Papers by Qi Zhang
Enhancing Hierarchical Text Classification through Knowledge Graph Integration (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to hierarchical text classification are limited by lack of domain knowledge, which leads to mistakes in a variety of situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-enabled Hierarchical Text Classification model which integrates knowledge graphs into HTC to address the knowledge limitations of traditional methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates knowledge graphs into the hierarchical text classification process, addressing the knowledge limitations of traditional methods. |
Snapshot-Guided Domain Adaptation for ELECTRA (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing domain-specific knowledge of domain-related tasks is lacking in pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-adaptation method which can dynamically select domain-specific tokens and guide the discriminator to emphasize them, without introducing new training parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture domain-specific knowledge of domain-related tasks without introducing new training parameters. |
Optimizing Code Retrieval: High-Quality and Scalable Dataset Annotation through Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Multiview Clickbait Detection via Jointly Modeling Subjective and Objective Preference (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing clickbait detection models rely on analyzing the objective semantics of posts or correlating posts with article content only, but fail to identify and exploit the manipulation intention of clickbaiting from a user’s subjective perspective. |
| Approach: | They propose a multiview clickbait detection model to model subjective and objective preferences simultaneously to capture clickbaiting from a user's subjective perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two real-world datasets and shows that it integrates subjective and objective preferences simultaneously. |
Searching for an Effective Defender: Benchmarking Defense against Adversarial Word Substitution (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zongyi Li, Jianhan Xu, Jiehang Zeng, Linyang Li, Xiaoqing Zheng, Qi Zhang, Kai-Wei Chang, Cho-Jui Hsieh
| Challenge: | Existing methods to defend against adversarial word-substitution attacks have not been evaluated or compared in a systematic manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare different defense methods under representative adversarial attacks . they propose a method that improves the robustness of neural text classifiers against such attacks a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves robustness of neural text classifiers against such attacks by a significant margin. |
Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation, but Text-to-SQL datasets often include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. |
| Approach: | They found that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is crucial for unlocking DPO's potential by augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent and significant performance improvements on Text-to-SQL datasets. |
Muse: Towards Reproducible Long-Form Song Generation with Fine-Grained Style Control (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Changhao Jiang, Jiahao Chen, Zhenghao Xiang, Zhixiong Yang, Hanchen Wang, Jiabao Zhuang, Xinmeng Che, Jiajun Sun, Hui Li, Yifei Cao, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Junjie Ye, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent commercial systems such as Suno demonstrate strong capabilities in long-form song generation, but academic research remains non-reproducible due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for long-form song generation with fine-grained style conditioning that includes a licensed synthetic dataset and a song generation model, Muse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves competitive performance on phoneme error rate, text–music style similarity, and audio aesthetic quality while enabling controllable segment-level generation across different musical structures. |
GLoCIM: Global-view Long Chain Interest Modeling for news recommendation (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to extract local subgraph information from click graphs have hindered collaboratively utilizing global click graph information. |
| Approach: | They propose a global-view long chain interests model that models a click graph with neighbor interest to enhance news recommendation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline methods on two real-world datasets. |
VLA-Mark: A cross modal watermark for large vision-language alignment models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Shuliang Liu, Zheng Qi, Jesse Jiaxi Xu, Yibo Yan, Junyan Zhang, He Geng, Aiwei Liu, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Yik-Cheung Tam, Xuming Hu
| 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). |
Math Word Problem Solving with Explicit Numerical Values (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for solving math word problems ignore numerical values in solving problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerically-based approach that explicitly incorporates numerical values into a sequence-to-tree network and uses a mathematical properties prediction mechanism to capture category and comparison information of numerals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on the Math23K and APE datasets. |
Capability Salience Vector: Fine-grained Alignment of Loss and Capabilities for Downstream Task Scaling Law (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiming Ge, Shuhao Xing, Songyang Gao, Yunhua Zhou, Yicheng Zou, Songyang Zhang, Zhi Chen, Hang Yan, Qi Zhang, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but this achievement comes with the trade-off of significant computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a scaling law that decomposes the overall validation loss and assigns different importance weights to tokens to assess a specific meta-capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict the loss trending of models across different levels of computation without a gap between validation loss and model's downstream capabilities. |
Sentence-State LSTM for Text Representation (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | LSTMs have been shown to suffer from various limitations due to their sequential nature. |
| Approach: | They propose to model hidden states of all words simultaneously at each recurrent step rather than one word at a time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has strong representation power, giving competitive performances compared to stacked BiLSTM models with similar parameter numbers. |
Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenxiang Chen, Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Boyang Hong, Jiazheng Zhang, Nijun Li, Tao Gui, Yun Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| 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. |
RE-Matching: A Fine-Grained Semantic Matching Method for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jun Zhao, WenYu Zhan, Xin Zhao, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Zhongyu Wei, Junzhe Wang, Minlong Peng, Mingming Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot relation extraction lack explicit modeling of matching pattern . et al. (2018) show that our method achieves higher matching accuracy and faster inference speed . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained semantic matching method tailored for zero-shot relation extraction . they decompose sentence-level similarity score into entity matching score and context matching score . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher matching accuracy and faster inference speed than state-of-the-art methods. |
Patton: Language Model Pretraining on Text-Rich Networks (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for text-rich networks do not take inter-document structure into account. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretraining framework for a text-rich network using a masked language model and a masking node prediction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on four tasks in academic and e-commerce domains. |
UnifiedMLLM: Enabling Unified Representation for Multi-modal Multi-tasks With Large Language Model (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaowei Li, Wei Wang, YiQing Cai, Qi Xu, Pengyu Wang, Dong Zhang, Hang Song, Botian Jiang, Zhida Huang, Tao Wang
| Challenge: | Representative models like LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 have great capabilities in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model to represent various multi-modal tasks using a single representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in a variety of tasks while maintaining generality and scalability. |
FinToolSyn: A forward synthesis Framework for Financial Tool-Use Dialogue Data with Dynamic Tool Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Caishuang Huang, Yang Qiao, Rongyu Zhang, Junjie Ye, Pu Lu, null Wuwenxi, Meng Zhou, Xiku Du, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing data synthesis methods rely on static tools to generate queries . this approach fails to capture the implicit, event-driven nature of real-world needs . |
| Approach: | They propose a forward synthesis framework to generate high-quality financial dialogues . they construct a repository of 43,066 tools and synthesize over 148k dialogue instances . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that models trained on FinToolSyn achieve a 21.06% improvement . the framework is designed to generate high-quality financial dialogues . |
Keyphrase Generation with Fine-Grained Evaluation-Guided Reinforcement Learning (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing KG evaluation metrics are only aware of the exact correctness of predictions on phrase-level and ignore semantic similarities between similar predictions and targets, which inhibits the model from learning deep linguistic patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained evaluation metric to improve the previous KG framework . the evaluation metrics are only aware of the exact correctness of predictions on phrase-level . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing frameworks among all evaluation scores. |
SGA-MCTS: Decoupling Planning from Execution via Training-Free Atomic Experience Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new framework casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval, but high latency of inference-time search and supervised fine-tuning are limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval . they leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore the solution space . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that SGA-MCTS can match the performance of SOTA systems without task-specific fine-tuning. |
CoCA: Fusing Position Embedding with Collinear Constrained Attention in Transformers for Long Context Window Extending (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that use self-attention and position embedding have anomalous behavior that hinder long context window extrapolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a collinear constraint between Q and K to integrate RoPE and self-attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates self-attention and position embedding into LLMs without fine-tuning. |
MARS2: Scaling Multi-Agent Tree Search via Reinforcement Learning for Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Pengfei Li, Shijie Wang, Fangyuan Li, Yikun Fu, Kaifeng Liu, Kaiyan Zhang, Dazhi Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning are decoupled from structured search due to limited trajectory diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified RL framework that integrates multiple agents within a shared tree-structured search environment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MARS2 improves performance across diverse model combinations and training settings. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
Velocitune: A Velocity-based Dynamic Domain Reweighting Method for Continual Pre-training (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimise pretraining performance have not addressed the complexities of domain-adaptive continual pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically assesses learning velocity and adjusts data proportions accordingly, favouring slower learning domains while de-emphasising faster learning ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance gains in math and code reasoning tasks and command-line generation benchmarks. |
ReviewRL: Towards Automated Scientific Review with RL (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Sihang Zeng, Kai Tian, Kaiyan Zhang, Yuru Wang, Junqi Gao, Runze Liu, Sa Yang, Jingxuan Li, Xinwei Long, Jiaheng Ma, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing automated review systems struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on ICLR 2025 papers. |
A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have leapt from static chatbots to versatile agents that tackle complex tasks such as science experiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a plan-and-execute framework and propose 'EAGLET' to enhance the executor agent's planning abilities without human effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three long-horizon tasks and reduces training costs by 8 compared to baselines. |
Rethinking Smoothness for Fast and Adaptable Entity Alignment Decoding (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
A Skeleton-Based Model for Promoting Coherence Among Sentences in Narrative Story Generation (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for narrative story generation lack semantic dependency among sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a skeleton-based model that generates the most critical phrases and expands them to a complete sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate significantly more coherent stories according to human evaluation and automatic evaluation. |
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu, Jixuan Huang, Honglin Guo, Baodai Huang, Tinggang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Chenyu Liu, Jiajun Sun, Jiazheng Zhang, Dingwei Zhu, Xin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Yuming Yang, Junjie Ye, Minghe Gao, Dongrui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Guohao Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
Aegis:An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering (2024.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Aegis is an advanced LLM-based multi-agent for intelligent functional safety engineering that can perform all phases of a vehicle's lifecycle, including design, development, production, operation, and decommissioning. |
| Approach: | They introduce Aegis: An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution can perform Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), document Functional Safety Requirements (FSR), and plan test cases for Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems. |
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Yan Liu, Songyang Gao, Wei Shen, Limao Xiong, Yuhao Zhou, Xiao Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Shiliang Pu, Jiang Zhu, Rui Zheng, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting. |
Argue with Me Tersely: Towards Sentence-Level Counter-Argument Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiayu Lin, Rong Ye, Meng Han, Qi Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xinyu Zhang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work describes paragraph-level counter-argument generation task as paragraph-based . however, sentence-level generation can be quite different due to its unique constraints and brevity-focused challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark framework for sentence-level counter-argument generation . they use an annotated debate forum dataset to generate high-quality counter-argments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and evaluator are competitive in counter-argument generation tasks. |
Decorrelate Irrelevant, Purify Relevant: Overcome Textual Spurious Correlations from a Feature Perspective (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to debiase samples with biased features obstructs the model in learning from non-biased parts of the samples. |
| Approach: | They propose to eliminate spurious correlations in a fine-grained manner from a feature space perspective by using Random Fourier Features and weighted re-sampling to decorrelate dependencies between features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates spurious correlations in a fine-grained manner from a feature space perspective. |
Text Fluoroscopy: Detecting LLM-Generated Text through Intrinsic Features (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing because of their excellent performance on various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box method with better generalizability for detecting LLM-generated text by mining the intrinsic features of the text to be detected. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 7.36% and 2.84% improvement in detection performance compared to baselines in detecting texts from different domains generated by GPT-4 and Claude3 respectively. |
Causal Intervention Improves Implicit Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing neural models struggle with implicit sentiment analysis because they latch onto spurious correlations, resulting in poor generalization and robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a CausaL intervention model for implicit sEntiment ANalysis using instrumental variable to eliminate confounding causal effects and extract the pure causal effect between sentence and sentiment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts the pure causal effect between sentence and sentiment using instrumental variable. |
TextMixer: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Privacy-Preserving Inference (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often deployed as cloud services, enabling users to upload textual data and perform inference remotely. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy-preserving inference framework called MixPi which aims to obfuscate a user's private input by mixing it with multiple other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing privacy-preserving methods on token and sentence classification tasks. |
TriEx: A Game-based Tri-View Framework for Explaining Internal Reasoning in Multi-Agent LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing explainability methods for large language models have been limited in capturing interaction-dependent belief dynamics and multi-agent reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a tri-view explainability framework that instruments sequential decision making with aligned artifacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables analysis of explanation faithfulness, belief dynamics, and evaluator reliability, revealing systematic mismatches between what agents say, what they believe, and what they do. |
PubSE: A Hierarchical Model for Publication Extraction from Academic Homepages (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using a hierarchical model, we aim to extract all the publication strings from a researcher's homepage. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end hierarchical model named PubSE based on Bi-LSTM-CRF and an alternating training method for training the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models by 11.8% in F1-score on real data. |
Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
MINER: Improving Out-of-Vocabulary Named Entity Recognition from an Information Theoretic Perspective (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiao Wang, Shihan Dou, Limao Xiong, Yicheng Zou, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Liang Qiao, Zhanzhan Cheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition models are feature-engineering and machine learning based. |
| Approach: | They propose a new NER learning framework that uses entity mentions to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance on OOV entities on various settings and datasets. |
Length Generalization of Causal Transformers without Position Encoding (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Besides Transformers without position encodings, the success of NoPE provides a new way to overcome the challenge of generalizing to longer sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient tuning for searching attention heads’ best temperature hyper-parameters, which substantially expands NoPE’s context size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tuning significantly expands NoPE's context size, allowing it to generalize to longer sentences with state-of-the-art generalization algorithms. |
VALU: A Benchmark for Video Anomaly Temporal Localization and Understanding at Multiple Semantic Levels (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Leveraging Entity Information for Cross-Modality Correlation Learning: The Entity-Guided Multimodal Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Summarization with Multimodal Output (MSMO) is a new approach to produce a multimodal summary that integrates both text and relevant images. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entity-Guided Multimodal Summarization model that integrates both text and relevant images to produce a multimodal summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates text-image and entity-image information and refines image selection through knowledge distillation from a pre-trained vision-language model. |
A Lexicon-Based Graph Neural Network for Chinese NER (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese named entity recognition models are vulnerable to word ambiguities due to the lack of global semantics and chain structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a lexicon-based graph neural network with global semantics to solve word ambiguities in Chinese named entity recognition (NER) Lexicons are used to construct the graph and provide word-level features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on four NER datasets on Chinese characters, potential words, and the whole-sentence semantics. |
Unleashing the Power of Language Models in Text-Attributed Graph (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on graph learning on text-attributed graphs have been limited by memory cost and underutilization of relationships between nodes and words. |
| Approach: | They propose a Node Representation Update Pre-training Architecture based on Co-modeling text and graph to learn representations of papers and words simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the ogbn-arxiv benchmark dataset. |
Uncertainty Guided Label Denoising for Document-level Distant Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Structural Patent Classification Using Label Hierarchy Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for patent classification ignore key technical content claims and citation relationships . existing methods treat labels as independent targets, failing to exploit semantic and structural information within the label taxonomy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Claim Structure based Patent Classification model with Label Awareness . structural graph learning is used to mine the internal logic of patent claims . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more effective than state-of-the-art classification models. |
ClusterAttn: KV Cache Compression under Intrinsic Attention Clustering (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sparse attention apply the same pattern across different attention heads and inputs, but fail to capture the intrinsic attention clustering in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free sparse attention method that provides an efficient prompt cache compression scheme under intrinsic attention clustering for efficient LLM inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory usage by 10%–65% and increases throughput by 2.6–4.8 times with no accuracy loss. |
C-World: A Computer Use Agent Environment Creator (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziqiao Xi, Shuang Liang, Qi Liu, Jiaqing Zhang, Letian Peng, Fang Nan, Meshal Nayim, Tianhui Zhang, Rishika Mundada, Lianhui Qin, Biwei Huang, Kun Zhou
| Challenge: | C-World enables users to build agent environments on demand. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that enables users to build agent environments on demand. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines on 119k samples and achieves Spearman = 0.883 ranking correlation with real execution. |
MAIN: Mutual Alignment Is Necessary for instruction tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Fanyi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Haoyu Liu, Xixin Cao, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Instruction tuning has enabled large language models to achieve remarkable performance, yet its success heavily depends on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a mutual alignment framework which enforces coherence between instructions and responses through mutual constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes well across model architectures and sizes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on LLaMA, Mistral, and Qwen models across diverse benchmarks. |
Discourse Heuristics For Paradoxically Moral Self-Correction (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | moral self-correction is a promising approach for aligning output of Large Language Models with human moral values . authors show that moral self correction relies on discourse constructions that reflect heuristic shortcuts . |
| Approach: | a new method is proposed to strengthen moral self-correction using heuristics extracted from curated datasets. |
| Outcome: | a new method to strengthen moral self-correction is proposed . the proposed method is based on heuristics extracted from curated datasets. |
One Battle After Another: Probing LLMs’ Limits on Multi-Turn Instruction Following with a Benchmark Evolving Framework (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for instruction-following in multi-topic dialogues are limited to a fixed number of turns, susceptible to saturation and failing to account for users’ interactive experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework featuring a three-layer tracking mechanism and a query synthesis agent to mimic sequential user behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks in the evaluation of instruction following in multi-topic dialogues and demonstrates deficiencies in failure recovery and fine-grained instruction following. |
Weighed Domain-Invariant Representation Learning for Cross-domain Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Cross-domain sentiment analysis is a hot topic in research and industry . domain-invariant representation learning (DIRL) is used to learn a feature representation across domains . but, when label distribution P(Y) shifts across domain, it degrades performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-invariant representation learning framework to improve cross-domain sentiment analysis performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is easy to transfer existing models to the proposed model. |
Exploring the Compositional Deficiency of Large Language Models in Mathematical Reasoning Through Trap Problems (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current LLMs lack systematic compositionality, and therefore cannot serve as reliable cognitive models. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce logical traps into the original problems of MATH and GSM8K to investigate the compositionality of large language models in mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate infinite combinations from finite learned components. |
Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Binghai Wang, Senjie Jin, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Zhihao Zhang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current methods rely on ranking losses to teach reward model to assess preferences, but they are susceptible to noise and ambiguous data, often failing to deeply understand human intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates contrastive learning into the reward modeling process to enhance generalization and stabilize the reinforcement learning training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances generalization of the reward model, stabilizes the reinforcement learning training process, and improves the final alignment with human preferences. |
UFO: A UI-Focused Agent for Windows OS Interaction (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chaoyun Zhang, Liqun Li, Shilin He, Xu Zhang, Bo Qiao, Si Qin, Minghua Ma, Yu Kang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| 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. |
MIKE: A New Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Entity Knowledge Editing (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaqi Li, Miaozeng Du, Chuanyi Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Nan Hu, Guilin Qi, Haiyun Jiang, Siyuan Cheng, Bozhong Tian
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks focus on coarse-grained knowledge, leaving the intricacies of fine-grounded knowledge unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and dataset specifically designed for FG multimodal entity knowledge editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark underscoring the complexity of FG knowledge editing in MLLMs. |
FaithLens: Detecting and Explaining Faithfulness Hallucination (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuzheng Si, Qingyi Wang, Haozhe Zhao, Yuzhuo Bai, Guanqiao Chen, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a faithfulness hallucination detection model that can provide binary predictions and corresponding explanations to improve trustworthiness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms advanced models on 12 diverse tasks. |
Making Revisions Understandable: A Survey of Edit Intentions, Methods, and Applications (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Text revision is a core process in document creation, capturing how authors iteratively refine, reorganize, and improve written content. |
| Approach: | They synthesize text revision research through the lens of edit intentions . they review prior work across the revision workflow including corpus construction, edit intention taxonomies, edit intentions, and edit intention identification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach synthesizes datasets, taxonomies, identification methods, and applications and highlights key open research directions. |
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hengyuan Zhang, Zhihao Zhang, Ercong Nie, Mingyang Wang, Zunhai Su, Yiwei Wang, Qianli Wang, Shuzhou Yuan, Xufeng Duan, Qibo Xue, Zeping Yu, Chenming Shang, Xiao Liang, Jing Xiong, Hui Shen, Chaofan Tao, Zhengwu Liu, Senjie Jin, Zhiheng Xi, Dongdong Zhang, Sophia Ananiadou, Tao Gui, Ruobing Xie, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Hinrich Schuetze, Xuanjing Huang, Qi Zhang, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency. |
DI-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Dependency Inference with Testable Repositories at Scale (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
Auto-Dialabel: Labeling Dialogue Data with Unsupervised Learning (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialog datasets rely on human labeling, which is expensive, limited in size, and in low coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically cluster dialogue intents and slots . they collect context features, leverage an autoencoder for feature assembly, and adapt a dynamic hierarchical clustering method for intent and slot labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can promote human labeling cost to a great extent and achieve good intent clustering accuracy (84.1%) it also provides reasonable and instructive slot labeling results. |
Governance in Motion: Co-evolution of Constitutions and AI models for Scalable Safety (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenhao Huang, Ziyu Shen, Yicong Ren, Huiyuan Zheng, Jiazheng Zhang, Mingxu Chai, Ming Zhang, Shihan Dou, Fan Mo, Jie Shi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences lack flexibility . static alignment preferences lack the ability to correct misaligned behaviors as they emerge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables dynamic and continuous alignment of large language models with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves safety and accuracy of a 7B model with human annotations. |
Grouped-Attention for Content-Selection and Content-Plan Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent neural data-to-text generation models explicitly learn content-plan given a set of attributes as input. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural content-planner that captures local and global contexts . they use a token-level attention constrained within each input attribute . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competitors by 4.92%, 4.70%, and 16.56% on real-world datasets. |
SOTOPIA-π: Interactive Learning of Socially Intelligent Language Agents (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruiyi Wang, Haofei Yu, Wenxin Zhang, Zhengyang Qi, Maarten Sap, Yonatan Bisk, Graham Neubig, Hao Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on building language agents have not addressed this social learning gap. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive learning method that improves the social intelligence of language agents by using behavior cloning and self-reinforcement based training on filtered social interaction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows a 7B LLM to reach the social goal completion ability of an expert model (GPT-4-based agent) without the loss of more generic abilities, such as the ability to answer knowledge-based questions. |
KARL: Reinforcement Learning for LLM Agents on Multi-Turn Knowledge-Intensive Agentic Tasks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xueqiao Sun, Xiao Liu, Bowen Lv, Hanchen Zhang, Bohao Jing, Zehan Qi, Yifan Xu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have shown remarkable potential as autonomous agents, but their effectiveness in knowledge-intensive tasks remains limited by passive knowledge utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables LLM agents to dynamically explore structured knowledge sources through multi-turn interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing retrieval-augmented approaches on knowledge graph and database tasks while maximizing tool-use behaviors end-to-end. |
ProofInfer: Generating Proof via Iterative Hierarchical Inference (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing proof generation models focus on generating several proof paths instead of a whole tree. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates the proof tree via iterative hierarchical inference . they propose coding the proof as plain text without losing structure information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed proof generation model significantly improves performance on widely-used datasets. |
Preserving Knowledge Invariance: Rethinking Robustness Evaluation of Open Information Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks focus on pairwise matching, ignoring robustness . current models exhibit frustrating degradation, with a maximum drop of 23.43 F1 score . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates the evaluation of open information extraction models in the real world . they perform experiments on typical models published in the last decade and a representative large language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is rated robust on a knowledge-invariant clique with different syntactic and expressive forms. |
Inductive Relation Inference of Knowledge Graph Enhanced by Ontology Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to inference knowledge graphs lack ontology information, which is often too sparse. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge graph inductive inference method that fuses ontology information to learn the semantic information of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms large language models like ChatGPT on two benchmark datasets and improves the MRR metrics by 15.4% and 44.1%, respectively. |
DARM: Distribution-Aware Reward Modeling by Alleviating Biases from Low Preference-Context Dependency Data (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shaofan Liu, Guoqiang Zhang, Shihan Dou, Huiyuan Zheng, Yiming Zhou, Junjie Ye, Shaowen Wang, Shichun Liu, Jiazheng Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training reward models are vulnerable to context neglect and degraded accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose distribution-aware reward modeling that augments the RM objective with a conditional mutual information regularizer that maximizes context and the predicted reward conditioned on the response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance in RLHF and improves accuracy in other settings. |
SGPVT: Self-Generated Proximal Visual Tokens for Mitigating Proximal Collateral Damage in MLLM Unlearning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on general utility metrics, overlooking the preservation of semantically related concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that introduces self-generated proximal visual tokens to prevent forgetting vulnerability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in preserving semantically related concepts while achieving effective target unlearning. |
CoGenesis: A Framework Collaborating Large and Small Language Models for Secure Context-Aware Instruction Following (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large-scale language models (LLMs) are increasingly exposed to private data and are becoming more and more prevalent. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative generation framework that integrates large and small language models to address privacy concerns logically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines large and small models to address privacy concerns logically. |
LongTutor: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Long-term Personalized Tutoring (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations focus on isolated, short-term interactions, overlooking the inherently long-term nature of learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-term personalized tutoring based on an annotated learning log . they propose an automated generator–verifier pipeline to enable benchmark expansion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks evaluate LLMs across three progressive tasks: evidence acquisition, knowledge state diagnosis, and adaptive teaching action. |
HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a promising alternative to expensive human evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . they decompose a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . it decomposes a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . the framework is efficient to train and more explainable than relying solely on prompts . |
TransferTOD: A Generalizable Chinese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Transfer Capabilities (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Zhang, Caishuang Huang, Yilong Wu, Shichun Liu, Huiyuan Zheng, Yurui Dong, Yujiong Shen, Shihan Dou, Jun Zhao, Junjie Ye, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current datasets cater to user-led systems and are limited to predefined specific scenarios and slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dialogue dataset to train a model that authentically simulates human-computer dialogues in 30 popular life service scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a joint accuracy of 75.09% in out-of-domain evaluations . it also achieves notable abilities in slot filling and questioning . |
Mining Evidences for Concept Stock Recommendation (N18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent announcement of a state plan to build a new economic region has led to the rise of hundreds of stocks . concepts can be useful for investors to find out relevant concept stocks for making investment decisions . a chinese research team uses deep learning to mine evidences from large textual data . |
| Approach: | They use distributed word similarities and deep reinforcement learning to learn a strategy of topic expansion from large scale textual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a baseline method on two Chinese stock market datasets. |
PQR: Improving Dense Retrieval via Potential Query Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing training data is sparse, with each document associated with one or a few labeled queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free potential query retrieval framework to address this problem . they use a Gaussian mixture distribution to model all potential queries for a document . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to capture comprehensive semantic information from a document with multiple queries. |
A Confidence-based Partial Label Learning Model for Crowd-Annotated Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Limao Xiong, Jie Zhou, Qunxi Zhu, Xiao Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Jin Ma, Ying Shan
| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) are based on large-scale labeled datasets, which always obtain using crowdsourcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a CONfidence-based partial Label Learning method to integrate prior and posterior confidences for crowd-annotated named entity recognition models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on real-world and synthetic datasets compared with baselines. |
PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao, Kaiwen Yan, Ailin Huang, Hongyu Zhou, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum
| Challenge: | Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) overcomes a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-and-inference framework to overcome a central limitation of language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) under a fixed context window. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. |
ReAttn: Improving Attention-based Re-ranking via Attention Re-weighting (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Attention-based re-ranking methods are highly concentrated a small subset of tokens within a few documents, making others indistinguishable. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-hoc re-weighting strategy that uses attention weights to reduce lexical bias and emphasize distinctive terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces lexical bias and emphasizes distinctive terms across documents, while maintaining a balanced distribution across informative tokens. |
MasRouter: Learning to Route LLMs for Multi-Agent Systems (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to push the boundaries of LLM capabilities, yet they often face significant costs and challenges in dynamic LLM selection. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent system routing solution that integrates all components of MAS into a unified routing framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution is high-performing, cost-effective, and efficient . it reduces overhead by up to 52.07 compared to current methods on HumanEval . |
BoolQuestions: Does Dense Retrieval Understand Boolean Logic in Language? (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Dense retrieval systems focus on optimizing text embedding space while overlooking Boolean logic in language. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate whether retrieval systems can comprehend Boolean logic in language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a benchmark dataset covering complex queries containing basic Boolean logic and corresponding annotated passages. |
A Multi-Format Transfer Learning Model for Event Argument Extraction via Variational Information Bottleneck (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Kernel-Whitening: Overcome Dataset Bias with Isotropic Sentence Embedding (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reduce dataset bias rely on spurious correlations and obstruct valid feature information while mitigating bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation normalization method which disentangles correlations between features of encoded sentences and a kernel approximation method which provides isotropic data distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates the bias problem by providing isotropic data distribution while maintaining in-distribution accuracy. |
AgentV-RL: Scaling Reward Modeling with Agentic Verifier (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
LFKQG: A Controlled Generation Framework with Local Fine-tuning for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing KBQG models focus on the most relevant part of the answer entity, while neglecting the rest of the subgraph. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled generation framework for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases that generates questions with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) predicates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods significantly on three widely-used benchmark datasets SimpleQuestion, PathQuestions, and WebQuestIONS. |
QiMeng-PRepair: Precise Code Repair via Edit-Aware Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Changxin Ke, Rui Zhang, Jiaming Guo, Yuanbo Wen, Li Ding, Shuo Wang, Xuyuan Zhu, Xiong Peng, Di Huang, Zidong Du, Xing Hu, Qi Guo, Yunji Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to program repair are based on correctness alone. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that mitigates over-editing and improves repair accuracy by generating buggy programs and re-edits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves repair precision by 31.4% under fix1@1, a metric that considers repair correctness and extent, and significantly increases decoding throughput when combined with speculative editing. |
Unveiling and Consulting Core Experts in Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xin Zhou, Ping Nie, Yiwen Guo, Haojie Wei, Zhanqiu Zhang, Pasquale Minervini, Ruotian Ma, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, but internal mechanisms that contribute to RAG’s effectiveness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the internal mechanisms within the popular Mixture-of-Expert (MoE)-based LLMs and examine their ability to improve RAG by examining expert activations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual learning in language models suffer catastrophic forgetting when learning sequential tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal low-rank adaptation approach for continual learning in language models that uses orthogons to learn sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on continual learning benchmarks and preserves generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks. |
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Yujiong Shen, Tingyi Yang, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Shihan Dou, Qinhao Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Zhihao Zhang, Yi Dong, Zhen Wang, Zhihui Fei, Mingyang Wan, Tao Liang, Guojun Ma, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset. |
Flooding-X: Improving BERT’s Resistance to Adversarial Attacks via Loss-Restricted Fine-Tuning (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qin Liu, Rui Zheng, Bao Rong, Jingyi Liu, ZhiHua Liu, Zhanzhan Cheng, Liang Qiao, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating adversarial perturbations scale up the cost of training computational complexity by the number of gradient steps it takes to obtain the adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose a flood method which aims at better generalization and a criterion to bring hyper-parameter-dependent flooding into effect with a narrowed-down search space by measuring how the gradient steps taken within one epoch affect the loss of each batch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves BERT’s resistance to textual adversarial attacks by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art robust accuracy on various text classification and GLUE tasks. |
Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiao Wang, Weikang Zhou, Qi Zhang, Jie Zhou, SongYang Gao, Junzhe Wang, Menghan Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use end-task knowledge to select a tiny subset of pretraining corpus to influence performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pretrained models on eight datasets covering four domains with 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost. |
Call Me When Necessary: LLMs can Efficiently and Faithfully Reason over Structured Environments (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Sitao Cheng, Ziyuan Zhuang, Yong Xu, Fangkai Yang, Chaoyun Zhang, Xiaoting Qin, Xiang Huang, Ling Chen, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in reasoning over structured environments, e.g., knowledge graphs and tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows LLMs to efficiently and faithfully reason over structured environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art fine-tuned methods on three KGQA and two TableQA datasets and surpasse CWQ and WTQ methods. |
Domain Generalization via Causal Adjustment for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to domain adaptation fail to generalize well on unknown test data. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor adjustment-based causal model to disentangle domain-specific and domain-invariant representations that play essential roles in tackling domain shift. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model disentangles domain-specific and domain-invariant representations that play essential roles in tackling domain shift. |
TinyScientist: An Interactive, Extensible, and Controllable Framework for Building Research Agents (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Haofei Yu, Keyang Xuan, Fenghai Li, Kunlun Zhu, Zijie Lei, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Kyle Richardson, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Existing research systems often design and use agentic workflows to perform research tasks such as ideation, scientific coding, review writing, and tree-based search. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source codebase, an interactive web demonstration, and a PyPI Python package to make state-of-the-art auto-research pipelines broadly accessible to every researcher and developer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework adapts easily to new tools and supports iterative growth. |
Walking in Others’ Shoes: How Perspective-Taking Guides Large Language Models in Reducing Toxicity and Bias (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods that require white-box access to the model or substantial training fail to simultaneously lessen toxicity and bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy that encourages LLMs to integrate diverse human perspectives and self-regulate their responses by incorporating diverse human viewpoints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can significantly diminish toxicity (up to 89%) and bias (up 73%) in LLMs’ responses. |
Counteracting the Matthew Effect in Self-Improvement of LVLMs through Head-Tail Re-balancing (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xin Guo, Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Yitao Zhai, Xiaowei Shi, Xunliang Cai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large vision language models have impressive reasoning capabilities across complex multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use distribution-reshaping and trajectory-rebalancing to improve visual reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct and InternVL2.5-4B models show that their methods outperform baselines by 3.86 points. |
Retrieval Augmented Instruction Tuning for Open NER with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on integrating large language models (LLMs) with information extraction (IE) however, the best approach to incorporate information with LLMs for IE remains an open question. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese IT dataset to perform RA-IT for IE . they use semantically similar examples from the training dataset as the context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is evaluated in English and Chinese scenarios. |
Scaling Performance and Low-Resource Annotation with Many-Shot In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on ICL for Named Entity Recognition (NER) have mainly explored few-shot settings, but the potential of scaling to hundreds of demonstrations has not been thoroughly investigated. |
| Approach: | They evaluate various LLMs across multiple domains using hundreds of ICL examples and then assess the feasibility of using many-shot ICL as a data annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be scaled to hundreds of examples and annotate and refining data for low-resource NER tasks. |
Query Structure Modeling for Inductive Logical Reasoning Over Knowledge Graphs (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for inductive reasoning over knowledge graphs lack the ability to model the logical structures of complex queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-modeled textual encoding framework for inductive logical reasoning over KGs that encodes linearized query structures and entities using pre-trained language models to find answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework encodes query structures and entities using pre-trained language models to find answers. |
Mitigating Tail Narrowing in LLM Self-Improvement via Socratic-Guided Sampling (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwen Ding, Zhiheng Xi, Wei He, Lizhuoyuan Lizhuoyuan, Yitao Zhai, Shi Xiaowei, Xunliang Cai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| 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. |
Metacognitive Self-Correction for Multi-Agent System via Prototype-Guided Next-Execution Reconstruction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xu Shen, Qi Zhang, Song Wang, Zhen Tan, Xinyu Zhao, Laura Yao, Vaishnav Tadiparthi, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari, Kwonjoon Lee, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) excel at collaborative problem solving but remain brittle to cascading errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a metacognitive framework that enables step-level error detection and self-correction in Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the Who When benchmark and delivers consistent gains on AgentErrorBench. |
OctoBench: Benchmarking Scaffold-Aware Instruction Following in Repository-Grounded Agentic Coding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Deming Ding, Shichun Liu, Enhui Yang, Jiahang Lin, Ziying Chen, Shihan Dou, Honglin Guo, Weiyu Cheng, Pengyu Zhao, Chengjun Xiao, Qunhong Zeng, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qidi Xu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | coding scaffolds that follow heterogeneous instructions remain under-examined in software engineering . coding models are capable software agents, but their ability to follow constraints remains under-explored . |
| Approach: | They introduce OctoBench, which benchmarks scaffold-aware instruction following in agentic coding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to accelerate the development of more scaffold-aware agents. |
Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Yuhao Zhou, Rui Zheng, Songyang Gao, Jia Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods have been used to enhance multistep reasoning capabilities of large language models, but they have overlooked the potential of formulating higher-quality problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts from the problem side and refines problems to be more comprehensible and solvable for models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models. |
AutoRubric: Rubric-Based Generative Rewards for Faithful Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced from perception tasks to complex multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards with process-level supervision through automatically collected rubric-based generative rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on six multimodal reasoning benchmarks and significantly improves reasoning faithfulness in dedicated evaluations. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
MCS: An In-battle Commentary System for MOBA Games (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaofeng Qi, Chao Li, Zhongping Liang, Jigang Liu, Cheng Zhang, Yuanxin Wei, Lin Yuan, Guang Yang, Lanxiao Huang, Min Li
| Challenge: | In-battle commentary is an important component of live streaming of e-sports competitions and is applicable to a wide range of scenarios like combat information analysis and live streaming. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative system for in-battle real-time commentary in mobile MOBA games and propose 'transform' method to convert match statistics and utterances into consistent encoding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on real-time match statistics and events and can be used for live streaming, e-sports commentary and combat information analysis. |
SRF: Enhancing Document-Level Relation Extraction with a Novel Secondary Reasoning Framework (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level relation extraction ignore bidirectional mention interaction when generating relational features for entity pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that incorporates bidirectional mention fusion and a simple yet effective evidence extraction module for relation prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance and the proposed method is effective and general when integrated into existing models. |
PaD: Program-aided Distillation Can Teach Small Models Reasoning Better than Chain-of-thought Fine-tuning (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in various tasks, but their huge size and inaccessibility of parameters present challenges for practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use CoT data to distill task-specific ability from large language models to smaller models . they use reasoning programs to suppress errors in distilled data and improve distillation quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LLMs on arithmetic reasoning, symbolic reasoning, and general ability. |
SciER: An Entity and Relation Extraction Dataset for Datasets, Methods, and Tasks in Scientific Documents (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Scientific information extraction (SciIE) is critical for converting unstructured knowledge from scholarly articles into structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a scientific entity and relation extraction dataset to capture interactions between entities in full texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset captures the intricate use and interactions among entities in full texts and provides an out-of-distribution test set to offer a more realistic evaluation. |
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Dou, Jiazheng Zhang, Jianxiang Zang, Yunbo Tao, Weikang Zhou, Haoxiang Jia, Shichun Liu, Yuming Yang, Shenxi Wu, Zhiheng Xi, Muling Wu, Rui Zheng, Changze Lv, Limao Xiong, Shaoqing Zhang, Lin Zhang, Wenyu Zhan, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yueming Wu, Ming Wen, Yixin Cao, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs). |
Se2: Sequential Example Selection for In-Context Learning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior work has explored the selection of examples for in-context learning, neglecting the internal relationships between examples and exist an inconsistency between training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential-aware method that leverages the LLM’s feedback on varying context, aiding in capturing inter-relationships and sequential information among examples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 23 NLP tasks show that Se2 surpasses baselines and achieves 42% relative improvement over random selection. |
An Edge-Enhanced Hierarchical Graph-to-Tree Network for Math Word Problem Solving (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on graph neural networks to capture word relationships neglects the rest of the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose an edge-enhanced hierarchical graph encoder to incorporate edge label information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can improve performance on the MAWPS and Math23K datasets compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Modeling Evolution of Message Interaction for Rumor Resolution (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for rumor resolution ignore local interactions during the message diffusion which is important for the identification of rumors. |
| Approach: | They propose to model confrontation and reciprocity between message pairs via discrete variational autoencoders which effectively reflects the diversified opinion interactivity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a PHEME dataset show that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy than existing methods. |
HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Zhilin Yang, Peng Qi, Saizheng Zhang, Yoshua Bengio, William Cohen, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Christopher D. Manning
| Challenge: | Existing question answering (QA) datasets fail to train QA systems to perform complex reasoning and provide explanations for answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a new dataset with 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs with four key features: (1) the questions require finding and reasoning over multiple supporting documents to answer; (2) the questions are diverse and not constrained to any pre-existing knowledge bases or knowledge schemas; (3) the questions provide sentence-level supporting facts required for reasoning; and (4) a type of factoid comparison questions to test QA systems’ ability to extract relevant facts and perform necessary comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset has 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs and four key features that make it challenging for the latest QA systems. |
Coarse-to-fine Few-shot Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ruotian Ma, Zhang Lin, Xuanting Chen, Xin Zhou, Junzhe Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen
| Challenge: | Existing few-shot NER solutions do not consider sub-class discrimination and various granularity of new classes during coarse training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a cluster-based prototype loss to learn group-wise discriminative representations of coarse-grained classes and a mixture prototype loss for learning the representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows superior performance over baseline methods on in-domain and cross-domain settings with various target granularity. |
To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Li, Xu Chen, Chaozhuo Li, Yanming Shen, Jianan Zhao, Yujing Wang, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier. |
SSS: Editing Factual Knowledge in Language Models towards Semantic Sparse Space (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to modify LMs suffer from sub-optimal locality, where irrelevant neighborhood examples can be adversely influenced. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model editing method to modify specific examples in LMs to improve locality and reasoning capability by directing the hidden state of edit example towards spaces where semantics are sparse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves locality and reasoning capability on two datasets. |
TALON: A Multi-Agent Framework for Long-Table Exploration and Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to query-relevant content retrieval fail to retrieve contextually relevant data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for table question answering over long tables . TALON features a planning agent that iteratively invokes a tool agent to access tabular data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves average accuracy improvements of 7.5% and 12.0% across all language models. |
DuReadervis: A Chinese Dataset for Open-domain Document Visual Question Answering (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering is a task that requires answering questions based on a collection of document images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use document images to answer questions using layouts and visual features instead of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces human cost and improves scalability of QA systems by incorporating layouts and visual features. |
ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-SequencePre-training (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing sequence-to-sequence models are optimized for future n-gram prediction and n stream self-attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised objective called future n-gram prediction and the proposed n stream self-attention mechanism to optimize the model for sequence-to-sequence learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and SQuAD 1.1 benchmarks compared to the models using the same scale pre-training corpus. |
How Should We Enhance the Safety of Large Reasoning Models: An Empirical Study (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhexin Zhang, Xian Qi Loye, Victor Shea-Jay Huang, Junxiao Yang, Qi Zhu, Shiyao Cui, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Yingkang Wang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models have achieved remarkable success on reasoning-intensive tasks, but their enhanced reasoning capabilities do not translate to improved safety performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised fine tuning to enhance the safety of Large Reasoning Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the safety of large reasoning models on reasoning-intensive tasks. |
Word-level Textual Adversarial Attacking as Combinatorial Optimization (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing word-level attack models are far from perfect because of unsuitable search space reduction methods and inefficient optimization algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial adversarialist model that incorporates word substitution and particle swarm optimization to solve two problems separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves much higher success rates and crafts more high-quality adversarial examples as compared to baseline methods. |
ReasTAP: Injecting Table Reasoning Skills During Pre-training via Synthetic Reasoning Examples (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models with table-specific architectures and pre-training methods perform well on understanding table structures but lack table reasoning skills. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train tables with table reasoning skills without complex architectures . they define 7 table reasoning skill, and then pre-teach them to generate tables . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on four tasks and is available on github. |
Experience is the Teacher: Reusing Atomic Thoughts from LLMs to Improve Medical Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guangya Yu, Hui Luo, Qi Ye, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Mingxi Shang, Xuanwu Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Recent large reasoning models (LLMs) lack dynamic and diverse thinking capabilities . reusing atomic thoughts provides a practical pathway toward dynamic reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. |
Light-R1: Curriculum SFT, DPO and RL for Long COT from Scratch and Beyond (2025.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
A Survey of Post-Training Scaling in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hanyu Lai, Xiao Liu, Junjie Gao, Jiale Cheng, Zehan Qi, Yifan Xu, Shuntian Yao, Dan Zhang, Jinhua Du, Zhenyu Hou, Xin Lv, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in understanding and generating human natural languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for scaling large language models using supervised fine-tuning, RLxF and test-time compute methodologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to understand and generate human natural languages. |
Sub-Character Tokenization for Chinese Pretrained Language Models (2023.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Chenglei Si, Zhengyan Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Fanchao Qi, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Yasheng Wang, Qun Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs treat each character as an indivisible token, but ignore the unique feature of the writing system where additional linguistic information exists below the character level. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode Chinese characters into short sequences and construct Chinese vocabulary based on the encoded text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizers can tokenize inputs into much shorter sequences, improving computational efficiency. |
Divide-Verify-Refine: Can LLMs Self-align with Complex Instructions? (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve complex questions with a tree-of-thought approach using parametric knowledge and retrieved external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting. |
JointLK: Joint Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Commonsense Question Answering (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing KG-augmented models for commonsense question answering ignore the effectively fusing and reasoning over question context representations and the KG representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model which combines a logical reasoning and a dynamic pruning mechanism to solve these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves existing models and performs interpretable reasoning on the CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA datasets. |
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications. |
Asynchronous Deep Interaction Network for Natural Language Inference (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods have framed the reasoning problem as a semantic matching task. |
| Approach: | They propose an asynchronous deep interaction network (ADIN) to deconstruct the reasoning process and implement asynchron and multi-step reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on three popular benchmarks: SNLI, MultiNLI, and SciTail. |
HyperLoRA: Efficient Cross-task Generalization via Constrained Low-Rank Adapters Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt pre-trained language models (PLMs) to emerging tasks are costly and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-network that generates task-specific weights without any optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has flexible generalization ability and superior performance over hypenetworks. |
Uncertainty Aware Learning for Language Model Alignment (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing alignment strategies that focus on diverse and high-quality data often overlook the intrinsic uncertainty of tasks, learning all data samples equally. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce the sample uncertainty into the alignment of different task scenarios by a simple fashion by setting the label smoothing value of training according to the uncertainty of individual samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning on high-entropy tasks and complex low-entropic tasks. |
PathQG: Neural Question Generation from Facts (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research for question generation encodes text as a sequence of tokens without explicitly modeling fact information. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate facts in the input text for question generation in a comprehensive way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models and human evaluation shows it generates relevant and informative questions. |
Building Multi-domain Dialog State Trackers from Single-domain Dialogs (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi-domain dialog state tracking models require significant manual effort to define domain relations and collect data. |
| Approach: | They propose a divide-and-conquer (DAC) DST paradigm and a multi-domain dialog synthesis framework to build multi- domain DST models from single-domain dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm makes building multi-domain DST models easier on unseen domain combinations. |
Iterative GNN-based Decoder for Question Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models ignore the rich structure information that is hidden in the previously generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the previous generation using a Graph Neural Network at each decoding step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models with sentence-level QG tasks on SQUAD and MARCO datasets. |
GeAR: Generation Augmented Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haoyu Liu, Shaohan Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Furu Wei, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Document retrieval techniques are used to compute semantic similarity between a query and documents, but the scalar similarity fails to reflect enough information, hindering the interpretation of retrieval results. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
LEMON: Language-Based Environment Manipulation via Execution-Guided Pre-training (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to language-based environment manipulation are difficult to generalize across environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework for language-based environment manipulation tasks that can deal with various environments using the same generative language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art results on four of the tasks and the execution-guided pre-training strategy brings remarkable improvements on all experimental tasks. |
Enhancing Contrastive Learning with Noise-Guided Attack: Towards Continual Relation Extraction in the Wild (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual relation extraction (CRE) excel in preserving old knowledge but falter when confronted with contaminated data streams. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-resistant contrastive framework for continual relation extraction (CRE) that preserves old knowledge while learning incremental corrupted relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks with increasing noise rates. |
Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, especially in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose several strategies for deploying RAG that balance performance and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy. |
Rescue: Ranking LLM Responses with Partial Ordering to Improve Response Generation (2024.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Customizing LLMs for a specific task involves separating high-quality responses from lower-quality ones. Obtaining a large volume of expert-annotated data is costly for most tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains the model to prioritize the best responses from a pool of candidates created for a task using ranking metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be achieved with limited human annotations or through heuristic methods. |
Hierarchical Document Refinement for Long-context Retrieval-augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiajie Jin, Xiaoxi Li, Guanting Dong, Yuyao Zhang, Yutao Zhu, Yongkang Wu, Zhonghua Li, Ye Qi, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Real-world RAG applications often encounter long-context input scenarios where redundant information and noise results in higher inference costs and reduced performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient plug-and-play refiner that leverages the structural characteristics of long documents. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on seven QA datasets show that LongRefiner achieves competitive performance in various scenarios while using 10x fewer computational costs and latency compared to baseline. |
REAP: Towards Effective Training-Free Chemical Reasoning with Explicit Atomic Priors (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current approaches to instill explicit priors into LLMs often suffer from an information bottleneck . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that equips LLMs with an external knowledge base, enabling them to reason over retrieved chemical priors dynamically. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that REAP outperforms current reasoning methods and rivals state-of-the-art training-based models. |
Outcome Accuracy is Not Enough: Aligning the Reasoning Process of Reward Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Binghai Wang, Yantao Liu, Yuxuan Liu, Tianyi Tang, Shenzhi Wang, Chang Gao, Chujie Zheng, Yichang Zhang, Le Yu, Shixuan Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Bowen Yu, Fei Huang, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies observe a phenomenon where reward models achieve high accuracy on static datasets but fail to generalize effectively during RLHF. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines rationale consistency with outcome accuracy to improve performance on RM-Bench and JudgeBench. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines on RM-Bench and JudgeBench by an average of 5% and improves creative writing tasks by 7%. |
Towards Interpretable Tabular Reasoning: Enhancing LLM Reasoning on Tabular Data with Pre-Constructed Logic Graph (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Lirong Gao, Zewei Yu, Zhongrui Yin, Qi Zhang, Yuke Zhu, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Sheng Guo
| Challenge: | Tabular data is used in fields such as finance and healthcare due to its heterogeneity and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logic-Graph-Enhanced LLM Reasoning framework that integrates the strengths of tree-based models and LLMs to improve their interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms tree-based models and state-of-the-art LLMs on tabular prediction tasks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability. |
Towards Trustworthy Smart Contract Synthesis: A Multi-Agent Framework with Lean-Based Verification (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Smart Contracts are the foundation of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), executing financial logic without trusted intermediaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates LLM-based generation with Lean-based auto-formalization and verification. |
| Outcome: | LeVer is the first trustworthy smart contract synthesis framework that integrates LLM-based generation with Lean-based auto-formalization and verification. |
Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoyang Wang, Shaohan Huang, Yuxuan Liu, Jiahai Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a tailored learning approach to distill the exclusive reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate democratization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability by leveraging the black-box model as a reasoning teacher. |
GAPO: Robust Advantage Estimation for Real-World Code LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jianqing Zhang, Zhezheng Hao, Wei Xia, Hande Dong, Hong Wang, Chenxing Wei, Yuyan Zhou, Yubin Qi, Qiang Lin, Jian Cao
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, but in real-world code editing scenarios, reward distributions are often skewed with unpredictable noise, leading to distorted advantage computation and increased rollout outliers. |
| Approach: | They propose a group-relative method that finds an interval with the highest SNR and uses the median of that interval as an adaptive Q to replace the group mean in advantage calculation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on nine instruction-tuned LLMs while remaining plug-and-play and efficient. |
DynClean: Training Dynamics-based Label Cleaning for Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify entities using distant annotations are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a training dynamics-based label cleaning approach to characterize distant annotations and an automatic threshold estimation strategy to locate errors in distant labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several advanced DS-NER approaches across four datasets. |
RECOST: External Knowledge Guided Data-efficient Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Considering the high computing power overhead, data-efficient instruction tuning is proposed to reduce the training data size. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve instruction tuning by integrating external knowledge into a single pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results with only 1% of the full dataset. |
Reading Order Matters: Information Extraction from Visually-rich Documents by Token Path Prediction (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to predict token sequences within visually-rich documents by a simple prediction head. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to predict token mentions as token sequences within documents. |
Forget the Token and Pixel: Rethinking Gradient Ascent for Concept Unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaqi Li, Chuanyi Zhang, Miaozeng Du, Hui Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Qianshan Wei, Junfeng Fang, Ruipeng Wang, Sheng Bi, Guilin Qi
| Challenge: | Gradient Ascent (GA) has emerged as a promising approach for concept unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (MGMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that selectively applies GA to targeted Conceptual Knowledge while preserving Natural Knowledge through Gradient Descent (GD). |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach removes Conceptual Knowledge and inadvertently diminishes Natural Knowledge, resulting in utility degradation. |
D.Va: Validate Your Demonstration First Before You Use It (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) heavily relies on selecting effective demonstrations to achieve outputs that better align with the expected results. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates a demonstration validation perspective into this field and integrates it into the learning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses all retrieval-based in-context learning techniques across both natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) tasks. |
Leveraging Argumentation Knowledge Graph for Interactive Argument Pair Identification (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing researches focus on sentence matching but the interaction of opinions requires reasoning of knowledge, which is beyond textual information. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage external knowledge to enhance the identification of interactive argument pairs by analyzing the discussion thread of the target topic in an online forum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in the benchmark dataset. |
WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Huawen Feng, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Qianli Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent code large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that learns from expert battles to address these limitations . they create an arena where leading LLMs challenge each other with evaluations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by leveraging expert battles . it achieves state-of-the-art performance even without relying on proprietary models . |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
GTR-LSTM: A Triple Encoder for Sentence Generation from RDF Data (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge bases are becoming an enabling resource for many applications including Q&A systems, recommender systems, and summarization tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a system to translate RDF triples into natural sentences using an encoder-decoder framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model by 17.6%, 6.0%, and 16.4% in terms of BLEU, METEOR, and TER scores. |
MulDimIF: A Multi-Dimensional Constraint Framework for Evaluating and Improving Instruction Following in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Caishuang Huang, Zhuohan Chen, Wenjie Fu, Chenyuan Yang, Leyi Yang, Yilong Wu, Peng Wang, Meng Zhou, Xiaolong Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on constraint categories, offering little guidance for improving instruction following abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional constraint framework that allows for instruction following . they construct 9,106 code-verifiable samples and evaluate 18 LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction following performance without compromising general performance. |
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines. |
A Multi-Task Learning Framework for Extracting Bacteria Biotope Information (D19-57)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract information from unstructured text are slow or expensive to get. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task transfer multi-learning method for Bacteria Biotope rel+ner task . they use BERT and pre-train it using mask language models and next sentence prediction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best performance on all metrics including slot error rate, precision and recall in the Bacteria Biotope rel+ner subtask. |
LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
MARS-Bench: A Multi-turn Athletic Real-world Scenario Benchmark for Dialogue Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chenghao Yang, Yinbo Luo, Zhoufutu Wen, Qi Chu, Tao Gong, Longxiang Liu, Kaiyuan Zhang, Jianpeng Jiao, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Nenghai Yu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in real-world dialogue applications, but their robustness is criticized all along. |
| Approach: | They propose to use play-by-play text commentary to build a multi-turn athletic real-world scenario dialogue benchmark to evaluate three critical aspects of multi-turned conversations: ultra multi- turn, interactive multi-twist, and cross-turn tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks outperform open-source LLMs on three critical aspects of multi-turn conversations: ultra multi-turned, interactive multi- turn, and cross-turn tasks. |
LLM4Decompile: Decompiling Binary Code with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Decompilation aims to convert binary code to high-level source code, but traditional tools like Ghidra often produce results that are difficult to read and execute. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source LLM series trained to decompile binary code . they optimize the LLM training process and introduce the Llm4Decompile-End models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform GPT-4o and Ghidra on the HumanEval and ExeBench benchmarks by over 100% in terms of re-executability rate. |
Towards Understanding Omission in Dialogue Summarization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialogue summarization are far from satisfactory . omission is a major factor in affecting the quality of summarizing, but few studies have explored the problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that provides high-quality omission labels for dialogue summarization . they propose to use this dataset to detect omitted dialogue utterances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves summarization quality by providing ground-truth omission labels . the proposed dataset and codes are publicly available . |
Making Parameter-efficient Tuning More Efficient: A Unified Framework for Classification Tasks (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Xin Zhou, Ruotian Ma, Yicheng Zou, Xuanting Chen, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Rui Xie, Wei Wu
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that re-uses existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier. |
LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Auto Search Indexer for End-to-End Document Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Generative retrieval heavily relies on the “preprocessed” document identifiers, thus limiting its retrieval performance and ability to retrieve new documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully end-to-end retrieval paradigm that can learn the best docids for existing and new documents automatically via a semantic indexing module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and industrial datasets and can handle new documents. |
LLMEval-Fair: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study on Robust and Fair Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Jingyi Deng, Yuhui Wang, Huayu Sha, Kexin Tan, Qiyuan Peng, Yue Zhang, Junzhe Wang, Shichun Liu, Yueyuan Huang, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Zhihao Zhang, Mingqi Wu, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation of Large Language Models on static benchmarks is vulnerable to data contamination and leaderboard overfitting. |
| Approach: | LLMEval-Fair framework provides a framework for dynamic evaluation of Large Language Models . evaluators use a proprietary bank of 220k graduate-level questions to analyze model data . |
| Outcome: | LLMEval-Fair provides robust and credible evaluation framework for Large Language Models . it provides a strong empirical validation for the dynamic evaluation paradigm . |
Alleviating Exposure Bias via Multi-level Contrastive Learning and Deviation Simulation in Abstractive Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization systems have a severe mismatch between training and inference, i.e., exposure bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level contrastive learning framework for abstractive summarization and a tailored sparse decoder self-attention pattern to bridge the gap between training and inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two summarization datasets while adding relatively low overhead. |
Open Domain Question Answering with Conflicting Contexts (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Siyi Liu, Qiang Ning, Kishaloy Halder, Zheng Qi, Wei Xiao, Phu Mon Htut, Yi Zhang, Neha Anna John, Bonan Min, Yassine Benajiba, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Open domain question answering systems often rely on information retrieved from large collections of text to answer questions. |
| Approach: | They evaluate and benchmark three powerful Large Language Models with a dataset . they find that 25% of unambiguous open domain questions can lead to conflicting contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't be used to answer questions with conflicting contexts . it can be fine tuned to provide richer information into the model's training . |
Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuming Yang, Wantong Zhao, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Xiao Wang, Huiyuan Zheng, Yang Nan, Yuran Wang, Xueying Xu, Kaixin Huang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models struggle with complex entity taxonomies in open domains and lack NER capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to guide LLMs' generalization in Open NER under a universal entity taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 in 3 out-of-domain benchmarks across 15 datasets and 6 languages. |
FacLens: Transferable Probe for Foreseeing Non-Factuality in Fact-Seeking Question Answering of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Self-Injecting Hallucinations (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination mitigation are based on external dependency and require external annotations or auxiliary models for preference data collection. |
| Approach: | a new method is proposed to help model-generated hallucinations without external dependencies. |
| Outcome: | a new method that self-injects hallucinations into a generated response improves halluuutations mitigation. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
Improving Consistency for Text Summarization with Energy Functions (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Sreyashi Nag, Zhengyang Wang, Bing Yin, Heng Ji, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Current abstractive summarization models generate inconsistent content due to the inherently noisy dataset and the discrepancy between maximum likelihood estimation based training objectives and consistency measurements. |
| Approach: | They propose a new consistency taxonomy that categorizes inconsistent content into faithfulness, factuality, and self-supportiveness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on XSUM and CNN/DM datasets show that EnergySum mitigates the trade-off between accuracy and consistency. |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
MovieUN: A Dataset for Movie Understanding and Narrating (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Automatic movie narration generation and narration grounding are important to provide a true movie experience for the blind and visually impaired. |
| Approach: | They propose to use movie clips as a benchmark to support automatic movie narration generation and narration grounding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are effective in supporting two movie-based tasks for the blind and visually impaired. |
MindBridge: Scalable and Cross-Model Knowledge Editing via Memory-Augmented Modality (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods overfit to specific models, causing edited knowledge to be discarded during each LLM update and requiring frequent re-editing. |
| Approach: | They propose a solution that allows editors to edit knowledge in multiple LLMs at the same time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution performs better even in editing tens of thousands of knowledge entries and can adapt to different LLMs. |
Measuring Data Diversity for Instruction Tuning: A Systematic Analysis and A Reliable Metric (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuming Yang, Yang Nan, Junjie Ye, Shihan Dou, Xiao Wang, Shuo Li, Huijie Lv, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored various diversity-aware data selection methods to construct high-quality datasets and enhance model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data diversity to measure instruction tuning of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed diversity metric outperforms existing methods on simulated and real-world data and shows that it captures diversity variations and achieves a 0.97 correlation with instruction tuning. |
Speculating LLMs’ Chinese Training Data Pollution from Their Tokens (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qingjie Zhang, Di Wang, Haoting Qian, Liu Yan, Tianwei Zhang, Ke Xu, Qi Li, Minlie Huang, Hewu Li, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Experiments on GPT and other 23 LLMs indicate that tokens widely exist while GPT’s vocabulary behaves the worst: more than 23% long Chinese tokens (i.e., a token with more than two Chinese characters) are either porn or online gambling. |
| Approach: | They propose to locate Polluted Chinese (PoC) tokens in LLMs and build a PoC token detector to label them in vocabularies by considering each token’s semantics and related contents from the search engines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method predicts that the ratio of “*” related webpages in GPT-4o's training data is around 0.5%. |
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Commercial-scale language models (LMs) have taken APR to unprecedented levels, but they are limited by parameters and humans interact with them through explicit prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes process supervision to improve program repair by allowing users to input feedback from compilers and test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms large outcome-based generation methods and is inspired by strategies used in programming competitions. |
CQG: A Simple and Effective Controlled Generation Framework for Multi-hop Question Generation (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current models can not ensure the complexity of generated questions, so they may generate shallow questions that can be answered without multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled framework to generate multi-hop questions that contain key entities in multi- hop reasoning chains and a novel Transformer-based decoder to guarantee that key entities appear in the questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model 25% on HotpotQA. |
Semi-Supervised Dialogue Policy Learning via Stochastic Reward Estimation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialogue policy optimization do not provide sufficient supervision signals at the end of dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn from state-action pairs of an optimal policy to provide turn-by-turn rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms competitive policy learning baselines on a benchmark multi-domain dataset. |
GameTox: A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis for Enhanced Toxicity Detection in Online Gaming Communities (2025.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect toxic behavior in online gaming environments are limited by utterance-level annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate game chat utterances for toxicity detection through intent classification and slot filling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the detection of toxic speech in online gaming environments and reveals limitations of current models. |
Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Haotan Guo, Jianfei He, Jiayuan Ma, Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Haiyang Zhang, Qi Chen, Wei Wang, Zijing Shi, Tao Shen, Ling Chen
| 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. |
OneNet: A Fine-Tuning Free Framework for Few-Shot Entity Linking via Large Language Model Prompting (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Entity Linking (EL) is the process of associating ambiguous textual mentions to specific entities in a knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes the few-shot learning capabilities of Large Language Models without the need for fine-tuning to improve the accuracy of EL. |
| Outcome: | The framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in a few-shot entity linking task. |
Merge then Realign: Simple and Effective Modality-Incremental Continual Learning for Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enhanced their versatility as they integrate a growing number of modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple MCL paradigm that addresses forgetting and misalignment . they propose 'MErge then ReAlign' to extend existing models to more modalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm is easy to deploy and highly reusable in the MLLM community. |
LitVISTA: A Benchmark for Narrative Orchestration in Literary Text (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Mingzhe Lu, Yiwen Wang, Yanbing Liu, Qi You, Chong Liu, Ruize Qin, Haoyu Dong, Wenyu Zhang, JiaRui Zhang, Yue Hu, Yunpeng Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language models focus on causal coherence, neglecting the complex story arcs and orchestration inherent in human narratives. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-dimensional framework for narrative orchestration that unifies human and model perspectives while jointly characterizing narrative function and structure in a common space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies human and model perspectives while jointly characterizing narrative function and structure in a common space. |
PDF-to-Tree: Parsing PDF Text Blocks into a Tree (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies try to extract one universal reading order for PDF files, however, some applications, like Retrieval Augmented Generation, require breaking long articles into sections and subsections for better indexing. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task and dataset, PDF-to-Tree, which organizes the text blocks of a PDF into a tree structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser achieves 93.93% accuracy, surpassing baseline methods by 6.72%. |
CMQCIC-Bench: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Medical Quality Control Indicator Calculation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guangya Yu, Yanhao Li, Zongying Jiang, Yuxiong Jin, Li Dai, Yupian Lin, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Yongqi Fan, Qi Ye, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Medical quality control indicators are essential to assess the qualifications of healthcare institutions for medical services. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese electronic medical records-based dataset for MQCIC and propose CF-IR method that disentangles clinical fact verification and inferential rule reasoning actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Chain-of-Thought methods on 20 representative LLMs, covering general and medical models. |
Adversarial Knowledge Stimulated Contrastive Prompting for Few-shot Language Learners (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted performance of Pre-trained language models on few-shot Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks by employing task-specific prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cloze-driven prompt framework for prompt tuning that implicitly stimulates knowledge from pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art for prompt-based fine-tuning on few-shot NLU tasks. |
Pre-training Language Model as a Multi-perspective Course Learner (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Beiduo Chen, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Wu Guo, Zhenhua Ling, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA’s average performance by 2.8% and 3.2% absolute points respectively on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective course learning method to fetch many degrees and visual angles for sample-efficient pre-training and to fully leverage the relationship between generator and discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ELECTRA's performance on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks and overshadows recent advanced ELECL-style models under the same settings. |
Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Simplifying Alignment into a Single Process (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models with human preferences post pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Supervised Fine-Tuning and Preference Optimization (PO) with two sub-processes defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP) |
| Outcome: | The proposed process performs comparably or even superiorly to SFT and some typical PO methods across several tasks, particularly those requires generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. |
A Global Past-Future Early Exit Method for Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
Latent Reasoning for Low-Resource Question Generation (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multihop question generation require extensive data collection and decomposition. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative approach that optimizes the two-phase model without question decomposition data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on HOTPOTQA, a benchmark multi-hop question answering dataset. |
Transferring from Formal Newswire Domain with Hypernet for Twitter POS Tagging (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing POS tagging methods for Twitter use labeled newswire text . however, Twitter users tend to mimic formal media expressions and develop linguistically informal styles. |
| Approach: | They propose to use newswire text to learn POS tagging for Twitter while twitter users are developing linguistically informal styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods on three different datasets. |
Causal Intervention for Abstractive Related Work Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models ignore the inherent causality during related work generation, leading to spurious correlations which downgrade the models’ generation quality and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a Causal Intervention Module for Related Work Generation (CaM) that captures causal relationships in related work generation and implements causal interventions to mitigate the negative impact of spurious correlations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the quality and coherence of generated related work by capturing causalities in the generation process. |
TEF: Causality-Aware Taxonomy Expansion via Front-Door Criterion (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research still faces spurious query-anchor matching due to unobserved factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses the front-door criteria to decompose the expansion process into a parser module and a connector to isolate confounding effects. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Learning Domain Representation for Multi-Domain Sentiment Classification (N18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Training data for sentiment analysis is abundant in multiple domains, yet scarce for other domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use domain-specific representations of input sentences to improve sentiment classification . they use a descriptor vector to map adversarially trained domain-general Bi-LSTM inputs into domain- specific representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on multi-domain sentiment analysis significantly. |
A Partition Filter Network for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract entity and relation feature are flawed because they do not consider the intimate connection between NER and RE. |
| Approach: | They propose a partition filter network to model two-way interaction between tasks . they leverage two gates: entity and relation gate, to segment neurons into two task partitions and one shared partition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly better than previous approaches on six public datasets. |
GroundingGPT: Language Enhanced Multi-modal Grounding Model (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaowei Li, Qi Xu, Dong Zhang, Hang Song, YiQing Cai, Qi Qi, Ran Zhou, Junting Pan, Zefeng Li, Vu Tu, Zhida Huang, Tao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal large language models focus on capturing global information while neglecting the fine-grained local information in multimodal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end language enhanced multi-modal grounding model that performs fine-grained grounding tasks for image, video and audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive fine-grained understanding of multi-modal inputs while maintaining or improving its global comprehension capabilities. |
PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangfeng Wang, Hangyu Guo, Yanlin Lai, Mitt Huang, Liang Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Yinmin Zhang, Qi Han, null Xiaoxiaoren, Chun Yuan, Tong Xu, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Current outcome-centric verification paradigms neglect potential errors in the derivation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via **PRIME**. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline verification paradigm on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME models. |
Modeling the Q-Diversity in a Min-max Play Game for Robust Optimization (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for minimizing the worst-case loss of annotated groups are lacking in practice due to expensive annotations and privacy issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a distributionally robust optimization framework that relaxes group identification into direct parameterization by using an interactive training mode. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real-world text classification tasks. |
CrossWOZ: A Large-Scale Chinese Cross-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset (2020.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite the significant contributions to the community, there is still a gap between existing dialogue corpora and real-life human dialogue data. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop Chinese cross-domain wizard-of-oz task-oriented dataset CrossWOZ with rich annotations of dialogue states and dialogue acts on both user and system sides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 6K dialogue sessions and 102K utterances for 5 domains, including hotel, restaurant, attraction, metro, and taxi. |
DiffZOO: A Purely Query-Based Black-Box Attack for Red-teaming Text-to-Image Generative Model via Zeroth Order Optimization (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-image (T2I) synthesis diffusion models raise misuse concerns, particularly in creating prohibited or not-safe-for-work (NSFW) images. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses zeroth order optimization to procure gradient approximations and harnesses both C-PRV and D-PRv to enhance attack prompts within a discrete prompt space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an 8.5% higher average attack success rate than previous works on multiple state-of-the-art safety mechanisms. |
Unveiling Linguistic Regions in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on how LLMs achieve cross-lingual alignment and generalization have not explored the intrinsic mechanisms of how they achieve crosslingual alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose to remove a core region that corresponds to linguistic competence and set parameters to zero to reduce performance across 30 different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to perform tasks requiring abstract knowledge and reasoning in complex languages. |
RobustQA: Benchmarking the Robustness of Domain Adaptation for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rujun Han, Peng Qi, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Juliette Burger, William Yang Wang, Zhiheng Huang, Bing Xiang, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Existing ODQA datasets consist mainly of Wikipedia corpus, and are insufficient to study models’ generalizability across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate ODQA's domain robustness using Wikipedia corpus . they annotate QA pairs in retrieval datasets with rigorous quality control . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves model performance on annotated QA pairs in retrieval datasets with rigorous quality control. |
SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuang Cheng, Yihan Bian, Dawei Liu, Yuhua Jiang, Yihao Liu, Linfeng Zhang, Qian Yao, Zhongbo Tian, Wenhai Wang, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models are a dominant paradigm in the field of parallelism and non-causal modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a blockwise discrete diffusion model that preserves AR-compatible serving while enabling parallel intra-block generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves theoretical speedups over 5 and wall-clock speedup of 2.3 on H200 GPUs in latency-critical regimes. |
A Structure-Aware Argument Encoder for Literature Discourse Analysis (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yinzi Li, Wei Chen, Zhongyu Wei, Yujun Huang, Chujun Wang, Siyuan Wang, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Libo Wu
| Challenge: | Existing research for argument representation learning treats tokens in sentences equally and ignores the implied structure information of argumentative context. |
| Approach: | They propose to separate tokens into two groups to capture structural information of arguments and to incorporate paragraph-level position information into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures structural information of arguments and is able to identify arguments automatically. |
Open-World Attribute Mining for E-Commerce Products with Multimodal Self-Correction Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current AM methods focus on extracting attributes from unimodal text, underutilizing multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal self-correction instruction tuning to extract new attributes from images and text with Multimodal Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets. |
XAL: EXplainable Active Learning Makes Classifiers Better Low-resource Learners (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for active learning rely on model uncertainty or disagreement to pick unlabeled data, leading to over-confidence in superficial patterns and lack of exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a bi-directional encoder and a uni-directional decoder to generate and score an explanation for low-resource text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 9 strong baselines on six datasets and can generate explanations for its predictions. |
Language-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Qi, Fengran Mo, Yufeng Chen, Xue Zhang, Shuo Wang, Hongliang Li, Xu Jinan, Meng Jiang, Jian-Yun Nie, Kaiyu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (MRAG) use a single-turn retrieval and subsequent optimization to acquire and integrate beneficial external knowledge from multilingual collections. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual search-augmented reinforcement learning framework that integrates a language-coupled Group Relative Policy Optimization into the policy and reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance and is appropriate for various practical scenarios such as constrained training data and retrieval over collections encompassing a large number of languages. |
RethinkingTMSC: An Empirical Study for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that current TMSC systems rely on textual information, and the progress in tackling this task has slowed down. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate both visual and textual information to improve the performance of TMSC by considering multimodal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates both visual and textual information to improve performance. |
Hard Sample Aware Prompt-Tuning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt-tuning based few-shot learning has garnered increasing attention in recent years due to its efficiency and promising capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to distinguish informative hard samples from misleading ones in model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA results on a series of NLP tasks pushing the SST-5 accuracy to 49.5% (1.1% point absolute improvement), QNLI accuracy to 74.6% (1.9% absolute improvement) |
PlugAT: A Plug and Play Module to Defend against Textual Adversarial Attack (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples can be easily fooled by adversarially perturbed examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable defense module PlugAT to provide robust predictions by adding a few trainable parameters to the model inputs while keeping the original model frozen. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves robustness over several strong baselines whilst training only 9.1% parameters. |
Subspace Defense: Discarding Adversarial Perturbations by Learning a Subspace for Clean Signals (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that extract discrete inputs into fixed-length representations are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that place perturbations on clean inputs to fool DNNs. |
| Approach: | They propose to inspect the subspaces of sample features through spectral analysis to better understand adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy enables the model to inherently suppress adversaries, which boosts model robustness and motivates new directions of effective adversarial defense. |
LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Li, Yiqun Zhang, Zhaoyan Guo, Chenxu Wang, Shengji Tang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Yang Chen, Biqing Qi, Peng Ye, Lei Bai, Zhen Wang, Shuyue Hu
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the best suitable model from an ensemble. |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing . they find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented and performance-cost trade-off routing. |
Stay Hungry, Stay Focused: Generating Informative and Specific Questions in Information-Seeking Conversations (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on question generation assumes knowledge of what the answer might be . instead, questioner must reason pragmatically about how to acquire new information . |
| Approach: | They propose a question generation system that generates pragmatically relevant questions in information-asymmetric conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed questioner significantly improves the informativeness and specificity of questions generated over a baseline model as evaluated by metrics as well as humans. |
Detecting Adversarial Samples through Sharpness of Loss Landscape (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zheng, Shihan Dou, Yuhao Zhou, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Xuanjing Huang, Menghan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that adversarial samples are more vulnerable than normal ones to textual adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple and effective sharpness-based detector that can distinguish adversarial samples by maximizing the loss increment within the region where the inference sample is located. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous detection methods by large margins on three text classification tasks. |
Read Extensively, Focus Smartly: A Cross-document Semantic Enhancement Method for Visual Documents NER (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract entities from visually-rich documents ignore the inherent multimodality of VRDs and thus the suboptimal results are achieved. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal semantic enhancement method that filters redundant information in the current document and a cross-document information awareness technique to enrich the entity-related context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two documents understanding benchmarks covering eight languages. |
Toward Recognizing More Entity Types in NER: An Efficient Implementation using Only Entity Lexicons (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing named entity recognition systems require large scale labeled data to perform, while annotation of NER data is laborious and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose to adjust an existing named entity recognition system to recognize entity types not defined in the system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be quickly adjusted to a named entity recognition system. |
Low-Resource Dialogue Summarization with Domain-Agnostic Multi-Source Pretraining (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for low-resource dialogue summarization neglect the difference between dialogues and conventional articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source pretraining paradigm to leverage external summary data . they exploit large-scale in-domain non-summary data to separate dialogue encoder and summary decoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to better leverage external summary data. |
Not All Experts are Equal: Efficient Expert Pruning and Skipping for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLMs achieve higher performance with fewer active parameters, but are still difficult to deploy due to their immense parameter sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose expert-level sparsification techniques to enhance the deployment efficiency of large language models by introducing plug-and-play expert pruning and skipping techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce model sizes and increase inference speed while maintaining satisfactory performance across a wide range of tasks. |
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hao Chen, Haoze Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Lirong Gao, Qi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads. |
Taxonomy-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction for Domain-Specific Scientific Applications (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for constructing domain-specific knowledge graphs neglect curated taxonomies and LLMs fail to extract KGs in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy-driven framework for constructing domain-specific knowledge graphs . they use structured taxonomies, Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be adapted for other specialized domains. |
Dim-Krum: Backdoor-Resistant Federated Learning for NLP with Dimension-wise Krum-Based Aggregation (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce backdoor risk of federated learning are validated in the CV field. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated aggregation algorithm that detects errors determined by backdoor strengths for NLP attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is hard to defend against than CV, and the results validate it. |
PKAD: Pretrained Knowledge is All You Need to Detect and Mitigate Textual Backdoor Attacks (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current defense methods can be classified into inference-time and training-time ones based on their execution phase. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage poison detection strategy using pre-trained language models to detect poisoned samples before model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance than current methods more quickly and with fewer training costs. |
InMind: Evaluating LLMs in Capturing and Applying Individual Human Reasoning Styles (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Qi Chen, Diping Song, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities across complex mathematical and scientific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess whether LLMs can capture and apply personalized reasoning styles in social deduction games. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs on the game Avalon and shows that they can capture and apply individualized reasoning styles. |
Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) encoders lack global context representation, whereas MT encoder lacks it. |
| Approach: | They propose a Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding method for speech translation . they propose an adaptor module to alleviate representation inconsistency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 18.3 and 25.2 on two ST tasks. |
Hi-ArG: Exploring the Integration of Hierarchical Argumentation Graphs in Language Pretraining (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jingcong Liang, Rong Ye, Meng Han, Qi Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xinyu Zhang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent studies have discussed its capability to assist language models for various applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure to organize arguments using the **Hi**erarchical **Ar**gumentation **G**raph (Hi-ArG) and propose two approaches to exploit Hi-AarG, including a text-graph multi-modal model GreaseArR and a framework augmented with graph information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed structure supersedes existing language models on two argumentation tasks while incorporating graph information during further training improves vanilla language models. |
P4: Plug-and-Play Discrete Prompting for Large Language Models Personalization (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in following instructions, but manually prompting them to exhibit certain personalities may result in sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play prompting method to manipulate Large Language Models with distinct human-like personality traits by appending discrete personalized suffixes to query or dialog histories and focusing exclusively on influential tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other prompting methods and model editing methods on four models ranging from 1.1B to 13B and achieves 79.9% accuracy in customizing LLMs’ personalities. |
AutoReproduce: Automatic AI Experiment Reproduction with Paper Lineage (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xuanle Zhao, Zilin Sang, Yuxuan Li, Qi Shi, Weilun Zhao, Shuo Wang, Duzhen Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Efficient reproduction of research papers requires deep domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically mines implicit knowledge from the cited literature to reproduce experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines across all metrics and reproduces experimental code in a complete, end-to-end manner. |
Long-Horizon Dialogue Understanding for Role Identification in the Game of Avalon with Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Simon Stepputtis, Joseph Campbell, Yaqi Xie, Zhengyang Qi, Wenxin Zhang, Ruiyi Wang, Sanketh Rangreji, Charles Lewis, Katia Sycara
| Challenge: | Deception and persuasion play a critical role in long-horizon multi-party dialogues, especially when the interests, goals, and motivations of the participants are not aligned. |
| Approach: | They propose a game in which players must determine each other’s hidden identities to complete their team’s objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to determine the true player identities of six human players in a cooperative-competitive game. |
All Information is Valuable: Question Matching over Full Information Transmission Network (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for question matching only transmit one kind of information while failing to utilize both kinds of information simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a question matching network that can transmit both representation and interactive information together in a simultaneous fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baseline models on two standard benchmarks. |
OpenAttack: An Open-source Textual Adversarial Attack Toolkit (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Guoyang Zeng, Fanchao Qi, Qianrui Zhou, Tingji Zhang, Zixian Ma, Bairu Hou, Yuan Zang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Various attack models are distinct and implemented with different programming frameworks and settings, which hinders quick utilization and fair comparison of attack models. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source textual adversarial attack toolkit to solve these issues by combining 15 typical attack models into one toolkit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports all attack types, multilinguality, and parallel processing. |
Empirical Study of Zero-Shot NER with ChatGPT (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been a key component of natural language processing (NLP) . |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the NER task into simpler subproblems by labels and propose a syntactic augmentation strategy to stimulate model's intermediate thinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve remarkable improvements for zero-shot NER across seven benchmarks, including Chinese and English datasets. |
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Weizhen Qi, Yeyun Gong, Yu Yan, Can Xu, Bolun Yao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Jiusheng Chen, Ruofei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiheng Xi, Rui Zheng, Yuansen Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei, Minlong Peng, Mingming Sun, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting inter-task transferability are sparse and task-specific. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses connectivity patterns of neurons as a unique identifier associated with a task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in predicting inter-task transferability across data regimes and transfer settings while keeping high efficiency in computation and storage. |
EfficientRAG: Efficient Retriever for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyuan Zhuang, Zhiyang Zhang, Sitao Cheng, Fangkai Yang, Jia Liu, Shujian Huang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented generation methods rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs) Large-language models lack knowledge underrepresented in training data and still face hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient retriever for multi-hop question answering that generates new queries iteratively without the need for LLM calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on three open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets. |
Diagnosing Moral Reasoning Acquisition in Language Models: Pragmatics and Generalization (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior research has shown that LLMs fail to perform satisfactorily on moral cognizance tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to use curated datasets to improve LLMs' moral cognizance . they find pragmatic dilemma constrains generalization ability of current learning paradigms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigms fail to perform on moral cognizance tasks, the authors show . they show that the pragmatic dilemma is the primary bottleneck for moral reasoning acquisition . |
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Binghai Wang, Rui Zheng, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Wei Shen, Yuhao Zhou, Dong Yan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets. |
One-Model-Connects-All: A Unified Graph Pre-Training Model for Online Community Modeling (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Ruoxue Ma, Jiarong Xu, Xinnong Zhang, Haozhe Zhang, Zuyu Zhao, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing studies on integrating online community to solve social problems have not fully utilized these three components and the relationship among them. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that simultaneously considers communities, users, and texts and can easily connect with a variety of downstream tasks related to social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to perform violation detection, sentiment analysis, and community recommendation across multiple tasks. |
Characterizing the Impacts of Instances on Robustness (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Qin Liu, Wenbin Lai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Jin Ma, Ying Shan, Weifeng Ge
| Challenge: | Existing defense approaches focus on developing new model structures or training algorithms, but they do little to tap the potential of training instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training. |
Open Set Relation Extraction via Unknown-Aware Training (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jun Zhao, Xin Zhao, WenYu Zhan, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Zhongyu Wei, Yun Wen Chen, Xiang Gao, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing supervised relation extraction methods can still misclassify unknown relations into known relations due to the lack of supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that regularizes the model by dynamically synthesizing negative instances that can provide the missing supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves SOTA unknown relation detection without compromising the classification of known relations. |
AutoRAG-HP: Automatic Online Hyper-Parameter Tuning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jia Fu, Xiaoting Qin, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Jue Zhang, Qingwei Lin, Yubo Chen, Dongmei Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have transformed ML/AI development . a reevaluation of AutoML principles for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems is needed. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for hyper-parameter tuning and a hierarchical MAB method for efficient exploration of large search spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in more challenging optimization scenarios. |
Discrete Argument Representation Learning for Interactive Argument Pair Identification (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on monological argumentation covers claims generation, argument structure prediction, and essay scoring. |
| Approach: | They propose to identify argument pairs from two posts with opposite stances to a certain topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing models on a large-scale dataset . it also proves that it is useful for analyzing argument pairs from two posts . |
Controllable Contamination Detection for Reliable LLM Evaluation with Statistical Guarantees (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zheng Zhang, Qi Liu, Siyuan Liang, Ning Li, Zirui Hu, Weibo Gao, Rui Li, Zhenya Huang, Leszek Rutkowski, Baosheng Yu, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing training data detectors fail to detect clean samples from contaminated test sets . existing methods fail to identify clean samples due to black-box nature of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that detects and filters contaminated evaluation data . they propose 'failure detection' to reduce the proportion of contaminated samples mistakenly retained . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false discovery rate (FDR) under valid FDR control while maintaining evaluation consistency. |
ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format (2023.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zhu, Christian Geishauser, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Baolin Peng, Zheng Zhang, Shutong Feng, Michael Heck, Nurul Lubis, Dazhen Wan, Xiaochen Zhu, Jianfeng Gao, Milica Gasic, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing tools for building TOD systems often lack a user-friendly interface . a toolkit with advanced, easily integrable modules is needed to bridge this gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a multifaceted dialogue system toolkit that integrates diverse datasets and models with a streamlined training process and in-depth evaluation tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit combines RL and transfer learning to support the rapid development and evaluation of robust dialogue policies. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Thought-Action Graph Reasoning: Faithful and Efficient Reasoning of Large Language Models via Reusing Past Experience (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhixiao Qi, Feng Huang, Yunqi Zhang, Shijie Zhang, Qingqing Sun, Yongfeng Huang, Minghu Jiang, Shuai Chen, Tianyi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs with LLMs suffer from poor generalization or low reasoning efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a thought-action Graph (TAG) that decomposes LLM-KG interaction trajectories into fine-grained semantic operators and guides LLM to execute on them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on KGQA benchmarks while reducing the number of LLM calls and generated tokens. |
Efficient Integration of External Knowledge to LLM-based World Models via Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing attempts to enhance LLM-based world models through prompting or fine-tuning approaches are either requiring human knowledge or computationally extensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation to integrate external knowledge to LLM-based world models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and exhibits strong generalizability. |
NL2Lean: Translating Natural Language into Lean 4 through Multi-Aspect Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yue Fang, Shaohan Huang, Xin Yu, Haizhen Huang, Zihan Zhang, Weiwei Deng, Furu Wei, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Existing formal proof assistants rely on instruction tuning and lack fine-grained structural and semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to translate natural language into formal language such as Lean 4 . they use a model with basic translation ability to refine the model's reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on NL-to-Lean 4 tasks. |
CausalMACE: Causality Empowered Multi-Agents in Minecraft Cooperative Tasks (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on multi-agent collaborative tasks in Minecraft is limited due to inefficiency and limited fault tolerance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates causality to manage dependencies among subtasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-agent cooperative tasks of Minecraft. |
LM-Searcher: Cross-domain Neural Architecture Search with LLMs via Unified Numerical Encoding (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxuan Hu, Jihao Liu, Ke Wang, Jinliang Zheng, Weikang Shi, Manyuan Zhang, Qi Dou, Rui Liu, Aojun Zhou, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have opened new avenues for solving complex optimization problems, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages LLMs for cross-domain neural architecture optimization without extensive domain-specific tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| 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. |
Generalizable and Explainable Dialogue Generation via Explicit Action Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Conditioned response generation for task-oriented dialogues implicitly optimizes task completion and language quality. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn natural language actions that represent utterances as a span of words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms latent action baselines on a multi-domain dataset. |
ToolSword: Unveiling Safety Issues of Large Language Models in Tool Learning Across Three Stages (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Sixian Li, Guanyu Li, Caishuang Huang, Songyang Gao, Yilong Wu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on enhancing LLMs capabilities through tool utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to investigate safety issues in large language models in tool learning . they propose malicious queries and jailbreak attacks in the input stage . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework investigates six safety scenarios for LLMs in tool learning . the data will be released upon acceptance of the proposed framework . |
PromptBERT: Improving BERT Sentence Embeddings with Prompts (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ting Jiang, Jian Jiao, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Furu Wei, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing research shows that BERT and RoBERTa are poor in sentence embeddings due to static token embeddable bias and ineffective BERT layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel contrastive learning method for better sentence embeddings by using a template denoising technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.29 and 2.58 points of improvement compared to SimCSE and RoBERTa in the unsupervised setting. |
Mnemis: Dual-Route Retrieval on Hierarchical Graphs for Long-Term LLM Memory (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zihao Tang, Xin Yu, Ziyu Xiao, Zengxuan Wen, Zelin Li, Jiaxi Zhou, Hualei Wang, Haohua Wang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical messages are based on similarity-based mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates System-1 similarity search with a complementary System-2 mechanism, termed Global Selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on long-term memory benchmarks and 93.9 on LoCoMo and 91.6 on LongMemEval-S. |
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Sebastian Gehrmann, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Abinaya Mahendiran, Alex Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Aman Madaan, Angelina Mcmillan-major, Anna Shvets, Ashish Upadhyay, Bernd Bohnet, Bingsheng Yao, Bryan Wilie, Chandra Bhagavatula, Chaobin You, Craig Thomson, Cristina Garbacea, Dakuo Wang, Daniel Deutsch, Deyi Xiong, Di Jin, Dimitra Gkatzia, Dragomir Radev, Elizabeth Clark, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Filip Ginter, Genta Indra Winata, Hendrik Strobelt, Hiroaki Hayashi, Jekaterina Novikova, Jenna Kanerva, Jenny Chim, Jiawei Zhou, Jordan Clive, Joshua Maynez, João Sedoc, Juraj Juraska, Kaustubh Dhole, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Laura Perez Beltrachini, Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro, Lewis Tunstall, Li Zhang, Mahim Pushkarna, Mathias Creutz, Michael White, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Moussa Kamal Eddine, Nico Daheim, Nishant Subramani, Ondrej Dusek, Paul Pu Liang, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Qi Zhu, Ratish Puduppully, Reno Kriz, Rifat Shahriyar, Ronald Cardenas, Saad Mahamood, Salomey Osei, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Sanja Štajner, Sebastien Montella, Shailza Jolly, Simon Mille, Tahmid Hasan, Tianhao Shen, Tosin Adewumi, Vikas Raunak, Vipul Raheja, Vitaly Nikolaev, Vivian Tsai, Yacine Jernite, Ying Xu, Yisi Sang, Yixin Liu, Yufang Hou
| Challenge: | Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark to integrate new evaluation methods into existing evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation infrastructure bridges the gap between the advantages of leaderboards and in-depth and evolving evaluations by allowing model developers to benefit from each other's work. |
Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. Existing work in XQA focuses on integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA methods on complex QA datasets. |
RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yilun Zhao, Chen Zhao, Linyong Nan, Zhenting Qi, Wenlin Zhang, Xiangru Tang, Boyu Mi, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing Table QA models are vulnerable to task-specific perturbations, such as replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on existing Table QA models against human-annotated adversarial perturbations. |
Towards Identification and Intervention of Safety-Critical Parameters in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing safety-related methodologies for large language models are lacking . despite advances in safety alignment techniques, safeguarding LLMs during adaptation to various tasks remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to quantify how different parameters affect LLM safety . they propose two targeted intervention paradigms for safety enhancement and preservation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals safety-critical patterns across different LLM architectures. |
TSGP: Two-Stage Generative Prompting for Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on acquiring relevant knowledge by retrieving external knowledge bases and fine-tuning pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage prompt-based unsupervised commonsense question answering framework that leverages implicit knowledge stored in PrLMs to generate knowledge for questions with unlimited types and possible candidate answers independent of specified choices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the reasoning ability of language models in unsupervised settings. |
OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
Robust Lottery Tickets for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pre-trained language models contain smaller matching subnetworks that are not robust to adversarial examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to find robust tickets hidden in pre-trained language models by learning binary weight masks and an adversarial loss objective to guide the search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on previous work on adversarial robustness evaluation. |
SDAR-VL: Stable and Efficient Block-wise Diffusion for Vision-Language Understanding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing block-wise discrete diffusion models lack robust autoregressive (AR) decoders. |
| Approach: | They propose a block-wise discrete diffusion framework for large-scale vision-language understanding with a progressive beta noise curriculum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves training efficiency, convergence stability, and task performance over conventional block diffusion. |
RLSeek: Evidence-Grounded Reasoning for RAG Hallucination Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoheng Huang, Dacheng Wen, Yutao Zhu, Xiaoying Lian, Yushi Liang, Kai Hao, Nan Li, Liangjie Zhang, Qi Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou, Fangzhao Wu
| Challenge: | Recent work addresses this problem by training span-level hallucination detectors using reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly enforces active evidence seeking during CoT reasoning by requiring quotation of relevant source segments at each verification step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves hallucination span detection performance with limited reasoning overhead and improved robustness in out-of-domain settings. |
MMCLIP: Cross-Modal Attention Masked Modelling for Medical Language-Image Pre-Training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing vision-and-language pretraining methods face challenges in reconstructing pathological features due to limited data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses masked modeling to enhance visual and linguistic learning. |
| Outcome: | MMCLIP integrates unpaired data through disease-kind prompts to achieve state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot and fine-tuning across five benchmarks. |
Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziheng Li, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Qiang Lou, Haizhen Huang, Jian Jiao, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that dual encoder models trained with the sentence-level translation ranking task are effective methods for cross-lingual sentence embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-alignment pre-training framework that incorporates both sentence-level and token-level alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cross-lingual sentence embedding on three cross-linguistic benchmarks. |
GA-SAM: Gradient-Strength based Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Improved Generalization (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show flat minima tend to imply better generalization abilities . however, it has some difficulty implying SAM to some natural language tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a flatness-aware minimization algorithm that can be applied to natural language tasks . they propose to use parameter corruptions to explain why flat minima generalize better . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can generalize better for flat minima that are robust against corruptions or perturbations. |
GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dayiheng Liu, Yu Yan, Yeyun Gong, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Weizhu Chen, Jie Fu, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Pengcheng Wang, Jiusheng Chen, Daxin Jiang, Jiancheng Lv, Ruofei Zhang, Winnie Wu, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Multi-task benchmarks focus on a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks without considering the Natural Language Generation (NLG) models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities of NLG models across eight language generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on GLUE and Su-perGLUE for English and several other languages. |
For-Value: Efficient Forward-Only Data Valuation for finetuning LLMs and VLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wenlong Deng, Qi Zeng, Jiaming Zhang, Minghui Chen, Zixin Ding, Christos Thrampoulidis, Boying Gong, Xiaoxiao Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for data valuation rely on gradient computations, making them prohibitive for billion-parameter models. |
| Approach: | They propose a forward-only data valuation framework that enables efficient batch-scalable value estimation while maintaining effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or outperforms gradient-based baselines in detecting influential data and mislabeled data while achieving significant efficiency improvements. |
ORTicket: Let One Robust BERT Ticket Transfer across Different Tasks (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are susceptible to subtle perturbations and require multiple adversarial training during fine-tuning to improve their robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial defense method ORTicket that fine-tunes a model for downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable robustness to other defense methods while maintaining the efficiency of fine-tuning. |
TextFusion: Privacy-Preserving Pre-trained Model Inference via Token Fusion (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xin Zhou, Jinzhu Lu, Tao Gui, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Yuran Wang, Yong Ding, Yibo Cheung, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to preserve inference privacy are available as cloud services . however, the risk of privacy leakage remains, according to recent studies . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to preserve inference privacy by fusing token representations in the cloud. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves inference privacy without sacrificing performance on different scenarios. |
Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Zheng, Hongyi Guo, Zhihan Liu, Xiaoying Zhang, Yuanshun Yao, Xiaojun Xu, Zhaoran Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yang Liu, Hang Li
| Challenge: | Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values. |
| Approach: | They propose an alignment method based on a two-agent game consisting of an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a two-agent game with an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
Learning “O” Helps for Learning More: Handling the Unlabeled Entity Problem for Class-incremental NER (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruotian Ma, Xuanting Chen, Zhang Lin, Xin Zhou, Junzhe Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen
| Challenge: | Existing Named Entity Recognition systems are typically trained on a large-scale dataset with predefined entity classes, then deployed for entity recognition on the test data without further adaptation or refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation learning method that adaptively detects entity clusters in "O" and two effective distance-based relabeling strategies for better learning the old classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 10.62% improvement over the baseline methods. |
CASN:Class-Aware Score Network for Textual Adversarial Detection (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to counteract adversarial attacks can be divided into two directions, adversarials defense and adversarially detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a score-based generative method to implicitly model the data distribution using a log-density distribution and supervised contrastive learning to guide the estimation using label information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three text classification tasks on four advanced attack algorithms. |
Hidden Killer: Invisible Textual Backdoor Attacks with Syntactic Trigger (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for textual backdoor attacks insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, causing detection and blocking of backdoors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use syntactic structure as trigger in textual backdoor attacks . they propose to achieve similar attack performance but have higher invisibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves almost 100% success rate but has higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses than the insertion-based methods. |
Enhancing LLM-based Search Agents via Contribution Weighted Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training large language models suffer from unstable value estimation, whereas outcome supervision struggles with credit assignment due to sparse, trajectory-level rewards. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates process supervision into group relative policy optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard GRPO on knowledge-intensive benchmarks by 5.0% and 6.3% on Qwen3-1.7B. |
Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that popular NLP models are vulnerable to both adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer . the authors propose to use text style to alter the style of a sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that popular models are vulnerable to both attacks based on text style transfer . the results show that the proposed methods perform better than baselines in many aspects . |
Question Directed Graph Attention Network for Numerical Reasoning over Text (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Kunlong Chen, Weidi Xu, Xingyi Cheng, Zou Xiaochuan, Yuyu Zhang, Le Song, Taifeng Wang, Yuan Qi, Wei Chu
| Challenge: | Numerical reasoning requires both natural language understanding and arithmetic computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph representation for the context of the passage and question needed for numerical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves remarkable results in benchmark datasets such as DROP. |
Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuming Yang, Mingyoung Lai, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Mingqi Wu, Chiyue Huang, Jun Zhao, Haijun Lv, Jian Tong, Yunhua Zhou, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model’s current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rank–Surprisal Ratio metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
Thinking Clearly, Talking Fast: Concept-Guided Non-Autoregressive Generation for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models with seq2seq framework lack ability to effectively manage concept transitions . lack of concept management strategies might lead to incoherent dialogue due to loosely connected concepts . |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-guided non-autoregressive model for open-domain dialogue generation that learns to identify multiple associated concepts from a conceptual graph and a customized Insertion Transformer to perform concept-directed generation to complete a response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in automatic and human evaluations with substantially faster inference speed. |
TASO: Task-Aligned Sparse Optimization for Parameter-Efficient Model Adaptation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Daiye Miao, Yufang Liu, Jie Wang, Changzhi Sun, Yunke Zhang, Demei Yan, Shaokang Dong, Qi Zhang, Yuanbin Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LoRA introduces substantial parameter redundancy, which not only increases the number of trainable parameters but also hinders the effectiveness of fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages importance information from the pretrained model’s weights to mitigate LoRA redundancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters required for task adaptation while providing a task-aligned perspective for LoRA redundancy reduction. |
Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition using Positive-Unlabeled Learning (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical studies on four public NER datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to perform named entity recognition using unlabeled data and named entity dictionaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can estimate task loss as if there is fully labeled data. |
Incorporating Dynamic Semantics into Pre-Trained Language Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) predicts sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dynamic aspect-oriented semantics-based method to learn ABSA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn dynamic aspect-oriented semantics for ABSA on three benchmark datasets. |
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Keyphrase Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for keyphrase generation generate uncontrollable and inaccurate absent keyphrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based method that captures explicit knowledge from related references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baseline keyphrase generation models on multiple benchmarks. |
Efficient Adversarial Training with Robust Early-Bird Tickets (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the robustness of pre-trained language models are expensive because of the need to generate adversarial examples via gradient descent. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial optimization method that searches for robust tickets with structured sparsity in the early stage and fine-tunes tickets in the remaining time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 7 13 training speedups while maintaining comparable or even better robustness compared to the most competitive state-of-the-art methods. |
EgoMemory: Memory-Augmented Personalized Retrieval for Long-Context Egocentric Video (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuanmin Tang, Jue Zhang, Xiaoting Qin, Jing Yu, Meikang Qiu, Gaopeng Gou, Gang Xiong, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Wu
| Challenge: | Existing egocentric video datasets do not support the personalization and long-context reasoning required for episodic memory retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark framework that uses MLLMs and reflective Chain-of-Thought to ground user queries in personal memory explicitly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on three benchmarks . it can be used to generate detailed target video descriptions in long-context contexts based on user-specific object annotations enriched with user-specified object annotation data . |
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training Models (D19-3)
Copied to clipboard
Zhe Zhao, Hui Chen, Jinbin Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tao Liu, Wei Lu, Xi Chen, Haotang Deng, Qi Ju, Xiaoyong Du
| Challenge: | Existing work on pre-training models have shown that it is important to use a framework to deploy various pre- training models efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit that assembles pre-trained models on demand and encapsulates them with rich modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reproduce state-of-the-art models or develop models that remain unexplored. |
Locate Then Ask: Interpretable Stepwise Reasoning for Multi-hop Question Answering (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-hop reasoning ignore grounding on supporting facts of each step, which tends to generate inaccurate decompositions. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable stepwise reasoning framework that incorporates supporting sentences and questions at each intermediate step and utilizes the inference of the current hop for the next until reasoning out the final result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can boost performance and yield a better interpretable reasoning process without decomposition supervision. |
Do LLMs Overcome Shortcut Learning? An Evaluation of Shortcut Challenges in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various tasks, but may rely on dataset biases as shortcuts for prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a test suite to evaluate the impact of shortcuts on LLMs' performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suite incorporates six shortcut types, five evaluation metrics, and four prompting strategies. |
Pretrain-KGE: Learning Knowledge Representation from Pretrained Language Models (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Orca: A Few-shot Benchmark for Chinese Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Nuo Chen, Hongguang Li, Junqing He, Yinan Bao, Xinshi Lin, Qi Yang, Jianfeng Liu, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Baoyuan Wang, Jia Li
| 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. |
Neural Network Surgery: Injecting Data Patterns into Pre-trained Models with Minimal Instance-wise Side Effects (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Movie101: A New Movie Understanding Benchmark (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to narrate movies with no actors are difficult to implement in real situations . a new metric is proposed to provide the best correlation with human evaluation . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese movie benchmark to help visually impaired enjoy movies . they propose metric called Movie Narration Score (MNScore) which achieves best correlation with human evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and the existing methods. |
Unveiling the Deficiencies of Pre-trained Text-and-Layout Models in Real-world Visually-rich Document Information Extraction (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Chong Zhang, Yixi Zhao, Yulu Xie, Chenshu Yuan, Yi Tu, Ya Guo, Mingxu Chai, Ziyu Shen, Yue Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | PTLMs have shown remarkable success in multiple information extraction tasks . however, their performance in real-world scenarios falls short of expectations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use an entity-centric dataset to evaluate PTLMs' performance . they find that inadequate annotations in benchmark datasets lead to spurious correlations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset disentangles the falsely-coupled segment and entity annotations that arises from the block-level annotation of FUNSD. |
FinMRAGBench: A Realistic and Complex Benchmark for Multi-Modal RAG in Financial Document Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shouqing Yang, Qi Zhang, Yuhang Yang, Ruikang Xu, Yuwei Hou, Zhulin Jia, Lirong Gao, Haobo Wang, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Gang Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for realistic financial analysis fail to capture realistic financial situations involving cross-document retrieval, multi-page evidence integration, and diverse analytical tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal financial RAG benchmark that evaluates large language models in realistic financial analysis settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the strongest overall performance across all models. |
Modeling Layout Reading Order as Ordering Relations for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chong Zhang, Yi Tu, Yixi Zhao, Chenshu Yuan, Huan Chen, Yue Zhang, Mingxu Chai, Ya Guo, Huijia Zhu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing models of layout reading order do not convey the complete reading order information in the layout. |
| Approach: | They propose to model layout reading order as ordering relations over layout elements . they propose a reading-order-relation-enhancing pipeline to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a visual-rich document dataset and on eight cross-domain VrD-IE/QA tasks without targeted optimization. |
Dynamic Multi-granularity Attribution Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting sentiment polarity of aspects are susceptible to interference caused by irrelevant contexts and lack sentiment knowledge at a data-specific level. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Aspect-based sentiment analysis method that leverages attention scores to model the relationships between aspects and contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to predict sentiments from a set of five benchmark datasets. |
SUA: Stealthy Multimodal Large Language Model Unlearning Attack (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiahang Lin, Kai Hu, Binghai Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Shichun Liu, Junzhe Wang, Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Hang Yan, Zhenhua Han, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on long document visual question answering is based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where textual or visual content is encoded into embeddings and relevance is determined by similarity scores with respect to the original query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing RL systems by 10.4% on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark and demonstrates superior training performance over GRPO. |
Self-Improving for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models (2024.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies exploring the performance of large language models on named entity recognition tasks have focused on training task-specific LLMs for NER. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free self-improving framework that utilizes an unlabeled corpus to stimulate the self-learning ability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on the named entity recognition task by using an unlabeled corpus. |
SpindleKV: A Novel KV Cache Reduction Method Balancing Both Shallow and Deep Layers (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities across various fields, but their widespread use is facing a severe and realistic challenge, which is their high demand for GPU memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a KV cache reduction method which balances both shallow and deep layers by using an attention weight based eviction method and a codebook based replacement approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the KV cache for shallower layers while preserving similar or even better model performance. |
ResLoRA: Identity Residual Mapping in Low-Rank Adaption (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuhua Shi, Shaohan Huang, Minghui Song, Zhoujun Li, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method that adds residual paths during training and merges them together during inference to achieve better results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.5x faster convergence speed and improves performance by 14.3% on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks. |
LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Zelin Li, Huayu Sha, Binze Hu, Yuhui Wang, Chenhao Huang, Shichun Liu, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current medical benchmarks have limitations in question design, data sources and evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark covering five core medical areas . it includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers five core medical areas and includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records and expert-designed clinical scenarios. |
TL-Training: A Task-Feature-Based Framework for Training Large Language Models in Tool Use (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Yilong Wu, Sixian Li, Yuming Yang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Peng Wang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Zhengyin Du
| Challenge: | a new approach to training large language models (LLMs) overlooks task-specific characteristics in tool use, leading to performance bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-feature-based framework that mitigates the effects of suboptimal training data . they use a dataset to train large-scale LLMs and a reward mechanism tailored to error categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or surpasses open- and closed-source LLMs in tool-use performance using only 1,217 training data points. |
LCAN: A Label-Aware Contrastive Attention Network for Multi-Intent Recognition and Slot Filling in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-intent utterances processing remains a persistent challenge due to intricate intent-slot dependencies and semantic ambiguities. |
| Approach: | They propose a label-aware contrastive attention network (LCAN) that integrates label-based attention and contrastive learning strategies to improve semantic understanding and generalization in multi-intent scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves intent recognition and slot filling performance in multi-intent dialogue systems. |
Can LLMs Understand Unvoiced Speech? Exploring EMG-to-Text Conversion with LLMs (2025.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Unvoiced electromyography (EMG) is an effective communication tool for individuals unable to produce vocal speech. |
| Approach: | They propose an EMG adaptor module that maps EMG features to an LLM's input space and achieves an average word error rate of 0.49 on a closed-vocabulary unvoiced EMG-to-text task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module achieves an average word error rate of 0.49 on a closed-vocabulary unvoiced EMG-to-text task. |
Parameter-Aware Contrastive Knowledge Editing: Tracing and Rectifying based on Critical Transmission Paths (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of knowledge in their parameters, but the acquired knowledge can be incorrect or outdated over time, necessitating rectification after pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that captures key information flows that influence model predictions . they propose 'critical transmission paths' to improve model editing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two prominent datasets and three widely used LLMs. |
Metric-guided Distillation: Distilling Knowledge from the Metric to Ranker and Retriever for Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xingwei He, Yeyun Gong, A-Long Jin, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Sm Yiu, Nan Duan
| 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. |
TRAC: Teacher-Guided Token Reward with Adaptive Calibration for Robust Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current reward models for reinforcement learning (RL) rely on outcome rewards that propagate a single scalar value across all tokens based on final correctness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that derives dense token-level supervision from LLMs . they use a multi-granularity calibration mechanism to modulate teacher influence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates teacher reliability across problem-level expertise, trajectory-level discrimination, and token-level confidence. |
XGLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-lingual Pre-training, Understanding and Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Yeyun Gong, Ning Wu, Fenfei Guo, Weizhen Qi, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Guihong Cao, Xiaodong Fan, Ruofei Zhang, Rahul Agrawal, Edward Cui, Sining Wei, Taroon Bharti, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Winnie Wu, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Daniel Campos, Rangan Majumder, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | XGLUE provides a benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models . XCLUE provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both understanding and generation scenarios . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is labeled in English and includes only natural language understanding tasks. |
ToolEyes: Fine-Grained Evaluation for Tool Learning Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-world Scenarios (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Guanyu Li, SongYang Gao, Caishuang Huang, Yilong Wu, Sixian Li, Xiaoran Fan, Shihan Dou, Tao Ji, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of tool learning focus on validation of tools for large language models with expected outcomes, but this focus ignores the complex capabilities required for LLMs to effectively use tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained system for evaluation of large language models’ tool learning capabilities in authentic scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system examines seven real-world scenarios, analyzing five dimensions crucial to LLMs in tool learning: format alignment, intent comprehension, behavior planning, tool selection, and answer organization. |
TIGER: Text-Informed Generalized Enzyme-Reaction Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enzyme–reaction retrieval suffer from poor generalization across tasks and distributions . TIGER is a text-informed generalized enzyme-reaction retrieval framework that bridges enzymes and biochemical reactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-informed generalized enzyme-reaction retrieval framework that leverages protein-to-text generation models to distill textual knowledge from enzyme sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in enzyme–reaction retrieval tasks and distributions. |
RAG-QA Arena: Evaluating Domain Robustness for Long-form Retrieval Augmented Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Rujun Han, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Jenyuan Wang, Lan Liu, William Yang Wang, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for question answering based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG-QA) are either constructed using a single source corpus or consist of short extractive answers, which fall short of evaluating large language model (LLM) based RAG-QA systems on cross-domain generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that integrates short extractive answers from multiple documents into a single coherent narrative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset integrates short extractive answers from multiple documents into a single coherent narrative, covering 26K queries and large corpora across seven different domains. |
CENTAUR: Bridging the Impossible Trinity of Privacy, Efficiency, and Performance in Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jinglong Luo, Guanzhong Chen, Yehong Zhang, Shiyu Liu, Hui Wang, Yue Yu, Xun Zhou, Yuan Qi, Zenglin Xu
| Challenge: | Existing privacy-preserving Transformer Inference frameworks suffer from high computational overhead and performance losses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates random permutations and SMPC to address the "impossible trinity" CENTAUR resists diverse data reconstruction attacks and boosts inference speed by 5.030.4 times . |
| Outcome: | CENTAUR achieves an unprecedented balance between privacy, efficiency, and performance. |
Inverse-Q*: Token Level Reinforcement Learning for Aligning Large Language Models Without Preference Data (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on complex methodologies like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) that require extensive hyper-parameter tuning and pose challenges in sample efficiency and stability. |
| Approach: | They propose an innovative framework that leverages direct preference optimization techniques but extends them by estimating the conditionally optimal policy directly from the model’s responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches and exceeds the effectiveness of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in terms of convergence speed and alignment of model responses with human preferences. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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 . |
NaturalCodeBench: Examining Coding Performance Mismatch on HumanEval and Natural User Queries (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate code for productive activities, but current benchmarks for code synthesis are oriented towards introductory tasks on algorithm and data science. |
| Approach: | They propose a code benchmark to mirror the complexity and variety of scenarios in real-world coding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves on 39 large language models with close HumanEval scores and achieves an efficiency increase of more than 4 times. |
RIVAL: Reinforcement Learning with Iterative and Adversarial Optimization for Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Tianjiao Li, Mengran Yu, Chenyu Shi, Yanjun Zhao, Xiaojing Liu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qiang Zhang, Jiayin Wang
| Challenge: | Using reinforcement learning from human feedback, large language models perform poorly when applied to colloquial subtitle translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial training framework that iteratively updates the offline reward model and the online LLM to improve training outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework significantly improves upon translation baselines. |
SciDMT: A Large-Scale Corpus for Detecting Scientific Mentions (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | SciDMT is an enhanced and expanded corpus for scientific mention detection . existing corpora are limited by their small volume and entity linking capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance SciDMT, an annotated scientific corpus for scientific mention detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is the largest for scientific entity mention detection . it is based on deep learning architectures like SciBERT and GPT-3.5 . |
Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This survey examines knowledge conflicts for large language models (LLMs) this survey aims to shed light on strategies for improving the robustness of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They focus on three categories of knowledge conflicts: context-memory, inter-context, and intra-membry conflict. |
| Outcome: | The findings highlight the challenges faced by large language models when blending contextual and parametric knowledge. |
Keep it Consistent: Topic-Aware Storytelling from an Image Stream via Iterative Multi-agent Communication (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual storytelling construct text description independently for each image and roughly concatenate them as a story, which leads to the problem of generating semantically incoherent content. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic description task to detect the global semantic context of an image stream and a story is then constructed with the guidance of the topic description. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate stories with higher quality compared to state-of-the-art methods on a VIST dataset. |
VisFinEval: A Scenario-Driven Chinese Multimodal Benchmark for Holistic Financial Understanding (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaowei Liu, Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Lingfeng Zeng, Fangqi Lou, Jinyi Niu, Mengping Li, Qi Qi, Jiahuan Li, Wei Zhang, Yinglong Wang, Weige Cai, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on text comprehension, but MLLMs lack the ability to integrate visual data over financial visuals. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 21 state-of-the-art multimodal large language models in a zero-shot setting . they use an annotated question–answer pair from eight common financial image modalities . |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark outperforms existing models but trailed financial experts by 14 percentage points. |
DMDD: A Large-Scale Dataset for Dataset Mentions Detection (2023.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing corpora for dataset mention detection are limited in size and naming diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for dataset mention detection that is the largest publicly available corpus for this task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest publicly available corpus for dataset mention detection . it identifies open problems in dataset mention recognition and linking . |
OS-Sentinel: Towards Safety-Enhanced Mobile GUI Agents via Hybrid Validation in Realistic Workflows (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiushi Sun, Mukai Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Zhihui Xie, Fangzhi Xu, Zhangyue Yin, Kanzhi Cheng, Zehao Li, Zichen Ding, Qi Liu, Zhiyong Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ben Kao, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting unsafe mobile GUI agents are underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile agent safety detection framework that integrates a formal verifier and a VLM-based contextual judge to detect system-level violations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. |
Learning Implicit Sentiment in Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on identifying the sentiment polarity of aspects in product reviews. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised Contrastive Pre-Training to learn implicit sentiment . they propose to train large-scale sentiment-annotated corpora from in-domain language resources . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on SemEval2014 benchmarks and comprehensively validates its effectiveness on learning implicit sentiment. |
Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification with Target Domain Specific Information (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment classification focus on learning domain-invariant representations . few of them pay attention to domain-specific information, which should also be informative. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract domain specific and invariant representations and train a classifier on each of them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods. |
UniRAG: Unified Query Understanding Method for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
RAPO: An Adaptive Ranking Paradigm for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhoujin Tian, Chaozhuo Li, Shuo Ren, Zhiqiang Zuo, Zengxuan Wen, Xinyue Hu, Xiao Han, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on minimizing distances between words in aligned pairs, while suffering from low discriminative capability to distinguish the relative orders between positive and negative candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking-oriented induction model to learn personalized mapping function for each word. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn personalized mapping function for each word on public datasets including rich-resource and low-resourced languages. |
Grammar-Based Code Representation: Is It a Worthy Pursuit for LLMs? (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qingyuan Liang, Zhao Zhang, Zeyu Sun, Zheng Lin, Qi Luo, Xiao Yueyi, Yizhou Chen, Yuqun Zhang, Haotian Zhang, Lu Zhang, Chenbin Chenbin, Yingfei Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing research demonstrates the effectiveness of grammar-based code representations in small-scale models, showing their ability to reduce syntax errors and enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They develop a series of billion-scale grammar-based code representations that incorporate grammar rules into the code generation process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that grammar-based representations reduce syntax errors and improve performance even in billion-scale models. |
Tiny Scales, Great Challenges: The Limits of Multimodal LLMs in Scale Recognition (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on a single type of quantity or a specific format, lacking a comprehensive evaluation of scale recognition capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual scale recognition benchmark built using images from COCO, Open Images, and Flickr to evaluate scale recognition capabilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 42.60% accuracy, lower than the 97.40% of humans. |
Larger-Context Tagging: When and Why Does It Work? (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tagging systems that use sentence-level data are not well understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a larger-context approach to tagging tasks that incorporates contextual information into existing tapping systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed aggregators improve on four tagging tasks and 13 datasets. |
Efficient Sequential Decision Making with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrain or finetune large language models (LLMs) for decision making suffer from computational burden of gradient updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a model selection algorithm that leverages online model selection algorithms to efficiently incorporate LLMs agents into sequential decision making. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms both traditional decision making algorithms and vanilla LLM agents on a large-scale Amazon dataset. |
RJE: A Retrieval-Judgment-Exploration Framework for Efficient Knowledge Graph Question Answering with LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural language questions using knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that retrieves refined reasoning paths and evaluates their sufficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines while enabling small open-source LLMs to achieve competitive results without fine-tuning LLM. |
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junbo Qi, Yi Zhang, Hanchu Ni, Che Liu, Zhimin Yao, Ruilin Yang, Xiancong Ren, Liangjian Wen, Wei Ge, Yuya Ieiri, Osamu Yoshie, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
| Challenge: | Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack spatial reasoning, despite text-based CoTs . e-ViC reframes spatial intelligence as a verifiable, tool-using capability, argues a new study. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that moves reasoning beyond text into the visual domain . they ground reasoning in pixel-level interactions to enable human-like "look-and-confirm" strategies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing Vision-Language Models with an average gain of 10.1%. |
Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Senjie Jin, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Sirui Song, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbo Zhang, Peng Sun, Hong Lu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline. |
RoTBench: A Multi-Level Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models in Tool Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Yilong Wu, Songyang Gao, Caishuang Huang, Sixian Li, Guanyu Li, Xiaoran Fan, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current research emphasizes LLMs’ capacity to utilize tools in well-structured environments while overlooking their stability when confronted with the inevitable noise of the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level benchmark to evaluate the robustness of large language models in tool learning by establishing five external environments with varying levels of noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the GPT-4 model in tool learning in three critical phases: tool selection, parameter identification, and content filling. |
Explanation Graph Generation via Generative Pre-training over Synthetic Graphs (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for explanation graph generation are limited due to the large number of datasets available. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-graph generative task to pre-train a model to bridge the text-graph gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses all baseline systems with remarkable margins on ExplaGraphs and CommonsenseQA. |
Incorporating Argument-Level Interactions for Persuasion Comments Evaluation using Co-attention Model (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research explores different text features of reply comments on word level and ignores interactions between participants. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-attention mechanism based neural network to capture interactions between participants on argument level to better model dialogical argumentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a publicly available dataset showing that it extracts interactive argument pairs from the original post and the reply. |
ESF: Efficient Sensitive Fingerprinting for Black-Box Tamper Detection of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in diverse applications, including code generation, legal document analysis, medical diagnosis, and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a fingerprinting method tailored for black-box tamper detection of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects tampering with a 99.2% detection rate using 5 fingerprint samples across state-of-the-art LLMs. |
Actively Supervised Clustering for Open Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Open Relation Extraction (OpenRE) use a two-stage pipeline, which learns relation representations and assignments in the first stage, then manually labels relation for each cluster. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that performs relation learning and relation labeling simultaneously without a significant increase in human effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing SOTA methods by 13.8% and 10.6% on two datasets. |
Neuro-Symbolic Query Compiler (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are limited in their ability to process information in open-source environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic framework inspired by linguistic grammar rules and compiler design to formalize complex queries using a minimal yet sufficient Backus-Naur Form grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a backus-naur form grammar and compiler design that maintains completeness while minimizing redundancy. |
Three Stream Based Multi-level Event Contrastive Learning for Text-Video Event Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction ignore motion representations in videos and are misguided by background noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-video based multimodal event extraction framework that integrates video appearance features and motion representations with video appearance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the event extraction field. |
Lost in the Context: Insufficient and Distracted Attention to Contexts in Preference Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Dou, Jiayi Chen, Chenhao Huang, Feng Chen, Wei Chengzhi, Huiyuan Zheng, Shichun Liu, Yan Liu, Chenxiao Liu, Chao Xin, Lin Yan, Zongzhang Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing reward models concatenate contexts and responses, but they often ignore crucial segments of the context that are important for evaluating the response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model that evaluates the response quality based on a given context and assigns a rewards reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves preference modeling by increasing attention to relevant information within the context and achieves better generalizability. |
Logic-level Evidence Retrieval and Graph-based Verification Network for Table-based Fact Verification (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods leverage programs that contain rich logical information to enhance the verification process. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based fact verification task as an evidence retrieval framework . they retrieve logic-level program-like evidence from the given table and a statement as supplementary evidence for the table . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to retrieve logic-level program-like evidence from a table and a statement as supplementary evidence for the table. |
On the Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Efficient Data-free Adversarial Detection (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial detection methods require access to training data, which brings noteworthy concerns regarding privacy leakage and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-agnostic adversarial detection framework which induces different responses between normal and adversarials to UAPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive detection performance on various text classification tasks, and maintains equivalent time consumption to normal inference. |
RoCoIns: Enhancing Robustness of Large Language Models through Code-Style Instructions (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in following human instructions and solving NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use code style instructions to replace typically natural language instructions to provide more precise instructions and strengthen the robustness of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms natural language models on eight robustness datasets and achieves an improvement of 5.68% in test set accuracy and a reduction of 5.66 points in Attack Success Rate (ASR). |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
A Knowledge-Aware Sequence-to-Tree Network for Math Word Problem Solving (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for solving math word problems ignore background common-sense knowledge . a novel knowledge-aware sequence-to-tree (KA-S2T) network incorporates external knowledge and global expression information. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-aware sequence-to-tree network that incorporates external knowledge and global expression information into the problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better performance than previous models on a Math23K dataset. |
Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are often customized by fine-tuning for the requirements of different domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable training framework to make undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process while preserving the ability to learn other information. |
LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
WantWords: An Open-source Online Reverse Dictionary System (2020.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reverse dictionary systems only support English reverse dictionary queries . a reverse dictionary can help people who can't remember a word from memory . |
| Approach: | They propose an online reverse dictionary system that outperforms other reverse dictionary systems . it supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English cross-lingual reverse dictionary queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed reverse dictionary outperforms other reverse dictionary systems on performance . it supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English queries . |
M-CNER: A Corpus for Chinese Named Entity Recognition in Multi-Domains (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | NER is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate sentences from human-computer interaction, social media, and e-commerce using two rounds of annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs the best on all the data sets. |
SENT: Sentence-level Distant Relation Extraction via Negative Training (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction use bag labels, which introduce noise, to train the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to use negative training to train a model using complementary labels to separate the noisy data from the training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on previous methods on sentence-level evaluation and de-noise effect. |
A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
ReAL: How Can LLMs Simulate the Real Teacher? Retrieval-enhanced Agent for Adaptive Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior methods model learner-item interactions based only on ID sequences, leading to insufficient use of both learner and item information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-enhanced Agent for Adaptive Learning powered by large language models to simulate teacher decision-making with extensive prior knowledge and teaching experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three real-world datasets in both internal and external perspectives. |
PASUM: A Pre-training Architecture for Social Media User Modeling Based on Text Graph (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have incorporated different digital traces to better learn the representations of social media users, limited by overloaded text information and hard-to-collect social network information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pre-training Architecture for Social Media User Modeling based on Text Graph and combine microblogs to represent social media users based upon the text graph model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can represent users based on text even without social network information on microblogs. |
ConvLab-2: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Dialogue Systems (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zhu, Zheng Zhang, Yan Fang, Xiang Li, Ryuichi Takanobu, Jinchao Li, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaoyan Zhu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | ConvLab-2 inherits Convlab's framework but integrates more powerful dialogue models and supports more datasets. |
| Approach: | They present ConvLab-2, an open-source toolkit that enables researchers to build task-oriented dialogue systems with state-of-the-art models and perform an end-to-end evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The new tool inherits ConvLab's framework and extends it by integrating many recently proposed state-of-the-art dialogue models. |
Improving Pre-trained Language Models with Knowledge Enhancement and Filtering Framework (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge enhancement techniques for pre-trained language models (PLMs) introduce noisy entity representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge enhancement filter that integrates external knowledge bases to enhance PLMs' ability to capture entity knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy while reducing the computational cost by 1.7-2.5x. |
Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation: A Cycled Reinforcement Learning Approach (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies for sentiment-to-sentiment "translation" only change the underlying sentiment and fail to keep the semantic content. |
| Approach: | They propose a cycled reinforcement learning method that combines neutralization module and emotionalization module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art systems on Yelp and Amazon review datasets. |
SMR: State Memory Replay for Long Sequence Modeling (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing state space models (SSMs) address non-uniform sampling, but their recursive structures impede efficient SSM computation via convolution. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play mechanism to solve the Non-Stable State problem by adjusting input sequences with early memories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overcomes the non-uniform sample processing problem . it can achieve Sampling Step Adaptation (SSA) by adjusting input sequences with early memories. |
Unifying Cross-Lingual and Cross-Modal Modeling Towards Weakly Supervised Multilingual Vision-Language Pre-training (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies address the problem of translating English data into other languages, but they are limited in form and scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to unify cross-lingual and cross-modal pre-training by using English data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies cross-lingual and cross-modal pre-training on different data. |
Do Syntax Trees Help Pre-trained Transformers Extract Information? (2021.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work suggests that incorporating syntax information from dependency trees can improve task-specific transformer models. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate dependency tree information into pre-trained transformers for three tasks . they propose a late fusion approach and a joint fusion technique to infuses syntax structure into attention layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models obtain state-of-the-art results on SRL and relation extraction tasks. |
CodeRetriever: A Large Scale Contrastive Pre-Training Method for Code Search (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaonan Li, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Xipeng Qiu, Hang Zhang, Bolun Yao, Weizhen Qi, Daxin Jiang, Weizhu Chen, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing code pre-training approaches often adopt (masked) language modeling as the training objective which targets on learning to predict (macked) tokens in a given code context. |
| Approach: | They propose a code-text contrastive learning model which learns function-level code semantic representations through large-scale code corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art with significant improvement over existing pre-trained models on eleven domain/language-specific code search tasks with six programming languages in different code granularity. |
Towards Building More Robust NER datasets: An Empirical Study on NER Dataset Bias from a Dataset Difficulty View (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) models rely on superficial entity patterns for predictions, without considering evidence from the context. |
| Approach: | They propose to de-bias NER datasets by altering entity-context distribution . they also validate the feasibility of the proposed de-bianking techniques . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be applied to different models and improve existing models. |
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality. |
Towards Economical Inference: Enabling DeepSeek’s Multi-Head Latent Attention in Any Transformer-based LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tao Ji, Bin Guo, Yuanbin Wu, Qipeng Guo, Shenlixing Shenlixing, Chenzhan Chenzhan, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) is an innovative architecture designed to ensure efficient and economical inference by significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-efficient fine-tuning method for transitioning from MHA to MLA using a latent vector cache. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces the KV cache size of Llama2-7B by 92.19%, with only 1% drop in LongBench performance. |
Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yi Liu, Yuan Tian, Jianxun Lian, Xinlong Wang, Yanan Cao, Fang Fang, Wen Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), connecting mentions within unstructured contexts to their corresponding entities in a Knowledge Base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder framework that can efficiently match mentions to two-encoding frameworks by a global-view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several entity linking benchmarks. |
Enhancing Generalization in Natural Language Inference by Syntax (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Simplify the Usage of Lexicon in Chinese NER (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is concerned with the identification of named entities in unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for incorporating word lexicon into character representations . experimental results show method can be easily incorporated with pre-trained models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 6.15 times faster inference speed and better performance on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets. |
A Relation-Oriented Clustering Method for Open Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for open relation extraction (OpenRE) are designed for predefined relations, which cannot deal with new emerging relations in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-oriented clustering model that leverages readily available labeled data to learn a relationship-oriented representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces error rate by 29.2% and 15.7% on two datasets compared with current SOTA methods. |
UPPAM: A Unified Pre-training Architecture for Political Actor Modeling based on Language (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have incorporated contextual information to better learn the representation of political actors for specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use statements to represent political actors and learn mapping from languages to representations using social networks and behaviors as self-constructed supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be generalized to political actors and solve downstream tasks. |
CRaSh: Clustering, Removing, and Sharing Enhance Fine-tuning without Full Large Language Model (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Instruction tuning is an effective way of aligning large language models with private instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free strategy to derive improved emulators from LLMs by using Offsite-Tuning (OFT) they propose CRaSh, which transfers transformer blocks between centralized LLM and downstream emulators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique boosts performance of large language models with billions of parameters. |
Try to Substitute: An Unsupervised Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation Method Based on HowNet (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised methods for word sense disambiguation cannot work for HowNet-based WSD because of its uniqueness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which exploits the masked language model task of pre-trained language models to conduct word sense disambiguation using a lexical knowledge base as the sense inventory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significantly better performance than baseline methods. |
Dancing in Chains: Reconciling Instruction Following and Faithfulness in Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhengxuan Wu, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Rujun Han, Yian Zhang, Jifan Chen, Bonan Min, Zhiheng Huang
| Challenge: | Modern language models fail to follow human instructions while being faithful . a trade-off exists between instruction following and faithfulness when training LMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that relies on Reject-sampling by Self-instruct with Continued Fine-tuning to train LMs to follow human instructions while being faithful. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms vanilla MTL with high-quality data, but with significantly smaller data. |
Graph Convolution over Pruned Dependency Trees Improves Relation Extraction (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dependency-based models neglect crucial information (e.g., negation) by pruning the dependency trees too aggressively. |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of graph convolutional networks that is tailored for relation extraction by pruning dependency trees too aggressively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing sequence and dependency-based models on the large-scale TACRED dataset and has complementary strengths to sequence models. |
RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Enyu Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Songyang Gao, Xiaoran Fan, Zichu Fei, Jingting Ye, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on human-like behaviors in foundation models do not verify their faithfulness . a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-type behaviors . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to characterize humanoid behaviors in foundation models . they argue that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal consistency, and generalizability. |
Are Structural Concepts Universal in Transformer Language Models? Towards Interpretable Cross-Lingual Generalization (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have implicitly transfer knowledge across languages, but not all languages have such generalization capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning-based method to learn to align conceptual spaces of different languages to enhance cross-lingual generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and narrows the performance gap between languages. |
UrbanGeoEval: A City-Scale Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Geospatial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on 18 widely used LLMs uncover critical insights: (1) models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps; (2) failures in complex multi-hop tasks stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-module framework that disentangles factual recall and spatial logic from the model's real capabilities in urban environments. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests on 18 widely used LLMs reveal that models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps, and failures in complex multi-hop tasks often stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits. |
Tokenization Consistency Matters for Generative Models on Extractive NLP Tasks (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) models have been widely used to solve extractive tasks, where parts of the input are extracted to form the desired output. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple fix to tokenization inconsistency that damages extractive nature of generative models by causing performance drop and hallucination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets with a notable average of +1.7 F1 gain when a BART model is trained on SQuAD and evaluated on 8 QA datasets. |
Divide and Conquer: Text Semantic Matching with Disentangled Keywords and Intents (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text semantic matching models do not provide granularity for text comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective training strategy for text semantic matching by disentangling keywords from intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves stable performance improvements against a wide range of models on three benchmarks. |
Analyzing the Effects of Supervised Fine-Tuning on Model Knowledge from Token and Parameter Levels (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Yuming Yang, Yang Nan, Shuo Li, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Peng Wang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) acquire substantial world knowledge during pretraining, which is further shaped by post-training techniques such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT). |
| Approach: | They evaluate closed-book question answering (CBQA) performance across five LLMs from the LLaMA-2 and LLama-3 families and examine the impact of supervised fine-tuning on model knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance is 14% worse than models fine-tuned on 1,920 samples and 12% worse on 240 samples. |
Calibrating LLM-Based Evaluator (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for large language models lack the ability to calibrate their outputs towards human preference. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage, gradient-free approach to calibrate an LLM-based evaluator toward human preference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves correlation with expert evaluation on multiple text quality evaluation datasets. |
AXIS: Efficient Human-Agent-Computer Interaction with API-First LLM-Based Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junting Lu, Zhiyang Zhang, Fangkai Yang, Jue Zhang, Lu Wang, Chao Du, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled LLM-based agents to directly interact with application user interfaces (UIs), enhancing agents’ performance in complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent framework that prioritizes actions through application programming interfaces over UI actions and facilitates the creation and expansion of APIs through automated exploration of applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces task completion time by 65%-70% and cognitive workload by 38%-53% while maintaining accuracy of 97%-98% compared to humans. |
VRPO: Rethinking Value Modeling for Robust RL under Noisy Supervision in LLM Post-Training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Dingwei Zhu, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Guoqiang Zhang, Jiazheng Zhang, Junjie Ye, Mingxu Chai, Enyu Zhou, Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Caishuang Huang, Chenhao Huang, Yunke Zhang, Yuran Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world environments often suffers from ambiguous or incomplete supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances value modeling for robust RL in LLM post-training by integrating auxiliary losses guided by entropy and perplexity from a frozen language model and variational information bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multi-turn dialogue, math reasoning, and science QA with rule-based and model-based rewards. |
UPRISE: Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving Zero-Shot Evaluation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Daixuan Cheng, Shaohan Huang, Junyu Bi, Yuefeng Zhan, Jianfeng Liu, Yujing Wang, Hao Sun, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but need for task-specific prompt engineering can hinder their generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and versatile retriever that automatically retrieves prompts for a given zero-shot task input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is universally applicable across tasks and models . it mitigates hallucination problem in chatGPT, and it improves even the strongest LLMs. |
RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiexing Qi, Jingyao Tang, Ziwei He, Xiangpeng Wan, Yu Cheng, Chenghu Zhou, Xinbing Wang, Quanshi Zhang, Zhouhan Lin
| 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. |
Feedback-Driven Tool-Use Improvements in Large Language Models via Automated Build Environments (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Changhao Jiang, Zhengyin Du, Yufei Xu, Xuesong Yao, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Jiecao Chen
| Challenge: | Currently, there are no efficient reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks specifically designed for tool use. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated environment construction pipeline that incorporates scenario decomposition, document generation, function integration, complexity scaling, and localized deployment to enable high-quality training environments without external tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the models’ tool-use performance without degrading their general capabilities. |
LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zhang, Shouqing Yang, Lirong Gao, Hao Chen, Xiaomeng Hu, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL). |
| Approach: | They propose a process-level reward module to mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can boost LLMs’ reasoning ability by integrating external knowledge sources through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) The proposed model can mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
Stepwise Reasoning Disruption Attack of LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jingyu Peng, Maolin Wang, Xiangyu Zhao, Kai Zhang, Wanyu Wang, Pengyue Jia, Qidong Liu, Ruocheng Guo, Qi Liu
| Challenge: | Existing attacks on LLM reasoning are constrained by specific settings or lack of imperceptibility, limiting their feasibility and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a stepwise rEasoning error disruption attack that subtly injects errors into prior reasoning steps to mislead the model into producing incorrect subsequent reasoning and final answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is compatible with zero-shot and few-shot settings, maintains the natural reasoning flow, and ensures covert execution without modification of the instruction. |
Posterior-regularized REINFORCE for Instance Selection in Distant Supervision (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train unbiased methods such as REINFORCE take time to train. |
| Approach: | They propose to use posterior regularization to integrate domain-specific rules in instance selection using REINFORCE to improve the performance of the relation classifier trained on cleaned distant supervision datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the relation classifier trained on cleaned distant supervision dataset as well as the efficiency of the REINFORCE training. |
PerSphere: A Comprehensive Framework for Multi-Faceted Perspective Retrieval and Summarization (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the main challenge lies in long context and perspective extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to facilitate multi-faceted perspective retrieval and summarization . they propose measurable metrics to evaluate the comprehensiveness of the retrieval pipeline . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system breaks free from information silos by combining two opposing claims . it can be used to extract multiple perspectives and improve performance on the platform . |
Mitigating Hallucinations in VLMs: Enhancing Visual Attention via Head-Wise Perturbation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Vision–Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks that require joint understanding of text and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy that incorporates head-wise attention perturbation via continuous multiplicative noise coupled with a visual-guided loss focused on vision-sensitive text tokens to promote a more balanced attention distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models on three benchmarks and consistently outperformed the baseline model. |
Alleviating Performance Degradation Caused by Out-of-Distribution Issues in Embedding-Based Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Haotong Bao, Jianjin Zhang, Qi Chen, Weihao Han, Zhengxin Zeng, Ruiheng Chang, Mingzheng Li, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies reveal query out-of-distribution issues degrading ANN performance . a distribution regularizer is introduced into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings. |
| Approach: | They introduce a distribution regularizer into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently improves retrieval performance across multiple datasets. |
Neural Relation Extraction for Knowledge Base Enrichment (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on the extraction itself and rely on Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) to map triples into knowledge base (KB) enrichment. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end relation extraction model for knowledge base enrichment based on a neural encoder-decoder model . they propose to extract entities and their relationships from sentences in the form of triples and map the elements of the extracted triples to an existing KB in an end to end manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 15.51% and 8.38% on two real-world datasets. |
StyleDubber: Towards Multi-Scale Style Learning for Movie Dubbing (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Gaoxiang Cong, Yuankai Qi, Liang Li, Amin Beheshti, Zhedong Zhang, Anton Hengel, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Chenggang Yan, Qingming Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for movie dubbing break phonemes in scripts, resulting in incomplete phoneme pronunciation and poor identity stability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that switches dubbing learning from frame level to phoneme level . it uses a multimodal style adaptor to learn pronunciation style from audio . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two benchmarks, V2C and Grid, and is available on github. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
Loose lips sink ships: Mitigating Length Bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results prove that language models can learn from human feedback better, irrespective of sequence length . emergence of length bias often induces the model to favor longer outputs . |
| Approach: | They propose to separate reward modeling from the influence of sequence length by using the Product-of-Experts technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows that language models perform better regardless of sequence length . the main expert is focused on understanding human intents, while the biased expert targets the identification and capture of length bias. |
From Scores to Preferences: Redefining Evaluation Paradigm for Speech Quality Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yifei Cao, Changhao Jiang, Jiabao Zhuang, Jiajun Sun, Ming Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Hui Li, Shihan Dou, Yuran Wang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
| Approach: | They propose a MOS-aware reward model that incorporates MOS gap into reward function during reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied in few-shot learning tasks . however, when applied to token-level labeling tasks, it would be time-consuming to enumerate the template queries over all potential entity spans. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reformulate NER tasks as LM problems without templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 30.12 times faster than the template-based method under few-shot settings. |
RethinkCWS: Is Chinese Word Segmentation a Solved Task? (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent years have seen remarkable success in the use of deep neural networks on Chinese word segmentation (CWS) however, the performance of CWS systems has gradually reached a plateau with the rapid development of deep networks. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained evaluation for existing Chinese word segmentation systems that allows us to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can diagnose strengths and weaknesses of existing models and alleviate negative transfer problem when doing multi-criteria learning. |
DocFusion: A Unified Framework for Document Parsing Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Mingxu Chai, Ziyu Shen, Chong Zhang, Yue Zhang, Xiao Wang, Shihan Dou, Jihua Kang, Jiazheng Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document parsing often employ multiple models, limiting performance . Existing models often employ discrete tokens, whereas recognition relies on continuous coordinates . |
| Approach: | They propose a Gaussian-Kernel Cross-Entropy Loss (GK-CEL) that unifies detection and recognition by enabling generative frameworks to handle both tasks simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs competitively across four core document parsing tasks. |
Few-shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling with Retrieved Examples (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Mutian Bao, Jinjian Zhang, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo, Ming Kong, Jie Liu, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical group-based RL framework that leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA show that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect. |
What Makes a Good Order of Examples in In-Context Learning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive few-shot learning capabilities via in-context learning (ICL). |
| Approach: | They propose to use unlabeled data to evaluate order performance . they propose to filter out subsets of orders with label fairness and select the most influential order for each test instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior over strong baselines and validates generalizability across settings. |
Uncertainty-Aware Label Refinement for Sequence Labeling (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Conditional random fields (CRF) for label decoding have been a problem for many tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage label decoding framework that model long-term label dependencies while being much more computationally efficient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the CRF-based methods and greatly accelerates the inference process. |
ToolHop: A Query-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Hop Tool Use (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junjie Ye, Zhengyin Du, Xuesong Yao, Weijian Lin, Yufei Xu, Zehui Chen, Zaiyuan Wang, Sining Zhu, Zhiheng Xi, Siyu Yuan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Jiecao Chen
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that provides rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 49.04% accuracy across five model families. |
A Lexicon-Based Supervised Attention Model for Neural Sentiment Analysis (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing attention models do not take full advantage of sentiment lexicons, which provide rich sentiment information and play a critical role in sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a lexicon-based supervised attention model which allows a neural network to focus on the sentiment content, thus generating sentiment-informative representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three large-scale sentiment classification datasets. |
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shuo Li, Jiajun Sun, Guodong Zheng, Xiaoran Fan, Yujiong Shen, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Yuming Yang, Wenming Tan, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. |
Distill Visual Chart Reasoning Ability from LLMs to MLLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Yiwen Ding, Zifei Shan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| 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. |
AdvancedIF: Rubric-Based Benchmarking and Reinforcement Learning for Advancing LLM Instruction Following (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
Graph-Assisted Large Language Models: A Perspective on Mitigating Intrinsic Limitations (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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
| 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. |
RIMRULE: Improving Tool-Using Language Agents via MDL-Guided Rule Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiang Gao, Yuguang Yao, Qi Zhang, Kaiwen Dong, Avinash Baidya, Ruocheng Guo, Hilaf Hasson, Kamalika Das
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) struggle to use tools reliably in domain-specific settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic approach to adapt large language models to task-specific tools . they propose reusable rules that are distilled from failure traces and injected into the prompt . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms prompting-based adaptation methods and complements finetuning. |
Better Robustness by More Coverage: Adversarial and Mixup Data Augmentation for Robust Finetuning (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models perform poorly under adversarial attacks due to the large search space. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to cover a much larger proportion of the attack search space by adding textual adversarial examples during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method covers a much larger proportion of the attack search space. |
Parameter-free Automatically Prompting: A Latent Pseudo Label Mapping Model for Prompt-based Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing manual label mapping methods that require extra parameters and human knowledge are limited in data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Latent Pseudo Label Mapping method that optimizes the label mapping without human knowledge and extra parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard SOTA method in few-shot learning tasks and significantly outperformed the standard ALM method which requires extra task-specific prior knowledge. |
QA-Driven Zero-shot Slot Filling with Weak Supervision Pretraining (2021.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
When Agents Look the Same: Quantifying Distillation-Induced Similarity in Tool-Use Behaviors (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing metrics fail to distinguish mandatory behaviors required for task success from non-mandatory patterns that reflect a model’s autonomous preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use response pattern similarity and action graph similarity to isolate non-mandatory behaviors from mandatory behaviors. |
| Outcome: | Evaluating 18 models from 8 providers on -Bench and 2-Bench against Claude Sonnet 4.5, the authors find that within-family model pairs score 5.9 pp higher in response pattern similarity and action graph similarity . |
Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Difference in Multilingual BERT: How Good is It and How Does It Affect Transfer? (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has demonstrated considerable cross-lingual syntactic ability, but it is not well understood what leads to this variation and whether it fairly reflects difference between languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual BERT to enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of syntactic knowledge between different languages by generating grammatical relations in 24 different languages. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the distance between the distributions of different languages is highly consistent with the syntactic difference in terms of linguistic formalisms. |
Learn to Combine Linguistic and Symbolic Information for Table-based Fact Verification (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact verification lack attention to combine linguistic and symbolic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based reasoning approach that learns to combine linguistic and symbolic information effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can combine linguistic and symbolic information effectively. |
A Unified Dialogue User Simulator for Few-shot Data Augmentation (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment large-scale task-oriented dialogues rely on annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a unified dialogue user simulation model by pre-training on publicly available datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be tuned on a target domain with few-shot data. |
EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wei Tang, Yixin Cao, Yang Deng, Jiahao Ying, Bo Wang, Yizhe Yang, Yuyue Zhao, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Yong Liao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge evolution benchmarks are static and fail to capture the evolving nature of LLMs and knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an evolving dataset that categorizes information into stable, evolved, and uncharted states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is auto-updatable and enables evaluation of continuously changing knowledge and newly released LLMs. |
SafeScientist: Enhancing AI Scientist Safety for Risk-Aware Scientific Discovery (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Kunlun Zhu, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Nuoxing Shang, Zijia Liu, Peixuan Han, Yue Su, Haofei Yu, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents have significantly accelerated scientific discovery automation, yet raised critical ethical and safety concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance safety and ethical responsibility in AI-driven scientific exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves safety performance by 35% compared to traditional frameworks. |
A Progressive Framework for Role-Aware Rumor Resolution (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for rumor resolution ignore intrinsic propagation mechanisms of rumors and present poor adaptive ability when unprecedented news emerges. |
| Approach: | They propose to identify triggering posts and exploit their characteristics to facilitate rumor verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model and scheme exploits rumor diffusion patterns and linguistic features to facilitate verification. |
Escaping the Echo Trap: On Credit Assignment Failure in Multi-turn LLM Self-Reflection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Linxuan Du, Guangquan Xue, Xiaobo Liang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Xinyu Shi, Zhang Yijun, Ji Qi, Wenpeng Zhu, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-turn self-reflection are limited by the Echo Trap problem . the model is limited by its inherent capabilities and repeats earlier reflections to preserve reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured extension of GRPO for multi-turn self-reflection which enables more accurate advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates behavior collapse and improves performance across benchmarks. |
ConvLab: Multi-Domain End-to-End Dialog System Platform (P19-3)
Copied to clipboard
Sungjin Lee, Qi Zhu, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zheng Zhang, Yaoqin Zhang, Xiang Li, Jinchao Li, Baolin Peng, Xiujun Li, Minlie Huang, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | ConvLab is an open-source multi-domain end-to-end dialog system platform . it allows researchers to quickly set up experiments with reusable components and compare a large set of different approaches in common environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an open-source multi-domain end-to-end dialog system platform to train and evaluate dialog bots in common environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system enables researchers to quickly set up experiments with reusable components and compare a large set of different approaches in common environments. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
LONG2RAG: Evaluating Long-Context & Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Key Point Recall (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising approach to address limitations of fixed knowledge in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and a metric to assess LLMs' ability to generate long-form responses that exploit retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks lack a comprehensive evaluation method to assess LLMs' ability to generate long-form responses that effectively exploits retrieved information. |
Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tools that support only a few major languages are under-optimized for accuracy due to a focus on efficiency or use of less powerful models. |
| Approach: | They introduce a Python natural language processing toolkit that supports 66 languages . they train Stanza on 112 datasets and show it generalizes well on all languages compared to other tools . |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit performs well on 112 datasets and is compatible with the popular Java CoreNLP software. |
DSRM: Boost Textual Adversarial Training with Distribution Shift Risk Minimization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial training methods require multi-step gradient ascents or word substitutions to obtain adversarials, which impairs the effectiveness of adversariarial training. |
| Approach: | They propose a procedure for instead adversarial training with only clean data that estimates the adversarials loss by perturbing the input data’s probability distribution rather than their embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure reduces time consumption by up to 70% compared to current best-performing adversarial training methods. |
Tasty Burgers, Soggy Fries: Probing Aspect Robustness in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing ABSA test sets cannot be used to distinguish the sentiment of the target aspect from the non-target aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but effective approach to enrich ABSA test sets by disentangle the confounding sentiments of non-target aspects from the target aspect’s sentiment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distinguish the sentiment of the non-target aspects from the target aspect’s sentiment by using the Aspect Robustness Test Set (ARTS). |
LoRACoE: Improving Large Language Model via Composition-based LoRA Expert (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that the Mixture of Experts architecture improves performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to build static experts using LoRA parameters . they propose to use rank-level parameters to build experts based on rank-based parameters based in LoRA module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves task performance across a broader range of tasks. |
One2Set: Generating Diverse Keyphrases as a Set (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent keyphrase generation models are wrongly imposing a predefined order on keyphrases . a new training paradigm is proposed to concatenate keyphrase sequences in parallel . |
| Approach: | They propose a training paradigm that concatenates keyphrases in a predefined order . they propose combining a fixed set of learned control codes with a bipartite matching mechanism . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks. |
Beyond Scaling: Measuring and Predicting the Upper Bound of Knowledge Retention in Language Model Pre-Training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Changhao Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yifei Cao, Junjie Ye, Xiaoran Fan, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Jiajun Sun, Yi Dong, Yujiong Shen, Jingqi Tong, Baoyu Fan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict performance of large language models are lacking . authors propose a size-dependent mutual information predictor for closed-book question answering accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a size-dependent mutual information predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models and achieves R2 > 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy without additional training. |
TextObfuscator: Making Pre-trained Language Model a Privacy Protector via Obfuscating Word Representations (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing inference services are plagued by privacy concerns, such as sharing sensitive data with service providers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for protecting inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework protects inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chenyu Shi, Xiao Wang, Qiming Ge, Songyang Gao, Xianjun Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Xun Zhao, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted a tendency among large language models to refuse to answer benign queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach to reduce excessive attention to harmful words like ‘kill’ and a method to decode the next-token predictions by contrastive decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the refusal rate by 20% while having little impact on safety. |
Example Quality Matters: Multi-Aspects Example Augmentation for Private Library Programming (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuhao Li, Haifeng Sun, Xuesong Zhang, Shu Yao, Haoyu Zheng, Yvchuan Wang, Huazheng Wang, Zirui Zhuang, Qi Qi, Jianxin Liao, Jingyu Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to code generation fail to consider the quality of retrieved examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that combines existing API examples to improve complexity and readability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 22% accuracy improvement over baseline methods. |
KV-Latent: Dimensional-level KV Cache Reduction with Frequency-aware Rotary Positional Embedding (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) based on Transformer Decoders have become the preferred choice for conversational generative AI. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm called KV-Latent to reduce the KV cache footprint and improve inference speed by down-sampling the Key-Value vector dimensions into a latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reduces the KV Cache footprint and improves inference speed with a small amount of extra training, less than 1% of pre-training takes. |
Few-shot Joint Multimodal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis Based on Generative Multimodal Prompt (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Rhombus: Incentivizing Coordination in Parallel Thinking through Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ziyuan Nan, Qi Yi, Di Huang, Yutong Wu, Guanhua Huang, Xue Gong, Kejiao Li, Yuhao Jiang, Chenchen Zhang, Zenan Xu, Xing Hu, Bo Zhou
| Challenge: | Parallel thinking is a promising avenue for scaling test-time compute in Large Language Models . however, coordinating the exploration and aggregation stages remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel thinking framework that explicitly incentivizes coordination between components via end-to-end reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 6.0% over long chain-of-thought baselines while reducing wall-clock latency by 39.4% under matched token budgets. |