Papers by Ren Li
Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Kernels (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that our approach gains approximately an improvement of 1 BLEU score on most benchmarks over the Transformer baseline. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract several semantic kernels from a source sentence to capture global semantic information. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach improves 1 BLEU score on benchmarks . it is also 1.7 times faster than previous works on average at inference time . |
Doc2SoarGraph: Discrete Reasoning over Visually-Rich Table-Text Documents via Semantic-Oriented Hierarchical Graphs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on document visual question answering fails to capture the differences and correlations between elements of a document and associated questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-visual question-answering challenge that exploits element-level semantics and employs hierarchical Graph structures to capture differences and correlations between elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art method and large language model in terms of Exact Match (EM) metric, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness. |
A Logical Pattern Memory Pre-trained Model for Entailment Tree Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models overlook the importance of generating intermediate conclusions with logical consistency from the given facts, leading to inaccurate conclusions and undermining the overall credibility of entailment trees. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that utilizes logical entailment patterns to generate coherent explanations by leveraging logical patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces more coherent and reasonable conclusions that closely align with the underlying premises. |
Event Transition Planning for Open-ended Text Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Open-ended text generation tasks require models to generate coherent continuation given limited preceding context. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel two-stage method which explicitly arranges ensuing events in open-ended text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves coherence and diversity of open-ended text generation tasks. |
MathGenie: Generating Synthetic Data with Question Back-translation for Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning of LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models have demonstrated outstanding capabilities in mathematical reasoning, but there is a performance gap between open-source models and closed-source ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating diverse and reliable math problems by leveraging the ground-truth solutions of the seed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models across five representative mathematical reasoning datasets. |
Text AutoAugment: Learning Compositional Augmentation Policy for Text Classification (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Data augmentation aims to alleviate the overfitting issue in low-resource or class-imbalanced situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework called Text AutoAugment to enhance training samples . they use a Bayesian optimization algorithm to search for the best policy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on six benchmark datasets. |
SmartBench: Is Your LLM Truly a Good Chinese Smartphone Assistant? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for Large Language Models focus on objective tasks like mathematics and coding in English, which do not reflect the practical use cases of on-device LLMs in real-world mobile scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities of on-device Large Language Models in Chinese mobile contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates on-device LLMs and MLLMs in Chinese . it provides a standardized framework for evaluating LLM performance on real smartphones . |
Efficient Inference for Large Vision-Language Models: Bottlenecks, Techniques, and Prospects (2026.findings-acl)
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Jun Zhang, Yicheng Ji, Feiyang Ren, Yihang Li, Bowen Zeng, Zonghao Chen, Ke Chen, Lidan Shou, Gang Chen, Huan Li
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models are hindered by a systemic efficiency barrier known as visual token dominance. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy of efficiency techniques structured around the inference lifecycle . they examine visual encoding, prefilling, and decoding to understand bottlenecks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques reveal how upstream decisions dictate downstream bottlenecks . the proposed techniques include hybrid compression and modality-aware decoding . |
VIVA+: Human-Centered Situational Decision-Making (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promising results in complex, human-centered environments, yet evaluating their capacity for nuanced, humanlike reasoning and decision-making remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They introduce VIVA+, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating the reasoning and decision-making of MLLMs in human-centered situations. |
| Outcome: | The VIVA+ model is based on 1,317 real-world situations paired with 6,373 multiple-choice questions . it consists of three core abilities for decision-making: (1) Foundational Situation Comprehension, (2) Context-Driven Action Justification, and (3) Reflective Reasoning. |
Reliably Bounding False Positives: A Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus excessively on detection accuracy, neglecting the societal risks posed by high false positive rates (FPRs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Conformal Prediction framework that constrains the upper bound of false positive rates and introduces a real-time detection framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false positive rates and improves detection performance. |
Instruction-following Evaluation through Verbalizer Manipulation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on common instructions that align well with what the model learned during training, but proficiency in responding to these instructions does not necessarily imply strong ability in instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a new instruction-following evaluation protocol called verbalizer manipulation that instructs the model to verbalize the task label with words aligning with model priors to different extents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol can be integrated with any classification benchmark to examine the model’s reliance on priors and its ability to override them to accurately follow the instructions. |
SLARD: A Chinese Superior Legal Article Retrieval Dataset (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results, a study finds . existing large language models lack prior knowledge of the content of superior legal articles . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese superior legal article retrieval dataset to find relevant articles with higher legal effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
Beyond "I Don’t Know": Evaluating LLM Self-Awareness in Discriminating Data and Model Uncertainty (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies treat refusal as a generic "I don't know" lack of distinction limits downstream action decisions like requesting clarification or invoking external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate explicit uncertainty attribution in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves uncertainty attribution while preserving answer accuracy. |
LiveCANNBench: Benchmark SWE AI Coding for Ascend CANN (2026.findings-acl)
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Sijie Wang, Kai Zhao, Wee Peng Tay, Shuo Zhang, Chengwen Liu, Quanjiang Guo, Ren Junhao, Xin Li, Heng Lian, Jingdi Lei, Rui She, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in agents have enabled multi-file, multi-language, and dependency-aware AI coding. |
| Approach: | They propose an SWE-level benchmark for AI coding in the Huawei Ascend CANN software stack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world CANN repositories and consists of over 400 task instances spanning multiple file, multi-language, and execution-aware coding challenges. |
MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Wang, Junting Pan, Linda Wei, Aojun Zhou, Weikang Shi, Zimu Lu, Han Xiao, Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LMMs) struggle with simple tasks such as geometry, e.g., arithmetic, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage code as supervision for cross-modal alignment . they propose to use FigCodifier and ImgCode-8.6M to synthesize novel mathematical figures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the geometry problem-solving subset of MathVista, achieving improvements of 8.9% and 9.2%. |
GeAR: Graph-enhanced Agent for Retrieval-augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhili Shen, Chenxin Diao, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Pascual Merita, Shriram Piramanayagam, Enting Chen, Damien Graux, Andre Melo, Ruofei Lai, Zeren Jiang, Zhongyang Li, Ye Qi, Yang Ren, Dandan Tu, Jeff Z. Pan
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) relies on effective retrieval capabilities, yet traditional sparse and dense retrievers struggle with multi-hop retrieval scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph expansion mechanism that augments any conventional base retriever and an agent framework that incorporates the resulting graph-based retrieval into a multi-step retrieval framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results on three multi-hop question answering datasets while consuming fewer tokens and requiring fewer iterations than existing multi-step retrieval systems. |
RAG-Star: Enhancing Deliberative Reasoning with Retrieval Augmented Verification and Refinement (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but struggle with complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RAG approach that integrates retrieved information to guide tree-based reasoning process based on LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in large language models . iteratively plans intermediate sub-queries and answers based on the LLM itself . |
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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Wentao Deng, Jiahuan Pei, Keyi Kong, Zhe Chen, Furu Wei, Yujun Li, Zhaochun Ren, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren
| Challenge: | Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models. |
| Approach: | They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles. |
MRN: A Locally and Globally Mention-Based Reasoning Network for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on document-level relation extraction focus on sentencelevel RE, but recent studies reveal that a large number of relations can actually be expressed through multiple sentences, which necessitates document- level RE. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that captures local and global contextual information as well as close and distant mention interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three widely used datasets, namely DocRED, CDR, and GDA. |
Empowering Character-level Text Infilling by Eliminating Sub-Tokens (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for character-level infilling relied on predicting sub-tokens, but this strategy was ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fill-in-the-mid with Starting and Ending character constraints that avoids predicting sub-tokens in inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods and offers significant performance gains. |
RubricHub: A Comprehensive and Highly Discriminative Rubric Dataset via Automated Coarse-to-Fine Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Sunzhu Li, Jiale Zhao, Huimin Ren, Zhenlin Wei, Yang Zhou, Jingwen Yang, Shunyu Liu, Kaike Zhang, Chen Wei
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating open-ended rubrics suffer from scalability bottlenecks and coarse criteria resulting in a supervision ceiling effect. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated Coarse-to-Fine Rubric Generation . their framework uses principle-guided synthesis, multi-model aggregation, difficulty evolution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces comprehensive and highly discriminative criteria capable of capturing the subtle nuances. |
Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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Yongkang Wu, Meng Han, Yutao Zhu, Lei Li, Xinyu Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xiaoguang Li, Yuanhang Ren, Zhicheng Dou, Zhao Cao
| Challenge: | SylloBase is a benchmark for syllogistic reasoning, a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to learn syllogistic reasoning on a set of templates and to use them to generate and understand slogisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers a complete taxonomy of syllogism reasoning patterns, and contains both automatically and manually constructed samples. |
DDGIP: Radiology Report Generation Through Disease Description Graph and Informed Prompting (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Automatic radiology report generation is challenging due to inherent biases in medical imaging data. |
| Approach: | They propose a disease description graph that encapsulates comprehensive and pertinent disease information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two widely-used datasets . the proposed model is based on a three-layer decoder and improves on existing models . |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
RuleEdit: Towards Rule-Level Knowledge Generalization to Mitigate Over-Editing in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods focus on instance-level editing, which is prone to knowledge degradation and general ability deterioration due to redundant instance-specific modifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-level editing method that generalizes rule-derived knowledge to update rule-based instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves portability and performance over baselines for LLaMA-2-7B on RULEmix. |
MINED: Probing and Updating with Multimodal Time-Sensitive Knowledge for Large Multimodal Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Kailin Jiang, Ning Jiang, Yuntao Du, Yuchen Ren, Yuchen Li, Yifan Gao, Jinhe Bi, Yunpu Ma, Bin Li, Lei Liu, Qing Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are constrained by static representations, inadequately evaluating their ability to understand time-sensitive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark containing 2,104 time-sensitive knowledge samples spanning six knowledge types to evaluate temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 challenging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 tasks, while most open-source LMMs still lack time understanding ability. |
UOR: Universal Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to attack pre-trained language models rely on manual selection of triggers and backdoor representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack method that turns manual selection into automatic optimization . they propose to use poisoned contrastive learning to learn more uniform backdoor representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better attack performance on text classification tasks compared to manual methods. |
Diagnosing Memorization in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning, One Token at a Time (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on reasoning benchmarks but often fail when inputs alter slightly, raising concerns about overreliance on memorization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Source-aware Token-level Identification of Memorization which attributes each token in a reasoning chain to one of multiple memorization sources based on their statistical co-occurrence with the token in the pretraining corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework attributes each token in a reasoning chain to one of multiple memorization sources based on their statistical co-occurrence with the token in the pretraining corpus. |
Multi-Source Multi-Type Knowledge Exploration and Exploitation for Dialogue Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on identifying specific types of dialogue knowledge and utilizing corresponding datasets for training, but lack generalization capabilities and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explores multi-source multi-type knowledge from LLMs by leveraging diverse datasets and exploits it for response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits multi-source multi-type knowledge from LLMs to generate coherent, informative, and fluent responses. |
Lifting Optimized Binaries to Canonical Compiler IR via Structure-Aware Retrieval and Iterative Verification (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decompiling binary code are brittle due to compiler optimizations that distort control-flow and data-flow structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that lifts optimized binaries to canonical compiler intermediate representation (IR) BRIDGE uses control-flow-aware retrieval-augmented generation with feedback-driven verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms seven baselines on humanEval-Decompile and MBPP, lifting x86-64 and ARM64 binaries to LLVM IR. |
Exons-Detect: Identifying and Amplifying Exonic Tokens via Hidden-State Discrepancy for Robust AI-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated text detection assume uniform token contributions, making them less robust under short sequences or localized token modifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method for AI-generated text detection based on an exon-aware token reweighting perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance and robustness to adversarial attacks and varying input lengths. |
Table-as-Search: Agentic Information Seeking is Table Completion (2026.findings-acl)
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Tian Lan, Felix Henry, Bin Zhu, Qianghuai Jia, Junyang Ren, Qihang PU, Haijun Li, Longyue Wang, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | Current Information Seeking (InfoSeeking) agents struggle to maintain focus and coherence during long-horizon exploration, as tracking search states within one plain-text context is inherently fragile. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured planning framework that reformulates the InfoSeeking task as a Table Completion task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks across three kinds of benchmarks, including multi-agent framework and commercial systems. |
SeqXGPT: Sentence-Level AI-Generated Text Detection (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentence-level AIGT detection are weak . large language models (LLMs) can generate human-like content . |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence-level AIGT detection challenge using LLMs as log probability lists . they propose 'check' GPT' method that uses log probability list features to detect AIGT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline methods in sentence- and document-level detection challenges. |
InsBank: Evolving Instruction Subset for Ongoing Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiayi Shi, Yiwei Li, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Huan Ren, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Recent studies emphasize that quality and diversity of instruction data are more crucial than quantity, highlighting the need to select diverse, high-quality subsets to reduce training costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a continuously updated repository to integrate the latest valuable instruction data with a progressive evolution framework to evolve InsBank over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in InsBank evolution and extracts budget-specific subsets. |
Backdoor NLP Models via AI-Generated Text (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing attacks disregard fluency and semantic fidelity of poisoned text, rendering it easily detectable. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI-generated poisoned text to attack NLP models by establishing covert associations between trigger patterns and target labels without affecting normal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves effective attacks while maintaining fluency and semantic similarity across all scenarios. |
DualGuard: Dual-stream Large Language Model Watermarking Defense against Paraphrase and Spoofing Attack (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing watermarking algorithms focus on defending against paraphrase and piggyback spoofing attacks, which can inject harmful content, compromise reliability, and undermine trust in attribution. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm capable of defending against paraphrase and spoofing attacks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models and language models show that DualGuard is the first watermarking algorithm capable of defending against both paraphrase and spoofing attacks. |
Human-in-the-loop Schema Induction (2023.acl-demo)
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Tianyi Zhang, Isaac Tham, Zhaoyi Hou, Jiaxuan Ren, Leon Zhou, Hainiu Xu, Li Zhang, Lara Martin, Rotem Dror, Sha Li, Heng Ji, Martha Palmer, Susan Windisch Brown, Reece Suchocki, Chris Callison-Burch
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to event-centric natural language understanding (NLU) have been limited to linear and temporal ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop schema induction system powered by GPT-3 . they show that it transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system transfers to new domains more easily than previous approaches and reduces human curation. |
Teaching Large Language Models to Translate on Low-resource Languages with Textbook Prompting (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results in Machine Translation by following instructions, even without training on parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Translate After LEarNing Textbook approach which aims to enhance LLMs’ ability to translate low-resource languages by learning from a textbook. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation performance by 14.8% using 112 low-resource languages from FLORES-200 with two LLMs: ChatGPT and BLOOMZ. |
Rethinking LLM Watermark Detection in Black-Box Settings: A Non-Intrusive Third-Party Framework (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing secret-key schemes tightly couple detection with injection . this dependency creates a fundamental barrier for real-world governance . |
| Approach: | et al. introduce a black-box framework for non-intrusive, third-party watermark verification . they propose a proxy model to amplify watermark-relevant signals and complementary relative measurements . |
| Outcome: | a new framework decouples detection from injection and assesses alignment of query text with watermark distributions. |
Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the likelihood of sequence prediction models are based on MLE and teacher forcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative Bridging Network (GBN) that extends the point-wise ground truth to a bridge distribution conditioned on it and optimizes their KL-divergence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bridge module can improve on two recognized sequence prediction tasks and minimize learning burden. |
LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application (2023.acl-demo)
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Rindra Ramamonjison, Timothy Yu, Linzi Xing, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Xiaorui Li, Xiaojin Fu, Xiongwei Han, Yuanzhe Chen, Ren Li, Kun Mao, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing systems that translate optimization formulas manually are cumbersome and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that converts optimization formulas from TeX document to solver language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system helps operations research practitioners convert optimization formulations into solver modeling languages. |
1+1>2: A Synergistic Sparse and Low-Rank Compression Method for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank approximation compresses the model by retaining its essential structure with minimal information loss. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the strengths of pruning and low-rank approximation for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods surpass the existing methods on LLaMA and Qwen2.5 models. |
Watermarking LLMs with Weight Quantization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are being deployed at an astonishing speed, exposing users to high risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that plants watermarks in quantization process of large language models without pre-defined triggers during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method protects model weights without pre-defined triggers . it works when the model is used in the fp32 mode and remains hidden when the models are quantized to int8 . |
Unlocking Multilingual Reasoning Capability of LLMs and LVLMs through Representation Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Qiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Yixuan Ma, Ruihan Chen, Zihe Tong, Zekai Ye, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Haoyu Ren, Kun Chen, Yunfei Lu, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance multilingual reasoning capabilities rely on costly multilingual training or employ prompting with external translation tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference-time method to enhance multilingual reasoning capabilities via Representation Engineering without additional training data or tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on four reasoning benchmarks in English and Thai and Swahili. |
A Deep Decomposable Model for Disentangling Syntax and Semantics in Sentence Representation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in disentanglement work on coarse levels in the disenanglement of closely related properties, such as syntax and semantics in human languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep decomposable model based on VAE to disentangle syntax and semantics by using total correlation penalties on KL divergences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the disentanglement quality between syntactic and semantic representations for semantic similarity tasks and syntaktic similarity task. |
ReflectionCoder: Learning from Reflection Sequence for Enhanced One-off Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance code generation performance include integrating compiler feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates compiler feedback to improve one-off code generation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves one-off code generation performance on three benchmarks and can be applied to other domains that focus on final results and require long reasoning paths. |
Backdooring Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models with Virtual Prompt Injection (2024.naacl-long)
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Jun Yan, Vikas Yadav, Shiyang Li, Lichang Chen, Zheng Tang, Hai Wang, Vijay Srinivasan, Xiang Ren, Hongxia Jin
| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can modulate responses based on human instructions, but they can be maliciously steered to impact society in subtle but persistent ways. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack setting that allows an attacker to inject a virtual prompt into an LLM to steer it without any explicit injection at its input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to poison the model's instruction tuning data and show that it is highly effective in steering the model. |
Mind Reader: Latent User Demand-Guided Content Optimization for Generative Search Engine (2026.acl-long)
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Tong Chen, JiaWei Guo, Yuxi Li, Baiming Chen, Houxing Ren, Zhang Zhiwei, Yunxiang Zhang, Hanyang Xia, Kun Liang, Zhaoran Fan
| Challenge: | Generative Search Engines (GSEs) have reshaped information retrieval and Generating Engine Optimization (GEO) emerges to improve the content visibility in GSEs’ responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize content to cover latent semantic information of GSEs by decomposing query into diverse perspectives and capturing underlying semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and effectively improves content visibility (with up to 2.44x objective metrics and 1.23x subjective metrics on average). |
Automatic and Reliable Evaluation for Academic Caption-to-Figure Generation with LMMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for evaluating text-to-image generation focus mostly on real-life images, which poses challenges for assessing academic figure generation given real scientific captions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that first provides a Holistic Evaluation for Academic caption-to-Figure Generation (HE4AFG) they collect real figure captions from 8 scientific domains and generate 3,900 evaluation samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides high-quality human ratings in terms of three aspects—scientific aesthetic (SA), topic relevance (TR), and attribute correctness (AC). |
STORM-BORN: A Challenging Mathematical Derivations Dataset Curated via a Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Zhenyi Lu, Xinyu Hu, Jerry Zhang, Dailin Li, Jiacheng Cen, Huilin Cao, Haiteng Wang, Yuhan Li, Xie Kun, Dandan Li, Pei Zhang, Chengbo Zhang, Yuxiang Ren, Xiaohong Huang, Yan Ma
| Challenge: | Existing datasets suffer from outdated and insufficient challenging content, neglecting human-like reasoning, and limited reliability due to single-LLM generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop, multi-agent data generation framework that integrates reasoning-dense filters, multiagent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations to ensure the reliability and quality of the dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and quality of the 2,000-synthesized datasets by integrating reasoning-dense filters, multi-agent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations. |
Neural Relation Classification with Text Descriptions (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art methods for relation classification suffer from data sparsity issue greatly. |
| Approach: | They propose a new neural relation classification method which integrates entities’ text descriptions into deep neural networks models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much better experimental results than other state-of-the-art methods on the SemEval 2010 dataset. |
Probability-Consistent Preference Optimization for Enhanced LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Zimu Lu, Ke Wang, Weikang Shi, Aojun Zhou, Junting Pan, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in preference optimization have demonstrated significant potential for improving mathematical reasoning capabilities in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes two quantitative metrics for preference selection: surface-level answer correctness and intrinsic token-level probability consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing outcome-only criterion approaches across a diverse range of LLMs and benchmarks. |
Task Knowledge Injection via Interpolations and Reinstatement for Large Language Model Generalization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained large language models have been widely adopted to elicit their superior performance on downstream tasks, but instruction tuning may overfit them to specific task formats, compromising their generalization on unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject latent task adaptation and knowledge reinstatement into large language models to mitigate spurious correlations between inputs and targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization on in-domain and out-of-domain unseen tasks. |
KnowCoder: Coding Structured Knowledge into LLMs for Universal Information Extraction (2024.acl-long)
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Zixuan Li, Yutao Zeng, Yuxin Zuo, Weicheng Ren, Wenxuan Liu, Miao Su, Yucan Guo, Yantao Liu, Lixiang Lixiang, Zhilei Hu, Long Bai, Wei Li, Yidan Liu, Pan Yang, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | None. None.. None! |
| Approach: | None. None.. None! |
| Outcome: | None. None. No. : |
LSDC: An Efficient and Effective Large-Scale Data Compression Method for Supervised Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Zhaoguang Long, Yuhao Zhou, Shangqing Zhao, Yupei Ren, Li Cai, Chenghao Jia, Zhe Chen, Zhe Fang, Yuxiang Song, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are expanding in scale and size, increasing computational costs . large-scale data compression techniques can reduce the size of training datasets while maintaining data integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale data compression method to reduce the size of training data . they use a bifurcated quantization strategy to maximize the diversity of samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the size of training data while maximizing the submodular gain. |
InferAligner: Inference-Time Alignment for Harmlessness through Cross-Model Guidance (2024.emnlp-main)
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Pengyu Wang, Dong Zhang, Linyang Li, Chenkun Tan, Xinghao Wang, Mozhi Zhang, Ke Ren, Botian Jiang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing harmlessness and helpfulness of large language models (LLMs) involve complex and resource-intensive training processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decouples harmlessness from helpfulness during inference phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the attack success rate (ASR) of harmful instructions and jailbreak instructions while maintaining almost unchanged performance in downstream tasks. |
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Tension Between Ethical Reasoning and Safety Alignment in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) safety alignment predominantly operates on a binary assumption that requests are either safe or unsafe. |
| Approach: | They propose a methodology that embeds harmful requests within ethical framings to exploit this vulnerability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves high success rates by exploiting model's own ethical reasoning to frame harmful actions as morally necessary compromises. |
Social Welfare Function Leaderboard: On the Emergence of LLM Agents as the Welfare Dictator (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhengliang Shi, Ruotian Ma, Jen-tse Huang, Xinbei Ma, Xingyu Chen, Mengru Wang, Qu Yang, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ziyang Chen, Shanyi Wang, Cixing LI, Wenxuan Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Zhaochun Ren, Liefeng Bo
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 20 state-of-the-art Large language models (LLMs) and 20 LLM dictators to create a social welfare function benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model creates dilemma between maximizing collective efficiency and ensuring distributive fairness. |
Neuronal Insights into LLM Attacks: Targeted Neuron Tuning for Precise and Robust Vulnerability Patching (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing gradient-based attribution methods are inapplicable to adversarial attacks . et al.: Targeted neuron tuning improves model robustness against jailbreak attacks despite the model's vulnerability to jailbreak. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient-based method to identify key neurons sensitive to adversarial behaviors in open-ended generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects key neurons sensitive to adversarial behaviors in open-ended tasks. |
EmpDG: Multi-resolution Interactive Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on empathetic dialogue generation fails to capture the nuances of human emotion and consider the potential of user feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-resolution adversarial model - EmpDG - to generate more empathetic responses by exploiting both coarse-grained dialogue-level and fine-grounded token-level emotions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in both content quality and emotion perceptivity. |
HybridKV: Hybrid KV Cache Compression for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model Inference (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are hindered by the rapid growth of key–value (KV) caches. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid KV cache compression framework that reduces KV memory by 7.9 and speeds up decoding by 1.52. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 multimodal benchmarks show that HYBRIDKV cuts KV cache memory by 7.9 and speeds up decoding by 1.52. |
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Shenglai Zeng, Yaxin Li, Jie Ren, Yiding Liu, Han Xu, Pengfei He, Yue Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks. |
Cross-Domain Audio Deepfake Detection: Dataset and Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing audio deepfake detection datasets are outdated and lack generalization capabilities. |
| Approach: | They construct a new cross-domain audio deepfake detection dataset comprising over 300 hours of speech data that is generated by five advanced zero-shot TTS models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve 4.1% and 6.5% error rates in the cross-domain ADD dataset generated by five advanced zero-shot TTS models. |
Tailoring Instructions to Student’s Learning Levels Boosts Knowledge Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent success of natural language processing (NLP) is driven by the adoption of large-scale pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to determine the impact of distillation influence on student generalization ability by prioritizing samples likely to enhance the student's generalization abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 10 common knowledge distillation baselines on 6 text classification tasks in the GLUE benchmark. |
Towards Exploiting Sticker for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis in Social Media: A New Dataset and Baseline (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Sentiment analysis in social media is challenging because of the lack of context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use stickers to perform a multimodal sentiment analysis task using Chinese stickers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs best compared with other models. |
MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Weikang Shi, Aldrich Yu, Rongyao Fang, Houxing Ren, Ke Wang, Aojun Zhou, Changyao Tian, Xinyu Fu, Yuxuan Hu, Zimu Lu, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu, Rui Liu, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual chain-of-thought are limited by external tools or fail to generate high-fidelity diagrams. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable large multimodal models with VCoT capabilities . they pre-train a model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and teach it how to leverage visual aids . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks complex, human-like visual reasoning in large language models . it pre-trains the model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and fine-tunes it on MathCanvas-Instruct . |
Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies reveal a security threat to natural language processing models, called the Backdoor Attack. |
| Approach: | They propose to hack a model by modifying one single word embedding vector without sacrificing accuracy on clean samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more efficient and stealthier on sentiment analysis and sentence-pair classification tasks. |
CodeTool: Enhancing Programmatic Tool Invocation of LLMs via Process Supervision (2025.acl-long)
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YifeiLu YifeiLu, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Qiang Gao, Cheng Liu, Haibo Luo, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li, Feiliang Ren
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tool invocation are often unnecessarily long and require lengthy reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for stepwise code generation that improves LLM tool invocation . they incorporate two distinct process rewards: the On-the-spot and the Latent Reward . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM tool invocation by leveraging the concise nature of code. |
VIVA: A Benchmark for Vision-Grounded Decision-Making with Human Values (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large vision language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable intelligence and proficiency across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for VIsion-grounded decision-making driven by human VA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make decisions under a vision-depicted situation using human values and human values. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
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Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
Better Combine Them Together! Integrating Syntactic Constituency and Dependency Representations for Semantic Role Labeling (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies use only one singleton syntax for semantic role labeling (SRL). |
| Approach: | They propose a TreeLSTM-based integration that integrates phrasal boundaries and semantic relations from dependency into a labelaware GCN solution for simultaneously modeling syntactic edges and labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performance on span-based and dependency-based SRL. |
A General Framework to Enhance Fine-tuning-based LLM Unlearning (2025.findings-acl)
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Jie Ren, Zhenwei Dai, Xianfeng Tang, Hui Liu, Jingying Zeng, Zhen Li, Rahul Goutam, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Qi He, Hui Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to remove copyrighted and privacy-sensitive data from Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to remove specific data from LLMs without requiring full retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework that enhances the utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing target data and suppressing related generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the unlearning and utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing the target data and suppressing related generations. |
AMEX: Android Multi-annotation Expo Dataset for Mobile GUI Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuxiang Chai, Siyuan Huang, Yazhe Niu, Han Xiao, Liang Liu, Guozhi Wang, Dingyu Zhang, Shuai Ren, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | a new dataset is being developed to improve the capabilities of mobile GUI-control agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset designed for generalist mobile GUI-control agents . they use screenshots from popular mobile applications to create a detailed GUI-annotated dataset . |
| Outcome: | The Android Multi-annotation EXpo (AMEX) is a large-scale dataset for generalist mobile GUI-control agents . it includes screenshots from popular mobile applications, which are annotated at multiple levels . |
A Two-phase Prototypical Network Model for Incremental Few-shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised and distantly supervised RC models ignore the emergence of novel relations in open environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase prototypical network with prototype attention alignment and triplet loss to dynamically recognize the novel relations with a few support instances without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model performs better on deep learning and few-shot learning . it can recognize the novel relations with a few support instances without catastrophic forgetting . |
TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on video large language models lack a comprehensive feedback on temporal perception ability . current models cannot distinguish between different temporal aspects and are limited in task formats . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate temporal perception ability of video large language models . they construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that video large language models exhibit poor temporal perception ability. |
Nested Event Extraction upon Pivot Element Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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Weicheng Ren, Zixuan Li, Xiaolong Jin, Long Bai, Miao Su, Yantao Liu, Saiping Guan, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Nested Event Extraction (NEE) aims to extract complex event structures where an event contains other events as its arguments recursively. |
| Approach: | They propose a new model that extracts nested events mainly based on recognizing PEs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract nested events based on recognizing PEs . it incorporates information from both event types and argument roles to improve performance . |
A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents with Essential-State Procedural Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxiang Chai, Shunye Tang, Han Xiao, Weifeng Lin, Hanhao Li, Jiayu Zhang, Liang Liu, Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Guozhi Wang, Shuai Ren, Rongduo Han, Haining Zhang, Siyuan Huang, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for mobile GUI agents rely on static frame assessments or offline static apps. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation system that leverages large language models as reward models to verify task completion and process achievement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system addresses the limitations of traditional function based evaluation methods on online dynamic apps. |
Don’t be my Doctor! Recognizing Healthcare Advice in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in everyday use, especially in highly regulated domains such as healthcare, where misleading advice may influence users to commit malpractice. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale health-advice benchmark dataset that evaluates large language models' ability to recognize health-related advice in industrial settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be misinterpreted as direct advice in highly regulated domains such as healthcare, but the results are not enough to protect them from misinterpreting them as medical advice. |
The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a growing number of researchers are studying the hallucination issue in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection benchmark and a method to detect hallucines in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects hallucinations and mitigates them using different training stages. |
Releasing the Capacity of GANs in Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive (NAR) models suffer from their inherent multi-modality problem. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adversarial Non-autoregressive Transformer for Image Captioning that improves model performance by modifying model structure to be compatible with contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 26.72 times faster than the autoregressive model on the MSCOCO dataset. |
MLCopilot: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in Solving Machine Learning Tasks (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to automating ML are time-consuming and difficult to understand for human developers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to develop ML solutions for novel tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between machine intelligence and human knowledge by exploiting state-of-the-art large language models. |
Grounded Multimodal Procedural Entity Recognition for Procedural Documents: A New Dataset and Baseline (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract procedural knowledge from documents focus on text-only settings, which is insufficient for entity disambiguation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to detect the entity and the corresponding bounding box groundings in images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects the entity and the corresponding bounding box groundings in image (i.e., visual entities) it is based on a dataset of a WikiHow 1 and EHow 2 document and the results are compared with existing models. |
Rethinking the Alignment of Psychotherapy Dialogue Generation with Motivational Interviewing Strategies (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is a client-centered counseling technique that encourages individuals to change behaviors through emphatic conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate more controllable dialogues with explainability by prompting LLMs to predict appropriate strategies as reasoning and utilizing these strategies to guide dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more controllable and explainable dialogues with a set of MI skills. |
Denoising Multi-Source Weak Supervision for Neural Text Classification (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of deep neural networks (DNNs) for text classification problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a label denoiser which estimates the source reliability using a conditional soft attention mechanism and reduces label noise by aggregating rule-annotated weak labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on sentiment, topic, and relation classifications and achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods even without labeled data. |
Do MLLMs Understand Pointing? Benchmarking and Enhancing Referential Reasoning in Egocentric Vision (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Egocentric AI agents rely on pointing to resolve referential ambiguities in natural language commands. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answering benchmark to evaluate and enhance pointing reasoning in egocentric views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates and enhances pointing reasoning in egocentric views. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
Hierarchical Inductive Transfer for Continual Dialogue Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for learning and deployment of neural dialogue models have been used for online chit-chat scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical inductive transfer framework to learn and deploy dialogue skills continually and efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable performance under deployment-friendly model capacity. |
UR2 : Unify RAG and Reasoning through Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing attempts to unify large language models are limited to open-domain QA with fixed retrieval settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a general reinforcement learning framework that dynamically coordinates retrieval and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing paradigms on open-domain QA, MMLU-Pro, medical, and mathematical reasoning tasks. |
LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts (2025.acl-long)
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Qibing Ren, Hao Li, Dongrui Liu, Zhanxu Xie, Xiaoya Lu, Yu Qiao, Lei Sha, Junchi Yan, Lizhuang Ma, Jing Shao
| Challenge: | Current safety training focuses on teaching models to reject harmful queries, but recent research shows that adversarial attacks or jailbreak methods bypass these safety mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a new attack method to craft multi-turn toxic prompts that gradually lead LLMs to reveal unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in diversity, effectiveness, and efficiency across aligned LLMs. |
LR²Bench: Evaluating Long-chain Reflective Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models via Constraint Satisfaction Problems (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in o1-like models have significantly enhanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the Long-chain Reflective Reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the Long-chain Reflective Reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) it consists of 850 samples across six Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) |
Chain-Talker: Chain Understanding and Rendering for Empathetic Conversational Speech Synthesis (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current generative CSS models face interpretability limitations due to insufficient emotional perception and redundant discrete speech coding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns synthesized speech with the emotional context of user-agent interactions to achieve empathy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces more expressive speech than existing methods on three datasets. |
Alignment with Fill-In-the-Middle for Enhancing Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Houxing Ren, Zimu Lu, Weikang Shi, Haotian Hou, Yunqiao Yang, Ke Wang, Aojun Zhou, Junting Pan, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating test cases with limited training data are not reliable and may be counterproductive. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that splits code snippets into smaller, granular blocks, creating more diverse DPO pairs from the same test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows significant improvements in code generation tasks on benchmark datasets such as HumanEval (+), MBPP (+), and APPS. |
Towards Robust Real-World Spreadsheet Understanding with Multi-Agent Multi-Format Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Spreadsheets are among the most widely used data formats in real-world applications . existing large language models treat tables as plain text, overlooking layout cues and visual semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage multi-agent framework for spreadsheet understanding that adopts a step-by-step reading and reasoning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two spreadsheet datasets show the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on Spreadsheet Bench. |
Bridging the Editing Gap in LLMs: FineEdit for Precise and Targeted Text Modifications (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that large language models can perform precise text editing tasks. |
| Approach: | InstrEditBench is a benchmark dataset that compares 30,000 structured editing tasks . experimental evaluations show FineEdit outperforms state-of-the-art models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on single-turn edits and mistral-7B-OpenOrca on direct edits. |
DEIE: Benchmarking Document-level Event Information Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese News Dataset (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing event-based datasets mainly target sentence-level tasks . current models struggle with "document" annotation, a key feature of the current model . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale document-level event information extraction dataset with over 56,000+ events and 242,000+ arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset has over 56,000+ events and 242,000+ arguments. |
Query and Output: Generating Words by Querying Distributed Word Representations for Paraphrase Generation (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models tend to memorize words instead of learning meaning of words . existing models tend not to model semantic information, resulting in incorrect sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model that generates words by querying distributed word representations . they evaluate model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks, namely text simplification and short abstractive summarization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on these benchmark datasets . |
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)
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Siwei Wu, JinCheng Ren, Xeron Du, Shuyue Guo, Xingwei Qu, Yiming Liang, Jie Liu, Yunwen Li, Tyler Loakman, Tianyu Zheng, Boyu Feng, Huaqing Yuan, Zili Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenhao Huang, Chenglin Cai, Haoran Que, Jian Yang, Yuelin Bai, Zekun Moore Wang, Zhouliang Yu, Qunshu Lin, Ding Pan, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Tiannan Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Shenzhi Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Minghao Liu, Guoyin Wang, Ge Zhang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark. |
On the Influence of Masking Policies in Intermediate Pre-training (2021.emnlp-main)
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Qinyuan Ye, Belinda Z. Li, Sinong Wang, Benjamin Bolte, Hao Ma, Wen-tau Yih, Xiang Ren, Madian Khabsa
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that inserting an intermediate pre-training stage improves performance of masked language models. |
| Approach: | They propose methods to automate the discovery of optimal masking policies via direct supervision or meta-learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the heuristic of masking named entities on TriviaQA and can be generalizable beyond that task. |
Intra-Event and Inter-Event Dependency-Aware Graph Network for Event Argument Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models do not build dependency information among event argument roles . Existing methods do not learn the interactions between different roles based on event structure . |
| Approach: | They propose an intra-event and inter-e event dependency-aware graph network to model dependencies between roles . they use event structure as the fundamental unit to construct role dependencies within events . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the ACE05, RAMS, and WikiEvents datasets. |
Symbolic Chain-of-Thought Distillation: Small Models Can Also “Think” Step-by-Step (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Symbolic Chain-of-thought Distillation (SCoTD) is a method to train a smaller student model on rationalizations sampled from a significantly larger teacher model. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train a smaller student model on rationalizations from a larger teacher model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of a student model in supervised and few-shot settings and especially for challenge sets. |
CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing language models rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to emulate character behaviors but neglect the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving these behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RPLA adopting a cognize-then-respond reasoning paradigm that leverages dual cognition for more contextually grounded and psychologically coherent responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed RPLA outperforms baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks. |
REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extend knowledge scope of large language models (LLMs) lack internal parametric knowledge, resulting in misusing external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented approach that provides LLMs with potentially relevant documents through a module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on four open-domain QA tasks. |
PerturbScore: Connecting Discrete and Continuous Perturbations in NLP (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Natural language processing (NLP) applications are growing rapidly due to discrete nature of texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to connect discrete perturbations with continuous perturbations to help understand discrete ones in NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses methods used in discrete perturbation measuring and can be generalized to different datasets, perturbation methods. |
Learning to Select In-Context Demonstration Preferred by Large Language Model (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform tasks with only a few examples as demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative preference learning framework that leverages LLM feedback to directly optimize demonstration selection for ICL. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 19 datasets across 11 task categories show that GenICL achieves superior performance than existing methods in selecting the most effective demonstrations. |
A Novel Global Feature-Oriented Relational Triple Extraction Model based on Table Filling (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Table filling based relational triple extraction methods focus on using local features but ignore the global associations of relations and token pairs, which increases the possibility of overlooking some important information during triple extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a global feature-oriented triple extraction model that makes full use of the two kinds of global associations of relations and token pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
Rethinking Denoised Auto-Encoding in Language Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models such as BERT have achieved success in learning sequence representations, but they tend to learn representations that are covariant with the noise of pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to train self-trained models to learn noise invariant sequence representations . they encourage consistency between original sequence and corrupted version via unsupervised instance-wise training signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 11 natural language understanding and cross-modal tasks and achieves 0.6% gain on GLUE benchmarks and 0.8% increment on NLVR2 . |
HMEAE: Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing event extraction methods classify each argument role independently, ignoring conceptual correlations between different argument roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction model to provide inductive bias from the concept hierarchy of event argument roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on real-world datasets and shows that it leverages useful knowledge from the concept hierarchy. |
RAPO: An Adaptive Ranking Paradigm for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2022.emnlp-main)
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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. |
COMPASS: Enhancing Agent Long-Horizon Reasoning with Evolving Context (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-horizon tasks that require sustained reasoning and multiple tool interactions remain challenging for LLM agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that separates tactical execution, strategic oversight, and context organization into three specialized components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 20% relative to baselines on GAIA, BrowseComp, and Humanity’s Last Exam tasks. |
Triangular Architecture for Rare Language Translation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performs poor on low-resource pairs especially when Z is a rare language. |
| Approach: | They propose a triangular triangulation technique to leverage bilingual data to optimize the translation performance of low-resource pairs. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed architecture significantly improves translation quality of rare languages on MultiUN and IWSLT2012 datasets and even better when combining back-translation methods. |
Regularizing Dialogue Generation by Imitating Implicit Scenarios (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue generation lack the flexibility to handle such freedoms. |
| Approach: | They propose to take into account dialogue history and future conversation to implicitly reconstruct the scenario knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on diversity and relevance and expresses scenario-specific knowledge. |
TESTA: Temporal-Spatial Token Aggregation for Long-form Video-Language Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that TESTA reduces the number of visual tokens by 75% and thus accelerates video encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to condense video semantics by aggregating similar frames and patches within each frame. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces visual tokens by 75% and accelerates video encoding. |
EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | EASYTOOL combines tools from diverse tool documentation into a single tool instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms tool documentation into a unified tool instruction. |
| Outcome: | EASYTOOL combines extensive tool documentation into a concise tool instruction . it reduces token consumption and improves performance of LLM-based agents . |
Knowledge Graph Embedding with Atrous Convolution and Residual Learning (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods are complex and require time for training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an atrous convolution based knowledge graph embedding method that increases feature interactions by using atrous . they evaluate method on six benchmark datasets with different evaluation metrics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results on six benchmark datasets than state-of-the-art methods on most evaluation metrics. |
From Mimicking to Integrating: Knowledge Integration for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) are fine-tuned and released for research and deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a PLM reuse paradigm that merges teacher-PLM knowledge into a student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can reduce the computational cost and environmental side-effects of retraining the PLM from scratch. |
Exploring the Limitations of Mamba in COPY and CoT Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Inference overhead of Transformers increases linearly with the sequence length, posing challenges for modeling long sequences. |
| Approach: | They analyze Mamba's expressive ability to perform COPY operations and Chain of Thought reasoning tasks using a defined sequence length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform COPY operations and Chain of Thought reasoning tasks with a constant size while reducing computational costs. |
TurnBench-MS: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Turn, Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single-turn or single-step tasks, failing to capture iterative reasoning in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates multi-turn, multi-step reasoning through an interactive code-breaking task inspired by the "Turing Machine Board Game" the best model achieves 84% accuracy in Classic mode, but performance drops to 18% in Nightmare mode. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark evaluates multi-turn, multi-step reasoning through an interactive code-breaking task inspired by the "Turing Machine Board Game" the best model achieves 84% accuracy in Classic mode, but performance drops to 18% in Nightmare mode. |
Delving into the Openness of CLIP (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) allows for open-vocabulary visual recognition, where the model can recognize images from an open class set in a zero-shot manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to use image classification as an image-to-text matching task instead of discrete category IDs to achieve open-vocabulary visual recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recognize images from an open vocabulary in a zero-shot manner, but its performance deteriorates as the vocabulary expands. |
Retrieval over Classification: Integrating Relation Semantics for Multimodal Relation Extraction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal relation extraction ignore structural constraints and lack semantic expressiveness for fine-grained relation understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates multimodal relation extraction as a retrieval task driven by relation semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets MNRE and MORE and exhibits stronger robustness and interpretability. |
Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation: A Cycled Reinforcement Learning Approach (P18-1)
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| 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. |
HintPilot: LLM-based Compiler Hint Synthesis for Code Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize source code rely on invasive transformations that can introduce semantic errors and miss fine-grained compiler-level optimization opportunities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that bridges LLM-based reasoning with traditional compilers by synthesizing compiler hints. |
| Outcome: | HintPilot achieves 6.88x speedup over -Ofast while preserving program correctness. |
Debiasing Large Language Models via Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from excessive token usage and limited generalisability across diverse reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought framework that leverages structural causal models to infer the causal effect of a query on its answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing prompting baselines in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. |
Lifelong Pretraining: Continually Adapting Language Models to Emerging Corpora (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are typically learned over a large, static corpus and fine-tuned for various downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to continuously update a pretrained language model to adapt to emerging data and to keep track of the model's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can adapt to new corpora while retaining knowledge in earlier domains. |
Enhancing Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning with BranchLoRA (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine tune Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are prone to Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) existing approaches rely on the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LoRA framework to preserve previous instruction alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose an asymmetric tuning-freezing mechanism to mitigate parameter inefficiency . branch-specific routers are introduced to ensure optimal branch distribution over time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks on the latest MCIT benchmarks. |
A Three-Stage Learning Framework for Low-Resource Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogues perform poorly when transfer into new domains with limited training samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised three-stage learning framework based on weakly-supervised learning based upon large scale ungrounded dialogues and unstructured knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods even in zero-resource setting. |
Learning the Beauty in Songs: Neural Singing Voice Beautifier (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for pitch correction are limited to intonation but ignore the overall aesthetic quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel time-warping approach for pitch correction to synchronize the amateur recording with the template pitch curve. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves intonation and vocal tone while keeping content and vocal timbre. |
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing (2022.acl-long)
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Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that pre-trained models can improve in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal encoder-decoder framework that pre-trains speech-text representations using large-scale unlabeled speech and text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing models on speech-to-text processing tasks. |
Self-Adjust Softmax (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Guoxuan Chen, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Xiaozhe Ren, Chao Huang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Usually, tokens with larger attention scores are important for the final prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify softmax(z) to z softmax and its normalized variant to improve the Transformer attention mechanism by making minor adjustments to the softmax function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides enhanced gradient properties compared to the vanilla softmax function. |
SCOTT: Self-Consistent Chain-of-Thought Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LMs) generate free-text rationales for their predictions via chain-of-thought prompting, but there is little guarantee that the generated rationale is consistent with LM’s predictions or faithfully justify the decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a faithful knowledge distillation method to learn a small, self-consistent CoT model from a larger teacher model by contrastive decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields comparable performance but is less faithful than baselines. |
AV-TranSpeech: Audio-Visual Robust Speech-to-Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Rongjie Huang, Huadai Liu, Xize Cheng, Yi Ren, Linjun Li, Zhenhui Ye, Jinzheng He, Lichao Zhang, Jinglin Liu, Xiang Yin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing models for speech-to-speech translation suffer from distinct degradation in noisy environments and fail to translate visual speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based audio-visual speech-to-speech translation model that integrates visual information with audio-only data to improve system robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained on audio-only corpus in two languages . it also improves with low-resource audio-visual data, compared with baselines . |
EthicMind: A Risk-Aware Framework for Ethical-Emotional Alignment in Multi-Turn Dialogue (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialogue models address empathy and ethical safety in isolation . Existing models fail to adapt their behavior as ethical risk and user emotion evolve . |
| Approach: | They propose a risk-aware framework that integrates ethical-emotional alignment in dialogue as an explicit turn-level decision problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more consistent ethical guidance and emotional engagement than baselines in ethically complex interactions. |
ECC: An Emotion-Cause Conversation Dataset for Empathy Response (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing empathy dialogue datasets focus on emotion labels while cause annotations are added post hoc. |
| Approach: | They propose an emotion-cause conversation dataset with 2.4K dialogues that can be scalable . they use a framework that utilizes knowledge and large language models to automatically generate dialogues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can achieve comparable or even superior performance to existing empathy dialogue datasets. |
In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Inferential Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search (2024.emnlp-main)
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Huihan Li, Yuting Ning, Zeyi Liao, Siyuan Wang, Xiang Li, Ximing Lu, Wenting Zhao, Faeze Brahman, Yejin Choi, Xiang Ren
| Challenge: | Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK) is a framework for generating factually-correct yet long-tail inferential knowledge. |
| Approach: | They introduce a framework to obtain factually-correct yet long-tail inferential statements using variable-wise prompting grounded on symbolic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to obtain factually-correct yet long-tail inferential statements while ensuring factual correctness. |
OneRec-Think: In-Text Reasoning for Generative Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
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Zhanyu Liu, Shiyao Wang, Xingmei Wang, Rongzhou Zhang, Jiaxin Deng, Honghui Bao, Jinghao Zhang, Wuchao Li, PengFei Zheng, Xiangyu Wu, Yifei Hu, Qigen Hu, Xinchen Luo, Lejian Ren, Zhang Zixing, Qianqian Wang, Kuo Cai, Yunfan Wu, Hongtao Cheng, Zexuan Cheng, Lu Ren, Huanjie Wang, Yi Su, Ruiming Tang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing generative models lack the capacity for explicit and controllable reasoning, a key advantage of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates dialogue, reasoning, and personalized recommendation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across public benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance. |
Beyond Dynamic Quantization: An Efficient Static Hierarchical Mix-precision Framework for Near-Lossless LLM Compression (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic quantization are hardware-unfriendly and often lead to large quantization errors in static scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Static Hierarchical Mix-precision Quantization method which quantifies both inter-layer and intra-layer sensitivity through unified derivations involving Hessian. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 75.58% on zero-shot reasoning tasks while yielding average speedup of 2.86. |
Learning When to Concentrate or Divert Attention: Self-Adaptive Attention Temperature for Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation models treat decoding at each time step equally with the same matrix . conventional methods treat decoder outputs at all time steps with the identical weight matrix causing inaccuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a mechanism to control the softness of attention by means of an attention temperature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on Chinese-English and English-Vietnamese translations. |
Seeing No Evil: Blinding Large Vision-Language Models to Safety Instructions via Adversarial Attention Hijacking (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing attacks optimize image perturbations to maximize harmful output likelihood, but suffer from slow convergence due to gradient conflict between adversarial objectives and the model’s safety-retrieval mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a push-pull approach which suppresses attention to system-prompt tokens and anchors generation on adversarial image features to avoid collisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces gradient conflict by 45% and achieves 94.4% attack success rate on Qwen-VL (vs. 68.8% baseline) with 40% fewer iterations. |
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
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Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model. |
DAPE V2: Process Attention Score as Feature Map for Length Extrapolation (2025.acl-long)
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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Jiankai Sun, Jingyao Li, Minbin Huang, Xiaozhe Ren, Michael Ng, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that treating attention as a feature map and applying convolution as . a processing method significantly enhances Transformer performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the convolution operator to mimic the processing methods in computer vision to treat attention as a feature map and apply it to neighboring attention scores across different heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be adapted to various attention-related models and achieves high performance. |
Diffuse Thinking: Exploring Diffusion Language Models as Efficient Thought Proposers for Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet their autoregressive generation paradigm makes it computationally prohibitive to explore diverse reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines diffusion-based generation with autoregressive evaluation to efficiently generate diverse intermediate reasoning thoughts and employ LLMs as evaluators to assess and select candidates based on their plausibility and correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference efficiency while maintaining competitive or superior reasoning accuracy. |
Dynamic Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods conduct knowledge distillation statically, e.g., student model aligns output distribution to teacher model on pre-defined training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic knowledge distillation that empowers the student to adjust the learning procedure according to its competency . they find it is promising and provide discussions on potential future directions towards more efficient methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost student model performance while accelerating training . the proposed method reduces memory usage and accelerates model inference . |
CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CascadeBERT can achieve an overall 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing dynamic early exiting methods on six classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which emits predictions in internal layers without passing through the entire model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve 15% improvement under 4x speed-up compared with existing methods on six classification tasks yielding more calibrated and accurate predictions. |
MPR-GUI: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multilingual Perception and Reasoning in GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Ruihan Chen, Qiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Xiaoliang Yang, Yuxuan Gu, Zekun Zhou, Yunfei Lu, Haoyu Ren, Kun Chen, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing GUI benchmarks lack fine-grained diagnostics to identify which capabilities lead to task failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual P R GUI Benchmark to assess LVLMs' language capabilities . they propose XLI to align non-English hidden states with English ones during inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals consistent gaps between English and non-English settings . it reduces the cross-lingual gaps with an average gain of 6.5% in non- English settings compared to static benchmarks . |
SpikeVoice: High-Quality Text-to-Speech Via Efficient Spiking Neural Network (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | SpikeVoice performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN . major obstacle to using SNN for such generative tasks lies in the demand for models to grasp long-term dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a brain-inspired Spiking Neural Network (SNN) which performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN and explores the potential of SNN to "speak". |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with only 10.5% energy consumption of ANN. |