Papers by Rui Sun

50 papers
Union-of-Experts: Neurons in Mixture-of-Experts are Secretly Routers (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on an external router to assign tokens to experts, resulting in suboptimal performance.
Approach: They propose an MoE variant that performs "expert-autonomous routing" by pre-designating a fraction of neurons within each expert as "routing neurons" they pre-train UoE models with up to 3B parameters and show they outperform traditional MoEs with matched efficiency.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models with 3B parameters and provides valuable insights into expert-autonomous selection and the broader routing mechanisms of MoE models.
Enhancing Medical Dialogue Generation through Knowledge Refinement and Dynamic Prompt Adjustment (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Medical dialogue systems (MDS) struggle to identify relevant medical knowledge and generate accurate responses.
Approach: They propose a medical dialogue system that integrates knowledge refining and dynamic prompt adjustment to improve medical knowledge and accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art systems in both generation quality and medical entity accuracy.
Rethinking Diverse Human Preference Learning through Principal Component Analysis (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Decomposed Reward Models extract diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations.
Approach: They propose a decomposed reward model that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations.
Outcome: The proposed approach extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations.
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity.
Approach: They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Outcome: The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models.
Chart-MRAG: Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation on Chart-based Documents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on simple image-text interactions, overlooking complex visual formats like charts.
Approach: They propose a semi-automatic framework for generating evaluation samples through multi-modal keypoint extraction, knowledge graph construction, and qa pair synthesis.
Outcome: The proposed framework generates 4,738 question-answering pairs across 8 domains from real-world documents.
On the Vulnerability of Safety Alignment in Open-Access LLMs (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to malicious exploitation, but are often rejected and limited harmfulness is limited.
Approach: They propose two types of reverse alignment techniques: reverse supervised fine-tuning (RSFT) and reverse preference optimization (RPO).
Outcome: The proposed methods can significantly enhance the success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks, but they face high rejection rates and limited harmfulness.
ShieldLM: Empowering LLMs as Aligned, Customizable and Explainable Safety Detectors (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing tools for detecting safety issues in LLMs are expensive and inefficient.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based safety detector which annotates the safety of queries and provides explanations for its decisions.
Outcome: The proposed detector outperforms baselines on four sets of query-response pairs and is effective as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs.
IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to decompose VL reasoning rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models.
Approach: They propose a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models on multiple VL reasoning tasks.
E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models.
Approach: They propose an explanation benchmark for analogical reasoning using a Civil Service exam . they use a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is very challenging for state-of-the-art models, it is found.
To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy.
Approach: They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction.
Outcome: The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier.
Mobile-Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-based Mobile Agents (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for LLM-based mobile agents are insufficient to evaluate their capabilities.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based mobile agents' planning capabilities . they expand UI operations by incorporating 103 APIs to accelerate task completion .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks are based on 103 collected APIs and real user queries . the data is categorized into three distinct groups: SAST, SAMT, and MAMT .
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring.
Language Models “Grok” to Copy (2025.naacl-short)

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Challenge: We examine the pre-training dynamics of language models, focusing on their ability to copy text from preceding context.
Approach: They propose that Transformer-based language models develop copying abilities similarly to grokking . they argue that the connection between groking and context copying can improve in-context performance.
Outcome: The proposed model development is similar to grokking, but the speed is independent of tokens trained.
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks.
CAPE: A Chinese Dataset for Appraisal-based Emotional Generation in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs fail to capture the nuances of human emotions, making their interactions seem impersonal or inadequate.
Approach: They propose a two-stage automatic data generation framework to generate a Chinese dataset called CAPE . their data is a cognitive appraisal theory-based Emotional corpus that accounts for personal and situational factors.
Outcome: The proposed framework can generate human-like responses in conversation with large language models.
Plum: Prompt Learning using Metaheuristics (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in prompt learning have led to a need for general prompt optimization methods.
Approach: They propose a branch of discrete non-convex optimization methods with over 100 options as a promising approach to prompt learning.
Outcome: The proposed methods can be used to discover more human-understandable prompts that were previously unknown in reasoning and image generation tasks.
Semi-Supervised Dialogue Policy Learning via Stochastic Reward Estimation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for dialogue policy optimization do not provide sufficient supervision signals at the end of dialogues.
Approach: They propose to learn from state-action pairs of an optimal policy to provide turn-by-turn rewards.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms competitive policy learning baselines on a benchmark multi-domain dataset.
UICOMPASS: UI Map Guided Mobile Task Automation via Adaptive Action Generation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Mobile task automation is an emerging technology that leverages AI to automatically execute routine tasks by users’ commands on mobile devices like Android.
Approach: They propose a UI Map-guided LLM-based approach to automate mobile tasks using static analysis and LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves a 15.87% higher task execution success rate than SOTA approaches even when only APK is available.
Latent Reasoning for Low-Resource Question Generation (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to multihop question generation require extensive data collection and decomposition.
Approach: They propose a generative approach that optimizes the two-phase model without question decomposition data.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms baselines on HOTPOTQA, a benchmark multi-hop question answering dataset.
TopoDIM: One-shot Topology Generation of Diverse Interaction Modes for Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing communication topologies rely on spatio-temporal dialogues, which incur high latency and computation.
Approach: They propose a framework for one-shot Topology generation with Diverse Interaction Modes that enables agents to construct heterogeneous communication without iterative coordination.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces total token consumption by 46.41% while improving average performance by 1.50% over state-of-the-art methods.
DetermLR: Augmenting LLM-based Logical Reasoning from Indeterminacy to Determinacy (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a new approach that rethinks the reasoning process as an evolution from indeterminacy to determinacy.
Outcome: The proposed model surpasses all baselines on various logical reasoning benchmarks.
Find Someone Who: Visual Commonsense Understanding in Human-Centric Grounding (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Visual scenes often involve multiple people and humans can distinguish between them based on context descriptions about what happened before, their mental/physical states, and intentions.
Approach: They propose a task that tests human-centric commonsense grounding models' ability to distinguish individuals given context descriptions about what happened before and their mental/physical states or intentions.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms pre-trained and non-pretrained models on 130k commonsense descriptions annotated on 67k images.
Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for predicting inter-task transferability are sparse and task-specific.
Approach: They propose a method that uses connectivity patterns of neurons as a unique identifier associated with a task.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines in predicting inter-task transferability across data regimes and transfer settings while keeping high efficiency in computation and storage.
Generalizable and Explainable Dialogue Generation via Explicit Action Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Conditioned response generation for task-oriented dialogues implicitly optimizes task completion and language quality.
Approach: They propose to learn natural language actions that represent utterances as a span of words.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms latent action baselines on a multi-domain dataset.
DialogueCSE: Dialogue-based Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Conventional approaches to learning sentence embeddings from dialogues employ the siamese-network for this task, but such architecture yields a large gap between training and evaluating.
Approach: They propose a dialogue-based contrastive learning approach to learn sentence embeddings from dialogues using a siamese-network.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline methods on three multi-turn dialogue datasets in terms of MAP and Spearman’s correlation measures.
Reverse Chain: A Generic-Rule for LLMs to Master Multi-API Planning (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to enable large language models to implement function calling are limited in their tool-use capabilities.
Approach: They propose a controllable, target-driven approach to empower LLMs to operate external APIs only via prompts.
Outcome: The proposed approach limits LLMs to executing simple tasks, e.g., API Selection and Argument Completion.
MoE Adapter for Large Audio Language Models: Sparsity, Disentanglement, and Gradient-Conflict-Free (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing research on Large Language Models (LLMs) limited to textual input modality . acoustic information is intrinsically heterogeneous, entangling attributes such as speech, music, and environmental context.
Approach: They propose a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture to decouple acoustic information by routing audio tokens to specialized experts.
Outcome: The proposed architecture outperforms existing models on audio semantic and paralinguistic tasks while retaining shared experts for global context.
English-Myanmar Supervised and Unsupervised NMT: NICT’s Machine Translation Systems at WAT-2019 (D19-52)

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Challenge: NICT participated in the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT-2019) shared translation task, specifically Myanmar (My) - English task in both translation directions.
Approach: They present the participation of the NICT in the 6th Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT-2019) shared translation task, specifically Myanmar (Burmese) - English task in both translation directions.
Outcome: The proposed systems perform the third in English-to-Myanmar and the second in Myanmar-to English according to BLEU score.
Robust Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Adversarial Denoising Training (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) has attracted great interest in the machine translation community.
Approach: They propose to explicitly take noisy data into consideration to improve the robustness of UNMT based systems.
Outcome: The proposed methods significantly improved the robustness of the conventional UNMT systems in noisy scenarios.
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples .
Approach: They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models.
Outcome: The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models.
Exploiting Pseudo Image Captions for Multimodal Summarization (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) lack reference images for training, and exposure of image captions during training is inconsistent with MSMO’s task settings.
Approach: They propose a coarse-to-fine image-text alignment mechanism to identify the most relevant sentence of each image in a document, resembling the role of image captions in capturing visual knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed method sets up state-of-the-art on all intermodality and intramodality metrics and improves on image recommendation precision.
From "Aha Moments" to Controllable Thinking: Toward Meta-Cognitive Reasoning in LRMs via Decoupled Reasoning and Control (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Reasoning Models exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking.
Approach: They propose a meta-cognitive reasoning framework that decouples reasoning from control to enable independent optimization of control strategies.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed model improves efficiency and accuracy across reasoning benchmarks.
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences.
Approach: They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks.
LoRATK: LoRA Once, Backdoor Everywhere in the Share-and-Play Ecosystem (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: distributing LLMs without a proven track record like ‘meta-llama‘ or ‘qwen‘ rarely gains community traction.
Approach: They propose a simple, efficient, yet specific recipe for a backdoor LoRA to be injected into task-enhancing LoRAs and examine the mechanisms of such infections.
Outcome: The proposed model allows attackers to scale the distribution of compromised LoRAs with minimal effort by leveraging the rich pool of shared LoRA assets.
STINMatch: Semi-Supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network for Financial Risk Detection via News Label Diffusion (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Commercial news provides rich semantics and timely information for automated financial risk detection.
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network, STINMatch, along with a news-enterprise knowledge graph to endorse the risk detection enhancement.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models in terms of generalization and semantics and annotation.
Efficient Knowledge Infusion via KG-LLM Alignment (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for knowledge infusion face knowledge mismatch and poor information compliance of LLMs with knowledge graphs.
Approach: They propose a three-stage alignment strategy to enhance the LLM's capability to utilize information from knowledge graphs.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines on biomedical question-answering datasets and outperformed existing methods.
Enhancing Machine Translation with Self-Supervised Preference Data (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current approaches to constructing preference data rely on human annotations.
Approach: They propose a framework which efficiently constructs translation preference data for iterative training.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves translation preference data on large language models.
UniFine: A Unified and Fine-grained Approach for Zero-shot Vision-Language Understanding (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: supervised methods for vision-language tasks have been well-studied, but they lack the fine-grained information needed for semantics understanding.
Approach: They propose a framework to take advantage of fine-grained information for zero-shot vision-language learning, covering multiple tasks such as VQA, SNLI-VE, and VCR.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms previous zero-shot methods on VQA and achieves substantial improvement on SNLI-VE and VCR.
Knowledge Distillation for Multilingual Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) can only translate between a single language pair and cannot produce translation results for multiple language pairs at the same time.
Approach: They propose a method to translate between 13 languages using a single encoder and a decoder . they propose two knowledge distillation methods to further enhance multilingual UNMT performance .
Outcome: The proposed method improves translation performance for all languages using multilingual data.
A Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Grounded Dialogues (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to train grounded dialogues require large amounts of data.
Approach: They propose a synthetic data generation framework for grounded dialogues that takes knowledge data and heuristics to determine a dialogue flow and incrementally turn it into a dialog.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly boosts model performance in training data and low-resource scenarios.
Self-Training for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation in Unbalanced Training Data Scenarios (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods that use monolingual corpora for translation are not suitable for low-resource languages such as Estonian.
Approach: They propose unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) that relies on monolingual corpora to train a robust UNMT system and improve its performance.
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform conventional UNMT systems on several language pairs.
Beyond Query Bias: Candidate-Aware Iterative Refinement for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to retrieve target images suffer from inherent cognitive bias due to unknown candidate distribution.
Approach: They propose a training-free framework that reframes ZS-CIR as a self-correcting process . they propose to use retrieved results as feedback to perceive the candidate distribution .
Outcome: Experiments on public benchmarks show that CoRR outperforms other SOTA methods.
Alternated Training with Synthetic and Authentic Data for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to synthesizing data in NMT focus on leveraging monolingual data in training.
Approach: They propose alternated training with synthetic and authentic data to improve NMT models' performance.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves Chinese-English and German-English translation tasks over strong baselines.
Learning Relation Alignment for Calibrated Cross-modal Retrieval (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: despite advances in multimodal pre-training, cross-modal retrieval remains challenging . lack of relation consistency impairs contextualized representation of image-text pairs .
Approach: They propose a new metric to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations.
Outcome: The proposed method boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin.
Intent Discovery with Frame-guided Semantic Regularization and Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing intent discovery methods focus on transferring prior knowledge of known intents to unknown ones.
Approach: They propose to use frame knowledge as conceptual semantic guidance to bridge the gap between known intents representation learning and unknown intents clustering.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms solid baselines on two benchmark datasets.
An Error-Guided Correction Model for Chinese Spelling Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing neural network approaches have achieved great progress on Chinese spelling correction, but there is still room for improvement.
Approach: They propose an error-guided correction model that uses pre-trained BERT models to detect errors and integrate the error confusion set into the model.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on widely used benchmarks and achieves superior performance on both quality and computation speed.
Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embedding Agreement for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)

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Challenge: Unsupervised bilingual word embedding (UBWE) has helped unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) achieve remarkable results in several language pairs.
Approach: They propose two methods that train UNMT with UBWE agreement . they propose to use UBwe to initialize word embedding in UNMT .
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform conventional methods on several language pairs.
BaseCal: Unsupervised Confidence Calibration via Base Model Signals (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Post-trained LLMs typically compromise reliability with severe overconfidence, resulting in inaccurate responses.
Approach: They propose a solution that feeds PoLLMs into the base LLM to get confidence.
Outcome: The proposed solution reduces expected calibration error (ECE) by 42.90% compared to the best unsupervised baselines.
DNASpeech: A Contextualized and Situated Text-to-Speech Dataset with Dialogues, Narratives and Actions (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing TTS datasets lack situated descriptive prompts aligned with speech data.
Approach: They propose a contextualized and situated text-to-speech task to promote more accurate and customized speech generation using DNA prompts.
Outcome: The proposed task promotes more accurate and customized speech generation using DNA prompts.

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