, and their performance bottlenecks.

Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Haotan Guo, Jianfei He, Jiayuan Ma, Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Haiyang Zhang, Qi Chen, Wei Wang, Zijing Shi, Tao Shen, Ling Chen

A Global Past-Future Early Exit Method for Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR) is a problem in content moderation in China.
Approach:	They organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile PCR-ToxiCN, a dataset of 500 phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves only an F1-score and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower.

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Kaiyuan Liao, Yi Zhang, Xuancheng Ren, Qi Su, Xu Sun, Bin He

Graph Ensemble Learning over Multiple Dependency Trees for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to accelerate inference speed of pre-trained language models are limited to local representations of exit layer . current models are associated with large memory requirement and high computational cost, which slow down inference and further encumber the application of PLMs.
Approach:	They propose a method to exit early without passing through all inference layers . they take into consideration all the linguistic information embedded in the past layers a global perspective .
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing methods by a large margin . it uses linguistic information embedded in the past layers and future features . the proposed method is scalable and cost-effective .

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Xiaochen Hou, Peng Qi, Guangtao Wang, Rex Ying, Jing Huang, Xiaodong He, Bowen Zhou

Sentiment Analysis

Challenge:	Recent work on aspect-level sentiment classification has shown that syntactic information is effective in capturing long-range syntaktic relations that are obscure from the surface form.
Approach:	They propose a graph ensemble technique that integrates syntactic structures with GNNs to better leverage syntaktic information in the face of parsing errors.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms models with single dependency tree and beats other models without adding model parameters.

Beyond the Tip of Efficiency: Uncovering the Submerged Threats of Jailbreak Attacks in Small Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Sibo Yi, Tianshuo Cong, Xinlei He, Qi Li, Jiaxing Song

CA-GAR: Context-Aware Alignment of LLM Generation for Document Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Small language models (SLMs) have become increasingly prominent in the deployment on edge devices due to their high efficiency and low computational cost.
Approach:	They evaluate the security performance of 13 state-of-the-art small language models under various jailbreak attacks.
Outcome:	The proposed methods demonstrate that SLMs are quite susceptible to jailbreak attacks and some are even vulnerable to harmful prompts.

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Heng Yu, Junfeng Kang, Rui Li, Qi Liu, Liyang He, Zhenya Huang, Shuanghong Shen, Junyu Lu

A General Framework to Enhance Fine-tuning-based LLM Unlearning (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent techniques such as Generation-Augmented Retrieval (GAR) and Generative Document Retrieleval (GDR) leverage LLMs to enhance retrieval performance but face key challenges: GAR’s generated content may not always align with the target document corpus, while GDR limits the generative capacity of LLM.
Approach:	They propose a Context-Aware Generation-Augmented Retrieval approach which integrates corpus information into their generation process.
Outcome:	Experimental results show that CA-GAR outperforms existing methods on seven tasks and four non-English languages.

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Jie Ren, Zhenwei Dai, Xianfeng Tang, Hui Liu, Jingying Zeng, Zhen Li, Rahul Goutam, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Qi He, Hui Liu

Can LLM Agents Simulate Multi-Turn Human Behavior? Evidence from Real Online Customer Behavior Data (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to remove copyrighted and privacy-sensitive data from Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to remove specific data from LLMs without requiring full retraining.
Approach:	They propose a general framework that enhances the utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing target data and suppressing related generations.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves the unlearning and utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing the target data and suppressing related generations.

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Yuxuan Lu, Jing Huang, Yan Han, Bingsheng Yao, Sisong Bei, Yaochen Xie, Yisi Sang, Qi He, Dakuo Wang

ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent research shows that LLM Agents can generate “believable” human behaviors via prompt-only methods, leaving open questions of whether they can accurately generate step-by-step actions in multi-turn interaction tasks.
Approach:	They propose to use shopping data to evaluate LLMs' ability to accurately generate step-by-step actions in a multi-turn interaction task.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves 17.26% action generation accuracy and 33.86% F1 score on final purchase prediction, representing improvements of 5.4% and 13.85% over baselines.

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Zhucong Li, Powei Chang, Jin Xiao, Zhijian Zhou, Qianyu He, Jiaqing Liang, Fenglei Cao, Xu Yinghui, Yuan Qi

Challenge:	LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints.
Approach:	They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration.

DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)

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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang

Challenge:	Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability.
Approach:	They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets.

SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains (2025.naacl-long)

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Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering abilities of large language models (LLMs) however, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts and limited access to domain-specific data.
Approach:	They propose a method that equips large language models with joint capabilities of question answering and question generation for domain adaptation.
Outcome:	Experiments on 11 datasets across three different domains verify the efficacy of SimRAG over baselines by 1.2%–8.6%.

OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems (2024.acl-long)

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Chaoqun He, Renjie Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Shengding Hu, Zhen Thai, Junhao Shen, Jinyi Hu, Xu Han, Yujie Huang, Yuxiang Zhang, Jie Liu, Lei Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

AJ-Bench: Benchmarking Agent-as-a-Judge for Environment-Aware Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models have exceeded general human capabilities in various tasks.
Approach:	They present an Olympiad-level bilingual multimodal scientific benchmark featuring 8,476 problems from Olympiad level mathematics and physics competitions.
Outcome:	The best performing model, GPT-4V, attains an average score of 17.97% on OlympiadBench, with a mere 10.74% in physics, highlighting the benchmark rigor and the intricacy of physical reasoning.

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Wentao Shi, Yu Wang, Yuyang Zhao, Yuxin Chen, Fuli Feng, Xueyuan Hao, Xi Su, Qi GU, Hui Su, Xunliang Cai, Xiangnan He

Challenge:	Existing approaches to verify agent behaviors in complex environments rely on rule-based verifiers or LLM-as-a-Judge models.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to evaluate Agent-as-a-Judge across three domains . the benchmark covers search, data systems, and graphical user interfaces - with 155 tasks and 516 trajectories .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in search, data systems, and GUI domains while revealing open challenges in agent-based verification.

STReasoner: Empowering LLMs for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Time Series via Spatial-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Juntong Ni, Shiyu Wang, Qi He, Ming Jin, Wei Jin

Pretrain-KGE: Learning Knowledge Representation from Pretrained Language Models (2020.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing models focus on predictive accuracy over reasoning, a gap exists . time series data are ubiquitous in real-world systems and exhibit complex spatio-temporal structures.
Approach:	They propose a time series reasoning model that integrates time series, graph structure, and text for explicit reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed model achieves average accuracy gains between 17% and 135% at 0.004x the cost of proprietary models and generalizes robustly to real-world data.

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Zhiyuan Zhang, Xiaoqian Liu, Yi Zhang, Qi Su, Xu Sun, Bin He

Orca: A Few-shot Benchmark for Chinese Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing knowledge graph embedding models suffer from limited knowledge representation due to sparse and noisy dataset annotations.
Approach:	They propose to use pretrained language models to enhance knowledge representation by leveraging world knowledge from pretrained models.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework can improve results over existing models.

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Nuo Chen, Hongguang Li, Junqing He, Yinan Bao, Xinshi Lin, Qi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Baoyuan Wang, Jia Li

Neural Network Surgery: Injecting Data Patterns into Pre-trained Models with Minimal Instance-wise Side Effects (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks for conversational machine reading comprehension are inconsistent with real scenarios.
Approach:	They propose to use a Chinese CMRC benchmark to evaluate model's generalization ability towards diverse domains by using zero-shot/few-shot settings.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks are based on 831 hot-topic driven conversations with 4,742 turns and cover 33 domains.

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Zhiyuan Zhang, Xuancheng Ren, Qi Su, Xu Sun, Bin He

Learning with Less: Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models via Unlabeled Data (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Existing neural network tuning methods cause instance-wise side effects . et al., 2018: a new approach to perform neural network surgery .
Approach:	They propose to perform neural network surgery by only changing 10-5 parameters . they propose to use a dynamic selecting method to achieve the best overall performance .
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves the best overall performance and induces fewer instance-wise side effects by changing only 10-5 of the parameters.

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Juanhui Li, Sreyashi Nag, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Limeng Cui, Hansu Gu, Suhang Wang, Qi He, Jiliang Tang

SUA: Stealthy Multimodal Large Language Model Unlearning Attack (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior language understanding abilities in many real-world NLP applications.
Approach:	They propose a learning-based sample selection method that incorporates signals from both teacher and student to enhance model performance.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves model performance across datasets with higher data efficiency.

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Xianren Zhang, Hui Liu, Delvin Ce Zhang, Xianfeng Tang, Qi He, Dongwon Lee, Suhang Wang

Pointwise Mutual Information as a Performance Gauge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) trained on massive data may memorize sensitive personal information and photos, posing privacy and copyright concerns.
Approach:	They propose a framework that learns a universal noise pattern to recover unlearned information from MLLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework learns a universal noise pattern and can reveal unlearned content when applied to images.

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Tianyu Liu, Jirui Qi, Paul He, Arianna Bisazza, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ryan Cotterell

Metric-guided Distillation: Distilling Knowledge from the Metric to Ranker and Retriever for Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to improve language models' performance do not exploit this phenomenon .
Approach:	They propose to use contextual information to select and construct prompts that improve model performance.
Outcome:	The proposed methods show that the mutual information between a context and a question is an effective gauge for language model performance.

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Xingwei He, Yeyun Gong, A-Long Jin, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Sm Yiu, Nan Duan

SimRPD: Optimizing Recruitment Proactive Dialogue Agents through Simulator-Based Data Evaluation and Selection (2026.acl-industry)

Challenge:	Existing work on commonsense generation requires models to have relational reasoning and compositional generalization capabilities.
Approach:	They propose a metric distillation rule to distill knowledge from a standard metric to a ranker and transfer it to re-ranking a retriever.
Outcome:	The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA.

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Zhiyong Cao, Dunqiang Liu, Qi Dai, Haojun Xu, Huai Yuen Khor, Hao Wang, Huan He, Yafei Liu, Ke Ma, Ruqian Shi, Sicheng Zhou, Sijia Yao

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	High-quality data in training proactive dialogue agents is scarce, despite fine-tuning and reinforcement learning . a recent study has shown that the effectiveness of supervised fine-touring is limited by the lack of high-quality, domain-specific training data.
Approach:	They propose a framework for training recruitment proactive dialogue agents using a high-fidelity user simulator and a multi-dimensional evaluation framework based on Chain-of-Intention.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing simulator-based data selection strategies in a real-world recruitment scenario.

Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)

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Yu Zou, Yan Chen, Lida He, Qi Zhou, Xiaorui Zhou, Aixi Zhong, Yi Wang, Wei Li, Qingyu Wang, Jiatao Li, Wei Gong, Jialei Zeng, Jingmei Zhao, Ke Jiang, Qing Li

EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge.
Approach:	They propose a framework that redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics and uses snippets to enrich hierarchical lineage.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based benchmarks on FinTierQA Gold.

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Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song

A Survey on Proactive Defense Strategies Against Misinformation in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges .
Approach:	They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset .

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Shuliang Liu, Hongyi Liu, Aiwei Liu, Duan Bingchen, Zheng Qi, Yibo Yan, He Geng, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Xuming Hu

UniRAG: Unified Query Understanding Method for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for detection of misinformation generated by large language models fail to mitigate societal risks . authors propose a paradigm shift from passive detection to anticipatory mitigation strategies . existing defenses remain reactionary in an era demanding proactive defense, authors say .
Approach:	They propose a three-pillar approach to prevent misinformation by fortifying integrity of training data and inference reliability by embedding self-corrective mechanisms during reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves existing methods in misinformation prevention by 63% . it demonstrates that existing methods exhibit false negative rates against misinformation .

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Rui Li, Liyang He, Qi Liu, Zheng Zhang, Heng Yu, Yuyang Ye, Linbo Zhu, Yu Su

CoRAG: Enhancing Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation through a Cooperative Retriever Architecture (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing query augmentation methods face knowledge update lag and hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) Existing methods face two key challenges: (1) separation of query augmented and encoding tasks, which hinders information sharing and introduces cumulative errors; (2) difficulty of selecting optimal augmentation strategy for different scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a unified framework for query understanding in RAG that integrates internal and external knowledge to enhance query augmentation and encoding tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms traditional query augmentation methods in five knowledge-intensive benchmark tasks in both closed and open domain question answering.

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Zaiyi Zheng, Song Wang, Zihan Chen, Yaochen Zhu, Yinhan He, Liangjie Hong, Qi Guo, Jundong Li

Learning to Instruct: Fine-Tuning a Task-Aware Instruction Optimizer for Black-Box LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base, which often miss relevant information located further away from a global view.
Approach:	Hybrid-RAG combines textual documents and graph-structured relational information for RAG . existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base .
Outcome:	Hybrid-RAG combines textual documents and graph-structured relational information . existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base .

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Yunzhe Qi, Jinjin Tian, Tianci Liu, Ruirui Li, Tianxin Wei, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jingrui He

Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Learning to Instruct is a new paradigm for black-box LLMs with inaccessible internal states.
Approach:	They propose a new paradigm that formulates instruction optimization as an LLM fine-tuning objective for a white-box “instruction engineer” LLM.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in performance and efficiency.

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Wei He, Shichun Liu, Jun Zhao, Yiwen Ding, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods that rely on limited demos and out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries fail when faced with out- of-demotion queries.
Approach:	They propose a query-aware prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability of large language models by query-based demo generation.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the OOD setting and two public math benchmarks.

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Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Yuze He, Ji Qi, Lei Hou, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong, Juanzi Li

Can Large Language Models Adequately Perform Symbolic Reasoning Over Time Series? (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies to build long context language models focus on context extension and continual training on long text.
Approach:	They propose a recipe for instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length . they adopt packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-uning .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by 30% while maintaining proficiency in handling short, generic tasks.

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Zewen Liu, Juntong Ni, Xianfeng Tang, Max SY Lau, Qi He, Wenpeng Yin, Wei Jin

A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) show strong performance in complex reasoning tasks, but their ability to extract symbolic laws from time series data remains underexplored.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark to assess symbolic reasoning over real-world time series across three tasks: multivariate symbolic regression, Boolean network inference, and causal discovery.
Outcome:	The proposed framework integrates LLMs with genetic programming to form a closed-loop symbolic reasoning system.

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Kedi Chen, Dezhao Ruan, Yuhao Dan, Yaoting Wang, Siyu Yan, Xuecheng Wu, Yinqi Zhang, Qin Chen, Jie Zhou, Liang He, Biqing Qi, Linyang Li, Qipeng Guo, Xiaoming Shi, Wei Zhang

AutoVecCoder: Teaching LLMs to Generate Explicitly Vectorized Code (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Inductive reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs).
Approach:	They propose a survey of inductive reasoning for large language models . they categorize methods into three main areas: post-training enhancement, test-time exploration, and data augmentation.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves inductive reasoning in large language models.

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ShangZhan Li, Xinyu Yin, Xuanyu Jin, Ye He, Yuxin Zhou, Yuxuan Li, Xu Han, Wanxiang Che, Qi Shi, Ting Liu, Maosong Sun

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Current development practices face a dichotomy between automation and performance.
Approach:	They propose a framework to empower LLMs with the capability of automated explicit vectorization.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SSE and AVX subsets of SimdBench.

Enhancing Generalization in Natural Language Inference by Syntax (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Qi He, Han Wang, Yue Zhang

MicroEdit: Neuron-level Knowledge Disentanglement and Localization in Lifelong Model Editing (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Pre-trained language models such as BERT have the state-of-the-art performance on natural language inference (NLI).
Approach:	They propose to use dependency trees to enhance generalization of BERT in a natural language inference task by leveraging on a graph convolutional network to represent a syntax-based matching graph with heterogeneous matching patterns.
Outcome:	The proposed method makes BERT more robust on syntactic changes.

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Shiqi Wang, Qi Wang, Runliang Niu, He Kong, Yi Chang

Challenge:	Existing methods for enhancing large language models are designed for single or limited edits, lacking the capacity to support long-term, multi-round knowledge updates.
Approach:	They propose a neuron-level editing method that performs minimal interventions within large language models (LLMs) by leveraging a sparse autoencoder, MicroEdit disentangles knowledge representations and activates only a minimal set of necessary neurons for precise parameter updates.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments show that MicroEdit outperforms prior methods and robustly handles lifelong knowledge editing across QA and Hallucination settings on LLaM and Mistral.

RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL (2022.emnlp-main)

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Jiexing Qi, Jingyao Tang, Ziwei He, Xiangpeng Wan, Yu Cheng, Chenghu Zhou, Xinbing Wang, Quanshi Zhang, Zhouhan Lin

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Experimental results show RASAT can leverage a variety of relational structures while inheriting the pretrained parameters from the T5 model.
Approach:	They propose a Transformer seq2seq architecture augmented with relation-aware self-attention that leverages relational structures while inheriting pretrained parameters from the T5 model.
Outcome:	The proposed model can leverage relational structures while inheriting pretrained parameters from the T5 model effectively.

Masked Conditional Random Fields for Sequence Labeling (2021.naacl-main)

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Tianwen Wei, Jianwei Qi, Shenghuan He, Songtao Sun

Reasoning with Graphs: Structuring Implicit Knowledge to Enhance LLMs Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Conditional Random Fields (CRF) based neural models are among the most performant for sequence labeling problems, but they can sometimes generate illegal sequences of tags.
Approach:	They propose a conditional random field-based model that imposes restrictions on candidate paths during both training and decoding phases.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves on existing CRF models with near zero additional cost.

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Haoyu Han, Yaochen Xie, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Sreyashi Nag, William Headden, Yang Li, Chen Luo, Shuiwang Ji, Qi He, Jiliang Tang

Few-shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling with Retrieved Examples (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, however, they still face challenges in reasoning tasks that require understanding and inferring relationships between distinct pieces of information within text sequences.
Approach:	They propose to construct explicit graphs from context and leverage them to enhance LLM reasoning performance on reasoning tasks.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves both logical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks.

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Dian Yu, Luheng He, Yuan Zhang, Xinya Du, Panupong Pasupat, Qi Li

Distill Visual Chart Reasoning Ability from LLMs to MLLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods for few-shot learning are based on labeled examples, but they are non-trivial . few-sshot learning is challenging due to the imbalance in the amount of data between the source and target domains.
Approach:	They propose retrieval-based methods for intent classification and slot filling tasks . they use a batch-softmax objective to learn similar contextualized representations for spans .
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms previous systems on the CLINC and SNIPS benchmarks.

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Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Yiwen Ding, Zifei Shan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

AdvancedIF: Rubric-Based Benchmarking and Reinforcement Learning for Advancing LLM Instruction Following (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	a new method for generating chart annotations is proposed to improve visual reasoning in multimodal large language models.
Approach:	They propose a code-as-intermediary translation method for distilling visual reasoning abilities from LLMs to MLLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed method is cost-effective, efficient and scalable.

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Yun He, Wenzhe Li, Hejia Zhang, Songlin Li, Karishma Mandyam, Sopan Khosla, Yuanhao Xiong, Nanshu Wang, Xiaoliang Peng, Beibin Li, Shengjie Bi, Shishir G Patil, Qi Qi, Shengyu Feng, Julian Katz-Samuels, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Hunter Lang, Yue Yu, Yundi Qian, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Licheng Yu, Amine Benhalloum, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Manaal Faruqui

Graph-Assisted Large Language Models: A Perspective on Mitigating Intrinsic Limitations (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF) remains a significant challenge.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark that features over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs’ ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves instruction-following abilities of large language models, achieving a 6.7% gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks.

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Haitong Luo, Fali Wang, Weiyao Zhang, Xianren Zhang, Zhiwei Zhang, Tianxiang Zhao, Minhua Lin, Jiahao Zhang, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Qi He, Suhang Wang, Xuying Meng, Yujun Zhang

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Large language models exhibit intrinsic limitations such as knowledge cutoff, single-threaded reasoning that hinders finer-grained branch and aggregation, and rigid collaboration mechanisms that struggle to coordinate specialized capabilities.
Approach:	They propose a taxonomy spanning Graph-Assisted Knowledge Augmentation, Graph Assisted Reasoning and Planning, and Graphed LLM Collaboration.
Outcome:	The proposed models show that graphs can augment and correct LLMs and support dynamic coordination among experts and agents in collaborative settings.

Evaluating and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models: Can They Still See Removed Objects? (2025.naacl-long)

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Yixiao He, Haifeng Sun, Pengfei Ren, Jingyu Wang, Huazheng Wang, Qi Qi, Zirui Zhuang, Jing Wang

QA-Driven Zero-shot Slot Filling with Weak Supervision Pretraining (2021.acl-short)

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.

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Xinya Du, Luheng He, Qi Li, Dian Yu, Panupong Pasupat, Yuan Zhang

ModularMoE: Fast LLM Customization with Parameter-Sharing Mixture-of-Experts for Low-Resource Settings (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods to predict slots and their values do not encode enough semantic information, limiting the models’ zero-shot capability.
Approach:	They propose a QA-driven slot filling model which extracts slot-filler spans from utterances with a span-based QA model.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baselines by over 5% on the SNIPS benchmark.

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Jiaxing Liu, Qi Qi, Haifeng Sun, Dunjun Li, Zirui Zhuang, Bo He, Xiang Yang, Cong Liu, Jianxin Liao, Jingyu Wang