Papers by Song Liu
Attention-guided Self-reflection for Zero-shot Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Hallucination is a significant barrier to the effective application of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an Attention-Guided SElf-Reflection approach for hallucination detection in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot hallucination detection on four widely-used LLMs across three different halluciation benchmarks. |
Verified Critical Step Optimization for LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Critical Step Optimization (CSO) focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on GAIA-Text-103 and XBench-DeepSearch while requiring supervision at only 16% of trajectory steps. |
ProUIE: A Macro-to-Micro Progressive Learning Method for LLM-based Universal Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenda Liu, Song Zhigang, Shuai Nie, Guangyao Liu, Lisung Chen, Binyu Yang, Yaran Chen, Peng Zhou, Hongzhen Wang, Yuchen Liu, Wenyue Hu, Jiaming Xu, Runyu Shi, Ying Huang
| Challenge: | ProUIE improves universal information extraction (UIE) without external information . many LLM-based methods rely on extra schema cues, external resources or complex alignment and verification pipelines . |
| Approach: | They propose a Macro-to-Micro progressive learning approach that improves UIE without external information. |
| Outcome: | ProUIE outperforms instruction-tuned baselines on average for NER and RE while using a smaller backbone. |
Construct a Sense-Frame Aligned Predicate Lexicon for Chinese AMR Corpus (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing lexicons blur senses and frames of predicates, which needs to be refined to meet word sense disambiguation and event extraction tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a predicate lexicon for Chinese AMR corpus with 14,389 senses and 10,800 frames of 8,470 words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed lexicon includes 14,389 senses and 10,800 frames of 8,470 words. |
OmniCharacter: Towards Immersive Role-Playing Agents with Seamless Speech-Language Personality Interaction (2025.acl-long)
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Haonan Zhang, Run Luo, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Ting-En Lin, Pengpeng Zeng, Qiang Qu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on replicating dialogues in textual form, neglecting the role’s voice traits as a crucial effect in interaction, which tends to be more immersive experiences in realistic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a first seamless speech-language personality interaction model to achieve immersive RPAs with low latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits role-specific personality traits and vocal traits throughout the interaction, enabling a mixture of speech and language responses. |
What Makes a Good Reasoning Chain? Uncovering Structural Patterns in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning with large language models have popularized Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT) a framework that converts sequential LCoTs into hierarchical tree structures enables deeper structural analysis of LLM reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that converts sequential LCoTs into hierarchical tree structures and enables deeper structural analysis of LLM reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to analyze LLM reasoning in a variety of tasks and models. |
CLEME2.0: Towards Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error Correction (2025.acl-long)
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Jingheng Ye, Zishan Xu, Yinghui Li, Linlin Song, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Ruitong Liu, Xin Su, Zifei Shan
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the interpretability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation metrics, but the interpretabilty of these metrics has been neglected. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-based metric that describes four aspects of GEC systems: hit-correction, wrong-corrections, under-correcties, and over-corrects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric reveals critical qualities and locates drawbacks of GEC systems. |
Augmenting Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL Datasets with Self-Play (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Numerous architectures and pretraining methods have been proposed for context-dependent text-to-SQL, but the size of the datasets used has been limited due to the high cost of annotating multi-turn dialogue and SQL pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment training datasets using self-play which leverages contextual information to synthesize new interactions to adapt the model to new databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves accuracy on SParC and CoSQL, two widely used cross-domain text-to-SQl datasets. |
A Survey on Zero Pronoun Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Zero pronouns (ZPs) are often omitted in pro-drop languages, but should be recalled in non-pro-drop language. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze the literature on zero pronoun translation after the neural revolution . they uncover that data limitation causes learning bias in languages and domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method and methods are compared to other models and evaluation metrics on different benchmarks. |
Topology Imbalance and Relation Inauthenticity Aware Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks for Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect fake news focus on mining lexical and syntactic features. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology imbalance and Relation inauthenticity aware Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks to identify fake news on social media. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets. |
Sentence-State LSTM for Text Representation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | LSTMs have been shown to suffer from various limitations due to their sequential nature. |
| Approach: | They propose to model hidden states of all words simultaneously at each recurrent step rather than one word at a time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has strong representation power, giving competitive performances compared to stacked BiLSTM models with similar parameter numbers. |
When Reasoning Meets Information Aggregation: A Case Study with Sports Narratives (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using sports data, an LLM can analyze sports narratives to infer points from actions, identify related entities, attribute points accurately to players and teams, and draw conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to synthesize NBA basketball game narratives using real NBA basketball data and propose 'SportsGen' they find that most models fail to accurately aggregate basketball scores due to frequent scoring patterns and open-source models suffer from significant score hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can evaluate LLMs’ reasoning capabilities under complex scenarios with varying narrative lengths and density of information. |
What Does Your Smile Mean? Jointly Detecting Multi-Modal Sarcasm and Sentiment Using Quantum Probability (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model multi-modal sarcasm and sentiment are based on quantum probability . sarcasm and feelings embody intrinsic uncertainty of human cognition . |
| Approach: | They propose a quantum probability-driven multi-task learning framework for sarcasm and sentiment recognition using quantum superpositions and quantum interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal sarcasm and sentiment recognition. |
Hierarchical Memory Organization for Wikipedia Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Eugene J. Yu, Dawei Zhu, Yifan Song, Xiangyu Wong, Jiebin Zhang, Wenxuan Shi, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating Wikipedia articles do not utilize memory directly for outline generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate Wikipedia articles autonomously by leveraging a hierarchical memory architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in producing informative and reliable articles. |
ATLANTIS: Weak-to-Strong Learning via Importance Sampling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ATLANTIS is a new technique to improve the performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new technique to bridge the gap between the distribution of current datasets and the real-world data distribution by using importance sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can bring consistent and significant improvements to models’ performance and can be flexibly transferred among models with different structures. |
Beyond Function-Level Search: Repository-Aware Dual-Encoder Code Retrieval with Adversarial Verification (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | escalating complexity of modern codebases has intensified the need for code retrieval systems capable of interpreting cross-component change intents. |
| Approach: | RepoAlignBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate repository-level code retrieval . the benchmark proposes an adversarial reflection-augmented dual-tower architecture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 12.2% Top-5 Accuracy and 7.1% Recall improvements over state-of-the-art benchmarks. |
An Encoding Strategy Based Word-Character LSTM for Chinese NER (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-based model can not be trained in batches due to its DAG structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a lattice model that integrates word information into the start or end characters of a word and integrates it into a fixed-sized representation for efficient batch training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art models on benchmark datasets and shows that it can be trained in batches without a shortcut path. |
DecipherPref: Analyzing Influential Factors in Human Preference Judgments via GPT-4 (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Human preference judgments are important in large language models to produce outputs that align with human values. |
| Approach: | They conduct an in-depth examination of pairwise human judgments released by OpenAI . they find that most favored factors vary across tasks and genres . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reveals that most favored factors vary across tasks and genres . the findings have implications on the construction of balanced datasets in human preference evaluations - crucial step in shaping behavior of future LLMs. |
IFlyEA: A Chinese Essay Assessment System with Automated Rating, Review Generation, and Recommendation (2021.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Automated Essay Assessment (AEA) aims to judge students’ writing proficiency in an automatic way. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese AEA system IFlyEssayAssess to evaluate essays written by native Chinese students from primary and junior schools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system provides application services for essay scoring, review generation, recommendation, and explainable analytical visualization. |
AdDriftBench: A Benchmark for Detecting Data Drift and Label Drift in Short Video Advertising (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yinghao Song, Xiangji Zeng, Shuai Cui, Lu Sun, Zhaowei Liu, Yuan Yuan, Yulu Wang, Hai Zhou, Zhaohan Gong
| Challenge: | Short video advertising scenarios present unique challenges due to data drift (DD) and label drift (LD). |
| Approach: | They propose to use data drift and label drift to evaluate models under rapidly shifting content distributions and labeling scenarios to assess their generalization capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs moderately in short video advertising contexts, particularly in handling fine-grained semantics and adapting to shifting instructions. |
Generate-on-Graph: Treat LLM as both Agent and KG for Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yao Xu, Shizhu He, Jiabei Chen, Zihao Wang, Yangqiu Song, Hanghang Tong, Guang Liu, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) however, these methods are often incomplete to cover all the knowledge required to answer questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to address insufficient knowledge and hallucination issues in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two datasets. |
The Stepwise Deception: Simulating the Evolution from True News to Fake News with LLM Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies assume fake news is inherently existing rather than exploring its gradual formation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model-based simulation approach explicitly focusing on fake news evolution from real news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures fake news evolution patterns and accurately reproduces known fake news, aligning closely with human evaluations. |
Generating User-Engaging News Headlines (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Personalized news recommendation systems present the same headline to all users, making it difficult for them to understand the connection between their interests and the recommended article. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates user profiling to generate personalized headlines and a combination of automated and human evaluation methods to determine user preference for personalized headline generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate personalized headlines that meet the needs of a diverse audience. |
PhotoChat: A Human-Human Dialogue Dataset With Photo Sharing Behavior For Joint Image-Text Modeling (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | PhotoChat contains 12k dialogues, each of which is paired with a user photo that is shared during the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use PhotoChat to facilitate research on image-text modeling by combining a photo-sharing intent prediction task and a picture retrieval task to retrieve the most relevant photo according to the dialogue context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks achieve 10.4% recall@1 and 58.1% F1 scores, indicating that the proposed dataset presents interesting yet challenging real-world problems. |
Make Imagination Clearer! Stable Diffusion-based Visual Imagination for Multimodal Machine Translation (2025.acl-long)
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Andong Chen, Yuchen Song, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai, Muyun Yang, Liqiang Nie, Jie Liu, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing multimodal MT and text-only MT. |
| Approach: | They propose a stable diffusion-based imagination network into a multimodal large language model to generate an image for each source sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing multimodal and text-only MT and achieves an average improvement of 14 BLEU points on Multi30K and MSCOCO multimodal MT benchmarks. |
Self-supervised Meta-Prompt Learning with Meta-Gradient Regularization for Few-shot Generalization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt tuning can overfit to few-shot training samples, causing overfitting . authors propose a new framework for prompt learning with supervised meta-learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised meta-prompt learning framework with MEta-gradient Regularization for few-shot generalization that leverages self-recognized meta-learning with a diverse set of meta-tasks to learn a universal prompt initialization using only unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns a universal prompt initialization for efficient adaptation using only unlabeled data. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Shuyue Guo, Yizhi LI, Linzheng Chai, Zhengmao Ye, Shukai Liu, Yuyang Song, Jiajun Wu, Che Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Siwei Wu, Leo L, Xudong Ma, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Yan Xing, Jianzhou Wang, Mingjie Tang, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters. |
Ask-Before-Detection: Identifying and Mitigating Conformity Bias in LLM-Powered Error Detector for Math Word Problem Solutions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of large language models (LLMs) for automatic error detection in math word problems (MWPs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates adaptive reference solutions using LLMs to enhance error detection by reducing conformity bias in MWPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates the performance gap between conventional and alternative solutions in MWPs, especially when combined with reasoning-enhancing techniques like chain-of-thought prompting. |
TED-EL: A Corpus for Speech Entity Linking (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current entity linking tasks rely on textual information, but entities usually exist in textual, audio, and visual contexts in real-world data such as social media and video websites. |
| Approach: | They propose a speech entity linking task to recognize mentions from speech and link them to entities in knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing models on the TED-EL dataset, scoring an F1 score of 60.68%. |
Noisy Multi-Label Text Classification via Instance-Label Pair Correction (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Noise is a significant challenge for machine learning models, especially deep learning models. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic selection metric that identifies noisy pairs while considering global loss information and instance-specific ranking information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves performance in noisy multi-label text classification tasks. |
TopicAttack: An Indirect Prompt Injection Attack via Topic Transition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent attacks have demonstrated potential, but their abrupt instruction injection often undermines their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prompts the LLM to generate a fabricated conversational transition prompt that gradually shifts the topic toward the injected instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with an attack success rate (ASR) over 90% in most cases, even when various defense methods are applied. |
WIKIGENBENCH:Exploring Full-length Wikipedia Generation under Real-World Scenario (2025.coling-main)
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Jiebin Zhang, Eugene J. Yu, Qinyu Chen, Chenhao Xiong, Dawei Zhu, Han Qian, Mingbo Song, Weimin Xiong, Xiaoguang Li, Qun Liu, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to generate Wikipedia articles for new events fall short of real-world application. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to generate Wikipedia articles for new events under real-world scenarios . they use systematic metrics and LLM-based metrics to assess verifiability, organization, and other aspects aligned with real-life scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that hierarchical-based methods generate more comprehensive content while fine-tuned methods achieve better verifiability. |
Zero-Shot Information Extraction as a Unified Text-to-Triple Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of information extraction tasks require task-specific training. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-triple translation framework for information extraction tasks . they propose enabling task-agnostic translation by leveraging latent knowledge of a pre-trained language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing methods on open information extraction tasks. |
Allocating Large Vocabulary Capacity for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models require a more expressive vocabulary to represent all languages . however, increasing the vocabulary size significantly slows down the pre-training speed . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm VoCap to determine the desired vocabulary capacity of each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves cross-lingual model pre-training while reducing side effects of increasing vocabulary size. |
Z-Code++: A Pre-trained Language Model Optimized for Abstractive Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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Pengcheng He, Baolin Peng, Song Wang, Yang Liu, Ruochen Xu, Hany Hassan, Yu Shi, Chenguang Zhu, Wayne Xiong, Michael Zeng, Jianfeng Gao, Xuedong Huang
| Challenge: | Z-Code++ is a pre-trained language model optimized for abstractive text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained language model optimized for abstractive text summarization that uses a two-phase pre-training technique to improve model's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the competing models on low-resource summarization tasks in zero-shot and few-shot settings. |
Beyond Static Testbeds: An Interaction-Centric Agent Simulation Platform for Dynamic Recommender Systems (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing platforms lack a mechanism for user actions to dynamically reshape the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent-based simulation platform for recommender systems with a robust interaction mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform improves the credibility of the simulation and replicates the Matthew Effect and Brand Loyalty. |
On the Role of Entity and Event Level Conceptualization in Generalizable Reasoning: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Haochen Shi, Baixuan Xu, Wenxuan Ding, Liyu Zhang, Wei Fan, Jiaxin Bai, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Conceptualization is a fundamental element of human cognition and plays a pivotal role in generalizable reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized. |
| Outcome: | The proposed categorization of different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized . |
CMoralEval: A Moral Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Linhao Yu, Yongqi Leng, Yufei Huang, Shang Wu, Haixin Liu, Xinmeng Ji, Jiahui Zhao, Jinwang Song, Tingting Cui, Xiaoqing Cheng, Liutao Liutao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress achieved by large language models in both natural language understanding and generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a large benchmark CMoralEval for moral evaluation of Chinese LLMs . they use a Chinese TV program discussing Chinese moral norms and Chinese moral anomies based on various sources . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is characterized by diversity and authenticity. |
Reinforcement Learning with Semantic Rewards Enables Low-Resource Language Expansion without Alignment Tax (2026.findings-acl)
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Zeli Su, Ziyin Zhang, Zhou Liu, Xuexian Song, Zhankai Xu, Longfei Zheng, Xiaolu Zhang, Rong Fu, Guixian Xu, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Extending large language models to low-resource languages often incurs an "alignment tax" token-level fine-tuning enforces token-level surface imitation on narrow and biased data distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-space alignment paradigm powered by group-level semantic rewards instead of likelihood maximization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model acquires low-resource capa- bilities while mitigating alignment tax on Tibetan–Chinese machine translation and Ti- betan headline generation. |
Better Highlighting: Creating Sub-Sentence Summary Highlights (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarizations are considered to be less reliable because they distort the original meaning and can be confusing for readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate summary highlights that are understandable on their own to avoid confusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows summaries to be understood in context and avoids misdirecting readers to false conclusions. |
Context-aware Watermark with Semantic Balanced Green-red Lists for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research suggests that watermarking methods cause degradation of text quality due to semantic disparities between the watermarked text and the unwatermarked text. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware watermark method that generates a watermark key considering contexts to split a green/red list for watermark injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces performance drop due to adding bias on green lists . it also allows green lists to cover almost all semantics . |
Robustness via Referencing: Defending against Prompt Injection Attacks by Referencing the Executed Instruction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yulin Chen, Haoran Li, Yuan Sui, Yue Liu, Yufei He, Xiaoling Bai, Chi Fei, Li Yabo, Haozhe Ma, Yangqiu Song, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Prompt injection attacks manipulate large language models (LLMs) by misleading them to deviate from the original input instructions and execute maliciously injected instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt injection defense method that suppresses the model's instruction-following tendencies rather than suppressing them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms prompt-engineering-based approaches and fine-tuning methods and reduces the ASR to nearly 0% in some scenarios. |
PsyScam: A Benchmark for Psychological Techniques in Real-World Scams (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | PTs are employed by scammers to manipulate victims and cause lasting psychological trauma. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to capture the PTs employed in real-worldscam reports and investigate how LLMs can be utilized to generate variants of scams based on the pts and the contexts provided by thesescams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate variants of scams based on the PTs employed in real-world scam reports and the contexts provided by these scams. |
Improving Chinese Grammatical Error Detection via Data augmentation by Conditional Error Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Grammatical Error Detection is a non-automatic method to detect grammatical errors in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Conditional Non-Autoregressive Error Generation model for Chinese grammatical errors that uses a masking and prediction method to generate a context-dependent error. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance than all compared data augmentation methods on the CGED-2018 and CGAD-2020 benchmarks. |
E-ConvRec: A Large-Scale Conversational Recommendation Dataset for E-Commerce Customer Service (2022.lrec-1)
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Meihuizi Jia, Ruixue Liu, Peiying Wang, Yang Song, Zexi Xi, Haobin Li, Xin Shen, Meng Chen, Jinhui Pang, Xiaodong He
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on developing conversational recommendation system (CRS), which provides valuable recommendations to users through conversations. |
| Approach: | They construct an authentic Chinese dialogue dataset consisting of over 25k dialogues and 770k utterances, which contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
How Speculative Can Speculative Decoding Be? (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have a largely increased latency due to their ability to autoregressively model . speculative decoding is a technique that trades generation quality for speed . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a draft model to draft tokens autoregressively and then verify them in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could draft tokens autoregressively and then verify them in parallel . the proposed model trades quality for speed and could fail in verification stage . |
DataSeer: A Manager-Centric Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework with Multi-Branch Reasoning for Automated Insight Discovery (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automated insight discovery lack contextual coherence and coverage due to single-path exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a Manager-Centric Collaborative Framework that integrates planner and executor . it ensures cross-episode contextual coherence and allows for adaptive sub-goal generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on InsightBench and Inseval. |
Bi-Chainer: Automated Large Language Models Reasoning with Bidirectional Chaining (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing unidirectional chaining methods suffer from low prediction accuracy and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional chaining method which dynamically switches to depth-first reasoning in the opposite reasoning direction when it encounters multiple branching options within the current direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves sizable accuracy boots over unidirectional chaining frameworks on four challenging logical reasoning datasets. |
MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct (2025.findings-acl)
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Run Luo, Haonan Zhang, Longze Chen, Ting-En Lin, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Min Yang, Yongbin Li, Minzheng Wang, Pengpeng Zeng, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen, Yunshui Li, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Xiaobo Xia, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | a new framework for image-text instruction data evolution improves MLLM performance . lack of high-quality instruction data remains a major bottleneck in ML modeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal instruction data evolution framework that iteratively enhances data quality through fine-grained perception, cognitive reasoning, and interaction evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves MLLM performance in nine vision-language tasks while using significantly less data. |
Mitigating Over-Generation for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction with Heterogeneous Centrality Detection (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction models incorrectly determine a keyphrase as a phrase but output other candidates as keyphrases because they contain the same word. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that detects both implicit and explicit centrality within a heterogeneous graph as the importance score of each candidate keyphrase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction models on three benchmark datasets. |
OpenEval: Benchmarking Chinese LLMs across Capability, Alignment and Safety (2024.acl-demos)
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Chuang Liu, Linhao Yu, Jiaxuan Li, Renren Jin, Yufei Huang, Ling Shi, Junhui Zhang, Xinmeng Ji, Tingting Cui, Liutao Liutao, Jinwang Song, Hongying Zan, Sun Li, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | a rapid development of Chinese large language models poses big challenges for efficient LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation testbed that benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation platform OpenEval benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
Multi-Stage Pre-training for Automated Chinese Essay Scoring (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automatic essay scoring are based on hand-crafted surface-level features, but recent advances in representation learning have improved performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training based automated Chinese essay scoring method with weakly supervised pre- training, supervised cross- prompt fine-tuning and supervised target- prompt refine-tuneing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves a state-of-the-art neural essay scorer in terms of effectiveness and domain adaptation ability, while in-depth analysis also reveals its limitations. |
Structure-Infused Copy Mechanisms for Abstractive Summarization (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that system summaries struggle to preserve syntactic meaning of source texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate syntactic information from source sentences into abstractive summaries by structure-infused copy mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach compares favorably to state-of-the-art methods. |
SEARL: Joint Optimization of Policy and Tool Graph Memory for Self-Evolving Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have demonstrated significant potential in single-turn reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-memory based self-evolving agentic framework that integrates planning with execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to extract explicit knowledge from historical data and leverage inter-trajectory correlations to densify reward signals. |
CLIP Models are Few-Shot Learners: Empirical Studies on VQA and Visual Entailment (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Previously, CLIP was only regarded as a powerful visual encoder. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to boost CLIP's few-shot performance on a visual entailment task without introducing any additional pre-training procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy achieves competitive zero/few-shot results on visual question answering and visual entailment tasks without introducing any additional pre-training procedure. |
MusKGC: A Flexible Multi-source Knowledge Enhancement Framework for Open-World Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Open-world knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer novel facts by enriching existing graphs with external knowledge sources while maintaining semantic consistency under the open-world assumption (OWA). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source knowledge enhancement framework based on an open-world assumption (OWA) that integrates external knowledge sources and a new evaluation strategy to validate new facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance across benchmarks and the evaluation strategy effectively assesses new facts under OWA. |
A New Approach to Overgenerating and Scoring Abstractive Summaries (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization is a learning objective to produce system outputs that resemble reference summaries on a word-to-word basis. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-staged strategy to generate multiple variants of the target summary and score and select admissible ones according to users’ needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art on benchmark summarization datasets. |
VidCapBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Video Captioning for Controllable Text-to-Video Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinlong Chen, Yuanxing Zhang, Chongling Rao, Yushuo Guan, Jiaheng Liu, Fuzheng Zhang, Chengru Song, Qiang Liu, Di Zhang, Tieniu Tan
| Challenge: | Existing studies have not identified a link between video caption evaluation and T2V generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a video caption evaluation scheme specifically designed for T2V generation that integrates video annotation with caption evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is agnostic to any particular caption format and can be used for training. |
Learning Robust Representations for Continual Relation Extraction via Adversarial Class Augmentation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies attribute catastrophic forgetting to the corruption of the learned representations as new relations come . Continual relation extraction models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning new relations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial class augmentation mechanism to learn more precise representations . they propose to train the model on a sequence of tasks where two new relations are discovered . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two popular benchmarks. |
Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Natural Language Processing: Past, Present, and Future (2023.emnlp-main)
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Linyi Yang, Yaoxian Song, Xuan Ren, Chenyang Lyu, Yidong Wang, Jingming Zhuo, Lingqiao Liu, Jindong Wang, Jennifer Foster, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing literature on the generalization of machine learning models to out-of-distribution data is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose to present the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in natural language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed survey provides the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in natural language understanding. |
Can Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Be Detected and Removed? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have developed various detection mechanisms to protect against prompt injection attacks. |
| Approach: | They investigate the feasibility of detecting and removing indirect prompt injection attacks . they use two methods to evaluate their performance and train detection models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a benchmark dataset and is available on github . it evaluates the performance of existing models and open-source detection models . |
InsightEval: An Expert-Curated Benchmark for Assessing Insight Discovery in LLM-Driven Data Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenghao Zhu, Yuanfeng Song, Xing Chen, Chengzhong Liu, Cui Yakun, Caleb Chen Cao, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for data analysis and insight exploration are lacking in terms of benchmarks . existing frameworks suffer from format inconsistencies, poorly conceived objectives, and redundant insights. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-curation pipeline to construct a new dataset named InsightEval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks highlight prevailing challenges in automated insight discovery and raise key findings to guide future research. |
LATENTLOGIC: Learning Logic Rules in Latent Space over Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning logic rules for knowledge graph reasoning face limitations such as searching in vast search space and inefficient optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to efficiently mine logic rules by controllable generation in the latent space by a pre-trained VAE and a discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework efficiently mines logic rules by controllable generation in the latent space. |
The Silent Saboteur: Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks against Black-Box Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on corpus poisoning, but there are no studies on adversarial attacks on RAG systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel imperceptible retrieve-to-generate attack against RAG systems . they propose regenerative reinforcement learning framework that tracks interactions between attacker and target RAG . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing attacks on factual and non-factual RAG systems with small imperceptible text perturbations. |
From Scenes to Elements: Multi-Granularity Evidence Retrieval for Verifiable Multimodal RAG (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems retrieve evidence at coarse granularities, making failures unverifiable. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark that features real-world landmarks with annotations across multiple viewpoints and a framework that treats visual elements as first-class retrieval units through three stages: element-level detection and classification, multi-granularity cross-modal alignment for evidence retrieval, and attribution-constrained generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 29.2% improvement over six strong baselines for this task. |
Relation Discovery with Out-of-Relation Knowledge Base as Supervision (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relations from text corpus without annotated data are violated by up to 31%. |
| Approach: | They propose to use out-of-relation knowledge bases to supervise the discovery of unseen relations where relations to discover from the text corpus and those in knowledge bases are not overlapped. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art relation discovery performance by a large margin. |
In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhen Tan, Jun Yan, I-Hung Hsu, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Long Le, Yiwen Song, Yanfei Chen, Hamid Palangi, George Lee, Anand Rajan Iyer, Tianlong Chen, Huan Liu, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to long-term dialogue memory management fail to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that integrates forward- and backward-looking reflections into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on a long-term dialogue memory model. |
Approaches and Challenges for Resolving Different Representations of Fictional Characters for Chinese Novels (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing automatic text analysis tools and models are often developed for generic, open-domain tasks, restricting in-depth literary studies. |
| Approach: | They adapt a state-of-the-art anaphora resolution model to resolve character representations in Chinese novels by making some modifications and train a widely used BERT fine-tuned model for speaker extraction as assistance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is modified to resolve character representations in Chinese novels and train a BERT fine-tuned model for speaker extraction as assistance. |
ShopSimulator: Evaluating and Exploring RL-Driven LLM Agent for Shopping Assistants (2026.acl-long)
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Pei Wang, Yanan Wu, Xiaoshuai Song, Weixun Wang, Gengru Chen, Zhongwen Li, Kezhong Yan, Qi Liu, Ken Deng, Shuaibing Zhao, Shaopan Xiong, Xuepeng Liu, Xuefeng Chen, Wanxi Deng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language model-based agents focus on evaluation benchmarks without training support. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese shopping simulation environment that uses large language models to train agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly in a large-scale and challenging shopping environment in China. |
Injecting Domain-Specific Knowledge into Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | specialized LLMs are often limited in domain-specific applications that require specialized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They provide a comprehensive overview of four key methods to enhance large language models by integrating domain-specific knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorized into four key approaches: dynamic knowledge injection, static knowledge embedding, modular adapters, and prompt optimization. |
From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zekun Zhou, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Xiachong Feng, Ziyun Song, Ruihan Chen, Liang Zhao, Weitao Ma, Yuxuan Gu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has inspired researchers to explore how AI can accelerate and enhance research. |
| Approach: | They organize the relevant studies into three main categories: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. |
| Outcome: | The authors summarize the current state of research in three main areas: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. |
TestAug: A Framework for Augmenting Capability-based NLP Tests (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on capability-based testing requires the developer to compose each individual test template from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose a capability-based NLP testing framework that requires the developer to only annotate a few test templates while leveraging the GPT-3 engine to generate the majority of test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework saves the developer's manual efforts and guarantees the correctness of the generated suites with a validity checker. |
CRASpell: A Contextual Typo Robust Approach to Improve Chinese Spelling Correction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent research on Chinese spelling correction methods has poor performance on multi-typo texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Bert-based Chinese spelling correction models to overcome these limitations by constructing a noisy context for each training sample and a copy mechanism to encourage the model to choose the input character when the miscorrected and input character are both valid. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on widely used benchmarks and achieves a remarkable gain. |
CoCoHD: Congress Committee Hearing Dataset (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Congressional hearings are crucial tools for both political parties to advance their agendas. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset covering congressional hearings from 1997 to 2024 across 86 committees, with 32,697 records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers hearings from 1997 to 2024 across 86 committees, with 32,697 records. |
Time-RA: Towards Time Series Reasoning for Anomaly Diagnosis with LLM Feedback (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiyuan Yang, Zichuan Liu, Lei Song, Kai Ying, Stephen Wang, Joshua Thomas Bamford, Svitlana Vyetrenko, Jiang Bian, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has traditionally focused on binary classification and lacks the fine-grained categorization and explanatory reasoning required for transparent decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a time-series reasoning task that reformulates TSAD from discriminative to reasoning-intensive paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task reformulates TSAD from discriminative to reasoning-intensive paradigm. |
QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to QA fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) however, current QA synthesis protocols introduce noise from the CSKB and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model’s ability to generalize. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts and mislabeled or false-negative options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches while using only 33% of the synthetic data. |
Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yongyu Mu, Peinan Feng, Zhiquan Cao, Yuzhang Wu, Bei Li, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kai Song, Tongran Liu, Chunliang Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel multilingual input to enhance the model's comprehension of the input and to examine how multilingual processing affects prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input, but previous studies focused on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning. |
K-PLUG: Knowledge-injected Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding and Generation in E-Commerce (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are not explicitly aware of domain-specific knowledge, which is essential for downstream tasks in many domains, such as tasks in e-commerce scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-injected pre-trained language model that can be transferred to both natural language understanding and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms baselines across the board in e-commerce scenarios. |
More Tokens, Lower Precision: Towards the Optimal Token-Precision Trade-off in KV Cache Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiebin Zhang, Dawei Zhu, Yifan Song, Wenhao Wu, Chuqiao Kuang, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | storing more tokens in the KV cache at lower precision can enhance the long-context performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-precision trade-off strategy to optimize KV cache compression . they also propose storing more tokens in the KV at lower precision . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an optimal point within the Information Bottleneck compared to standalone KV pruning or KV quantization. |
Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing via Critic-Guided Multi-Agent Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xudong Li, Yuhang Tian, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Shuhao Zhang, Jun Yang, Yongyu Huo, Changzhi Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Chenhao Li, Huipeng Ma, Luan Zhang, Yan Xu, Qian Liu
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods rely on unidirectional, feed-forward pipelines . a minor retrieval error or logical mismatch at an early hop can become a silent failure . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for closed-loop post-edit reasoning that uses a Critic agent to verify coherence and step-wise correctness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MQuAKE-2002 and MQuADE-hard show that CARE effectively mitigates error propagation . a minor retrieval error or logical mismatch at an early hop can become a silent failure . |
TTVS: Boosting Self-Exploring Reinforcement Learning via Test-time Variational Synthesis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing test-time methods are limited in specialized or novel domains where supervision is prohibitively expensive or unavailable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments training stream from unlabeled test queries. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show TTVS outperforms state-of-the-art RL-based techniques on unlabeled test-time data. |
Select, Read, and Write: A Multi-Agent Framework of Full-Text-based Related Work Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for related work generation (RWG) suffer from shallow comprehension due to taking the limited portions of references as input and isolated explanation for each reference due to ineffective capturing the relationships among them. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that takes the limited portions of references papers as input and isolates the relationships between them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms other selectors and improves reading order with constrains of the graph structure. |
Adapting the Neural Encoder-Decoder Framework from Single to Multi-Document Summarization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to summarize short texts using a neural encoder-decoder are limited and expensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a maximal marginal relevance method to select representative sentences from multi-document input and leverage an abstractive encoder-decoder model to fuse disparate sentences to an abstract. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compares favorably to state-of-the-art extractive and abstractive approaches judged by automatic metrics and human assessors. |
Unsupervised Paraphrasing by Simulated Annealing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate accurate and different-appearing paraphrases require massive parallel samples for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that accomplishes Unsupervised Paraphrasing by Simulated Annealing by performing local editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models in automatic and human evaluations on Quora, Wikianswers, MSCOCO, and Twitter. |
DataSage: Multi-agent Collaboration for Insight Discovery with External Knowledge Retrieval, Multi-role Debating, and Multi-path Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data insight agents fail to deliver satisfactory results due to insufficient utilization of domain knowledge, shallow analytical depth, and error-prone code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-agent framework that incorporates external knowledge retrieval to enrich the analytical context, a multi-role debating mechanism to simulate diverse analytical perspectives and deepen analytical depth, and multi-path reasoning to improve the accuracy of the generated code and insights. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on InsightBench show that DataSage outperforms existing data insight agents across all difficulty levels, improving by 7.5% and 13.9% respectively in insight-level and summary-level metrics. |
SOTOPIA-: Dynamic Strategy Injection Learning and Social Instruction Following Evaluation for Social Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the social simulation of large language model intelligent agents have shown that even expert agents 1 perform significantly worse on challenging social tasks compared to expert agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically injects a variety of social strategies into expert agents, thereby automating the construction of high-quality social dialogue training corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables the integration of social strategies into language agents and improves their performance on social tasks. |
InfoCL: Alleviating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Text Classification from An Information Theoretic Perspective (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified the severe performance decrease on analogous classes as a key factor for catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a replay-based continual text classification method that uses fast-slow and current-past contrastive learning to perform mutual information maximization and better recover previously learned representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three text classification tasks. |
Representation Learning with Ordered Relation Paths for Knowledge Graph Completion (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs are incomplete and lack the order of relations in paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which takes relation paths into account but ignores order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
See the World, Discover Knowledge: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Vision Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jihao Gu, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Chen Wang, Ziming Wang, Tengtao Song, Donglai Wei, Jiale Yuan, Yingxiu Zhao, Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Meng Cao, Jun Song, Yingshui Tan, Xiang Li, Wenbo Su, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing models for large vision language models do not fully reflect their knowledge capacity and reliability, resulting in erroneous outputs that do not align with the image content or provide answers lacking knowledge evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-based benchmark for visual factuality across 8 major topics and 56 subtopics and a multi-hop question construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decouples visual factuality into two parts: seeing the world and discovering knowledge. |
Verb Metaphor Detection via Contextual Relation Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on verb metaphor detection focuses on analyzing restricted forms of linguistic context. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which explicitly models the relation between a verb and its various contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model gets competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches on the VUA, MOH-X and TroFi datasets. |
Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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Zhaoyang Wang, Shaohan Huang, Yuxuan Liu, Jiahai Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a tailored learning approach to distill the exclusive reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate democratization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability by leveraging the black-box model as a reasoning teacher. |
Relation Extraction with Weighted Contrastive Pre-training on Distant Supervision (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods ignore the intrinsic noise of distant supervision during the pre-training stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a weighted contrastive learning method that explicitly reduces noise . they leverage supervised data to estimate reliability and reduce noise compared to non-weighted baselines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the noise of distant supervision and estimates reliability of pre-training instances. |
Awakening Dormant Experts:Counterfactual Routing to Mitigate MoE Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
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Wentao Hu, Yanbo Zhai, Xiaohui Hu, Mingkuan Zhao, Shanhong yu, Xue Liu, Kaidong Yu, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models are vulnerable to hallucinations, authors say . static Top-k routing leaves "specialist experts" under-prioritized for specific tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference framework to awaken dormant experts . they propose 'counterfactual routing' to shift computational resources from syntax-dominant to knowledge-intensive layers . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoR improves factual accuracy by 3.1% without increasing the inference budget. |
Covariance Matrix-Driven Image Channel Allocation for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on designing efficient multimodal fusion frameworks to bridge the semantic gap between images and texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a covariance matrix-driven image channel allocation method that expands the number of original channel maps and assigns importance scores to the expanded channel maps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three public multimodal fake news detection benchmark datasets. |
BrainECHO: Semantic Brain Signal Decoding through Vector-Quantized Spectrogram Reconstruction for Whisper-Enhanced Text Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current EEG/MEG-to-text decoding systems rely on teacher-forcing methods . pre-trained large language models are over-dominant in decoding text from brain activity . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs decoupled representation learning to achieve state-of-the-art performance on EEG and MEG datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on EEG and MEG datasets. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Multi-Agent Simulator Drives Language Models for Legal Intensive Interaction (2025.findings-naacl)
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ShengbinYue ShengbinYue, Ting Huang, Zheng Jia, Siyuan Wang, Shujun Liu, Yun Song, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced legal intelligence, but the scarcity of scenario data impedes the progress toward interactive legal scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-agent Legal Simulation Driver to generate synthetic data by simulating interactive legal scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures consistency of legal attributes between participants and introduces a supervisory mechanism to align participants’ characters and behaviors as well as addressing distractions. |
A Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese (2026.tacl-1)
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Yikang Liu, Yeting Shen, Hongao Zhu, Lilong Xu, Zhiheng Qian, Siyuan Song, Kejia Zhang, Jialong Tang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Rui Wang, Hai Hu
| Challenge: | Using sub-linear length normalized log-probabilities (SLLN-LP), we find unequal lengths of sentences in minimal pairs difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ZhoBLiMP as a linguistic minimal pair benchmark for Chinese language models to mitigate biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric mitigates biases in Chinese language models with over 100 paradigms . Anaphor, Quantifiers, and Ellipsis are difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters . |
Exploring Discourse Structures for Argument Impact Classification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that discourse structures influence the persuasiveness of arguments. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse sentence-level structural discourse information with contextualized features derived from large-scale language models to investigate how discourse relations influence argument impact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves its backbone RoBERTa around 1.67%, compared with other models, but side effects are brought by other models. |
SAD: A Large-Scale Strategic Argumentative Dialogue Dataset (2026.acl-long)
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YongKang Liu, Jiayang Yu, Mingyang Wang, Yiqun Zhang, Ercong Nie, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Kaisong Song, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Argumentation is a key part of human reasoning and decision-making . existing argumentative corpora focus on single-turn settings, but multi-turn dialogues are often realized as multi-turned dialogues . |
| Approach: | They present a dataset for strategic multi-turn argumentation dialogues . they annotate each utterance with five strategy types, allowing multiple strategies per utterrance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that explicit prompting improves fluency, stylistic coherence and persuasiveness. |
Sentence Ordering with a Coherence Verifier (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent sentence ordering studies can be classified into 2 categories: pair-wise ranking-based and sequence generation-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence ordering method by plugging a coherence verifier into ranking-based and sequence generation-based methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on topological sorting-based and pointer network-based methods with topological and point-based models. |
AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zhaowei Wang, Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing language models only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an entailment graph that collects abstract knowledge for 3 components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks. |
Using Customer Service Dialogues for Satisfaction Analysis with Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning (D19-1)
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Kaisong Song, Lidong Bing, Wei Gao, Jun Lin, Lujun Zhao, Jiancheng Wang, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu, Qiong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies fail to provide comprehensive service satisfaction analysis . Existing models fail to include satisfaction polarity classification and sentimental utterance identification . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that predicts customer sentiments and aggregates them into service satisfaction polarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts customer sentiments and aggregates them into service satisfaction polarity and reasoning clues. |
Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Han Weng, Puzhen Wu, Cui Longjie, Yi Zhan, Boyi Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Dun Zeng, Yingxiang Yang, Qianru Zhang, Dong Huang, Xiaoming Yin, Yang Sun, Xing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks rely on execution-based or LLM-based reward models. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL that employs the GMNScore outcome reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward model outperforms existing reward models on standard benchmarks including Spider and BIRD. |
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning (2026.acl-long)
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Xinwei Yang, Junyi Fan, Yuqing Liu, Jiaxuan Wang, Jiashuai Zhang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Yao Song
| Challenge: | Recent efforts have turned to large language models (LLMs) as therapeutic agents for psychological therapy tasks, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents and a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. |
A Lightweight Mixture-of-Experts Neural Machine Translation Model with Stage-wise Training Strategy (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Using mixture-of-experts (MoE) to deal with language heterogeneity is a challenge in neural machine translation (NMT). |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight MoE-based NMT model that is trained via an elaborate stage-wise training strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves stable improvements in translation tasks by introducing fewer extra parameters compared to baseline models. |
M-LongDoc: A Benchmark For Multimodal Super-Long Document Understanding And A Retrieval-Aware Tuning Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yew Ken Chia, Liying Cheng, Hou Pong Chan, Maojia Song, Chaoqun Liu, Mahani Aljunied, Soujanya Poria, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large multimodal models focus on short documents with less than 50 pages and are limited to extraction-based questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-aware tuning approach to improve the accuracy of multimodal document reading by 4.6%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of model responses by 4.6% compared to existing benchmarks on documents with hundreds of pages and longer documents with more complex content. |
NegotiationToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind on Negotiation Surrounding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Chunkit Chan, Cheng Jiayang, Yauwai Yim, Zheye Deng, Wei Fan, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Hongming Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Theory of mind evaluations currently focus on testing models using machine-generated data or game settings prone to shortcuts and spurious correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to stress-test machine ToM in real-world negotiation surrounding covered multi-dimensional mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark builds upon the Belief-Desire-Intention theory and conducts the necessary empirical experiments to evaluate large language models. |
Neural Multitask Learning for Simile Recognition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Simile is a special type of metaphor, where comparators such as like and as are used to compare two objects. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network framework for simile sentence classification, simile component extraction and language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms rule-based and feature-based approaches in simile sentence classification and simile component extraction tasks. |
Think How to Think: Mitigating Overthinking with Autonomous Difficulty Cognition in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but often suffer from overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage fine-tuning strategy that progressively inspires LRMs’ difficulty cognition and redundancy cognition of LRM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly reduces inference costs by over 70% on easy tasks and 40% on complex ones without compromising performance. |
Few-shot Knowledge Graph Relational Reasoning via Subgraph Adaptation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict unseen triplets from knowledge graphs are limited by spurious information in KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adapts contextualized graphs to subgraphs generated from support and query triplets to perform the prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts more comprehensive information from support triplets while minimizing spurious information when predicting query triplet. |
Distilling the Essence, Discarding the Dross: Improving Fairness in Multimodal Large Language Models via Historical Reflection-Guided Prompt Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to debiase MLLMs rely on handcrafted prompts that are brittle and difficult to generalize across tasks and bias types. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive self-debiasing framework that optimizes task-specific debiasers to suppress stereotypical outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework suppresses stereotypical outputs while maintaining performance. |
Ready Jurist One: Benchmarking Language Agents for Legal Intelligence in Dynamic Environments (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for legal intelligence are limited to static evaluation paradigms or simplified scenarios. |
| Approach: | They introduce J1-ENVS, the first interactive and dynamic legal environment tailored for LLM-based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses task performance and procedural compliance across legal proficiency levels. |
Table-R1: Region-based Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenhe Wu, Jian Yang, Zhongjiang He, Changzai Pan, Jiaheng Liu, Xianjie Wu, Yu Zhao, Shuangyong Song, Yongxiang Li, Zhoujun Li, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Tables are a widely used data format that poses unique challenges for language models due to their structured row-column interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a region-based reinforcement learning approach that integrates region evidence into reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on three benchmark datasets and significantly reduces the reasoning token consumption by 67.5%. |
Discarding the Crutches: Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Expert Meta-Learning for Continual Semantic Parsing (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Continual Semantic Parsing (CSP) enables parsers to generate SQL from natural language questions in task streams, using minimal annotated data to handle dynamically evolving databases in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Adaptive PET eXpert meta-learning approach that assists experts in adaptively warming up, ensuring better model initialization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two benchmarks and achieves superior performance without data replay or ideal settings. |
D-QRELO: Training- and Data-Free Delta Compression for Large Language Models via Quantization and Residual Low-Rank Approximation (2026.findings-acl)
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Junlin Li, Shuangyong Song, Guodong DU, Ngai Wong, Xuebo Liu, Yongxiang Li, Min Zhang, Jing Li, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuned large language models fail on fine-scale datasets . large data scale amplifies delta parameter magnitude, singular values, and entropy, causing compression errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a training- and data-free delta compression method that captures dominant delta structure and compensates residual low-rank approximation to recover fine-grained details from smaller residual error. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on large-scale datasets on dense and MoE architectures. |
MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that MobileBERT is 4.3x smaller and 5.5x faster than BERT_BASE . BERT is one of the largest models ever in NLP, but suffers from heavy model size and high latency . |
| Approach: | They propose a tool to compress and accelerate the popular BERT model by task-agnostic application. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 4.3x smaller and 5.5x faster than BERT_BASE . it achieves competitive results on well-known benchmarks . |
FAER: Benchmarking VLMs for Failure-Aware Embodied Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual-language models (VLMs) are the core component of embodied agents in perceiving the environment and making decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-aware benchmark to evaluate the performance of visual language models (VLMs) in long-horizon tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of 16 widely utilized VLMs and 4 LLMs for FAER tasks. |
Meet Changes with Constancy: Learning Invariance in Multi-Source Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-source neural machine translation neglect inconsistencies between sources of information. |
| Approach: | They propose a source invariance network to learn invariant information of parallel sources . they propose to integrate such network with multi-encoder based multi-source NMT methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves clear gains in translation quality and captures implicit invariance between different sources. |
A Dual-Mind Framework for Strategic and Expressive Negotiation Agent (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to negotiation dialogue focus on only one aspect, ignoring the synergistic effect of their combined synergies. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-mind negotiation agent framework that integrates an intuitive and a deliberative module for slow, expression optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on negotiation datasets showing that it improves negotiation ability. |
COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation (2021.naacl-demos)
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Qingyun Wang, Manling Li, Xuan Wang, Nikolaus Parulian, Guangxing Han, Jiawei Ma, Jingxuan Tu, Ying Lin, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Weili Liu, Aabhas Chauhan, Yingjun Guan, Bangzheng Li, Ruisong Li, Xiangchen Song, Yi Fung, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han, Shih-Fu Chang, James Pustejovsky, Jasmine Rah, David Liem, Ahmed ELsayed, Martha Palmer, Clare Voss, Cynthia Schneider, Boyan Onyshkevych
| Challenge: | a new framework to digest relevant biomedical knowledge is needed to combat COVID-19 . quantity of research results is a bottleneck, and false information promoted in publications . |
| Approach: | a team of researchers has developed a framework to extract multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature to combat COVID-19. |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature . it provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence . the framework is based on a case study of drug repurposing . |
BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing persona-based dialogue models use crowd-sourced data, such as the PersonaChat . however, the cost of such datasets is limited, and the model is not robust. |
| Approach: | They propose to disentangle persona-based dialogue generation into two sub-tasks by using a BERT-over-BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in response quality and persona consistency under different limited data settings. |
ParetoRAG: Leveraging Sentence-Context Attention for Robust and Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation systems face persistent challenges in retrieval inefficiency and the inability of LLMs to filter out irrelevant information. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework that optimizes RAG systems through sentence-level refinement guided by the Pareto principle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves dual improvements in retrieval precision and generation quality without additional training or API resources while using only 40% of the tokens compared to traditional approaches. |
GlobalBench: A Benchmark for Global Progress in Natural Language Processing (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yueqi Song, Simran Khanuja, Pengfei Liu, Fahim Faisal, Alissa Ostapenko, Genta Winata, Alham Aji, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Yulia Tsvetkov, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | despite advances in NLP, significant disparities in performance across languages still exist . prior benchmarks focused on a limited number of tasks and languages, but now GlobalBench tracks progress on all languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use global benchmarks to track progress on all NLP datasets in all languages. |
| Outcome: | a new tool tracks progress on all NLP datasets in all languages and tracks per-speaker utility and equity . globalbench is designed to identify the most under-served languages and reward research efforts . a globalbech is available at https://github.com/neulab/globalbench. |
PLAN-TUNING: Post-Training Language Models to Learn Step-by-Step Planning for Complex Problem Solving (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mihir Parmar, Palash Goyal, Xin Liu, Yiwen Song, Mingyang Ling, Chitta Baral, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that decomposing complex problems into simple subtasks has significantly boosted the performance of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-training framework that distills synthetic task decompositions and fine-tunes smaller LLMs via supervised and reinforcement-learning objectives to improve complex reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on GSM8k and MATH benchmarks and shows that it can improve generalization capabilities on out-of-domain datasets. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3. |
SportsMetrics: Blending Text and Numerical Data to Understand Information Fusion in LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models can handle text and data, but blending text and numerical data presents significant challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose four tasks to evaluate the numerical reasoning and information fusion capabilities of large language models in sports data analytics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks evaluate the numerical reasoning and information fusion capabilities of large language models in sports data analytics. |
DeepPlanner: Scaling Planning Capability for Deep Research Agents via Advantage Shaping (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to planning involve implicit planning or introduce explicit planners without systematically optimizing the planning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end RL framework that enhances the planning capabilities of deep research agents. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DeepPlanner improves planning quality and achieves state-of-the-art results under a lower training budget. |
DeepRapper: Neural Rap Generation with Rhyme and Rhythm Modeling (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for rap generation focus on rhyming lyrics but ignore rhythmic beats . rap lyrics need to be semantically meaningful and fashionable to convey interesting stories . |
| Approach: | They develop a Transformer-based rap generation system that can model both rhymes and rhythms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality raps with rhymes and rhythms . it is based on a Transformer-based language model . |
Scale-VAE: Preventing Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoder (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a widely used generative model . but when employing strong autoregressive generation networks, VAE tends to converge to a degenerate local optimum known as posterior collapse. |
| Approach: | They propose a model called Scale-VAE to solve a posterior collapse problem . they use a factor to keep the posterior dimension discriminative across data instances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in density estimation and representation learning. |
Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamics (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiarui Liu, Yueqi Song, Yunze Xiao, Mingqian Zheng, Lindia Tjuatja, Jana Schaich Borg, Mona T. Diab, Maarten Sap
| Challenge: | a study of multi-dimensional persona effects in AI-AI debates shows that personas influence moral stances and debate outcomes . political ideology and personality traits exert the strongest influence, according to our study . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a 6-dimensional persona space to simulate structured debates . they find political ideology and personality traits exert the strongest influence . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that personas affect moral stances and debate outcomes . political ideology and personality traits exert the strongest influence . |
CCTVBench: Contrastive Consistency Traffic VideoQA Benchmark for Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Xingcheng Zhou, Hao Guo, Rui Song, Walter Zimmer, Mingyu Liu, André Schamschurko, Hu Cao, Alois Knoll
| Challenge: | Existing Vision-language models are prone to hallucinating nonexistent entities or events and missing subtle but critical visual cues. |
| Approach: | They propose a Traffic VideoQA Benchmark that enforces a single structured decision pattern over each video question quadruple and provides actionable diagnostics that decompose failures into positive omission, positive swap, negative hallucination, mutual-exclusivity violation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects true hazards when an accident occurs, and rejects plausible-but-false hypotheses under near-identical counterfactual scenes. |
FinReporting: An Agentic Workflow for Localized Reporting of Cross-Jurisdiction Financial Disclosure (2026.acl-demo)
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Fan Zhang, Mingzi Song, Rania Elbadry, Yankai Chen, Shaobo Wang, Yixi Zhou, Xunwen Zheng, Yueru He, Yuyang Dai, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Ayesha Gull, Muhammad Usman Safder, Fan Wu, Liyuan Meng, Fengxian Ji, Junning Zhao, Xueqing Peng, Jimin Huang, YU Chen, Xue Liu, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
| Challenge: | FinReporting is an agentic workflow for localized cross-jurisdiction financial reporting . existing approaches assume a single-market setting and overlook structural differences across jurisdictions . |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow that decomposes financial reporting into auditable stages . they use Large Language Models to extract and summarize corporate disclosures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system decomposes reporting into auditable stages . it improves consistency and reliability under heterogeneous reporting regimes. |
GuoFeng: A Benchmark for Zero Pronoun Recovery and Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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Mingzhou Xu, Longyue Wang, Derek F. Wong, Hongye Liu, Linfeng Song, Lidia S. Chao, Shuming Shi, Zhaopeng Tu
| Challenge: | ZPs are often omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferred from intraand inter-sentential contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark testset for target evaluation on Chinese-English ZP translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed testset covers five genres and identifies current challenges for evaluation. |
BERTifying the Hidden Markov Model for Multi-Source Weakly Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing NER models are supervised by a large number of training sequences, each pre-annotated with token-level labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional hidden Markov model which can effectively infer true labels from multi-source noisy labels in an unsupervised way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised NER models on four benchmarks from various domains. |
A Persona-Aware LLM-Enhanced Framework for Multi-Session Personalized Dialogue Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized dialogue models focus on dialogue history and personality information, reducing the responses’ consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Persona-Aware LLM-enAnCEd(PALACE) framework that generates responses consistent with dialogue history and personality information across multiple sessions to engage users’ interest in the dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in automatic and human evaluation metrics on the MSC and DuLeMon datasets. |
Can Large Language Models Grasp Legal Theories? Enhance Legal Reasoning with Insights from Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Weikang Yuan, Junjie Cao, Zhuoren Jiang, Yangyang Kang, Jun Lin, Kaisong Song, Tianqianjin Lin, Pengwei Yan, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies have found that when LLMs are given criminal facts and legal rules, then asked whether cases constitute a certain charge, they struggle to understand legal theories and perform basic legal reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to assess LLMs' understanding of legal theories and reasoning capabilities by using a novel framework: Multi-Agent framework for improving complex legal reasoning capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLMs' understanding of legal theories and reasoning abilities in real-world scenarios. |
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Conversational Semantic Role Labeling (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2021: conversational semantic role labeling is under-explored in non-Chinese languages due to the lack of multilingual CSRL annotations for the parser training. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that implicitly learns conversational structure-aware representations with hierarchical encoders and elaborately designed pre-training objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on English CSRL tests by large margins . it will facilitate the research of non-Chinese dialogue tasks which suffer from ellipsis and anaphora . |
Decoupling Mixture-of-Graphs: Unseen Relational Learning for Knowledge Graph Completion by Fusing Ontology and Textual Experts (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) fail in unseen relation representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use three kinds of graphs to obtain unseen relation representations . they propose to decouple mixture-of-graph experts (DMoG) for unseened relations learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on unseen relation representations. |
Geoparsing: Diagram Parsing for Plane and Solid Geometry with a Unified Formal Language (2026.findings-acl)
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Peijie Wang, Ming-Liang Zhang, Jun Cao, Chao Deng, Dekang Ran, Pi Bu, Hongda Sun, Xuan Zhang, Yingyao Wang, Jun Song, Bo Zheng, Fei Yin, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various vision reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified formal language that integrates plane and solid geometry, comprehensively covering geometric structures and semantic relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language achieves state-of-the-art parsing performance and significantly boosts MLLMs’ capabilities for downstream geometry reasoning tasks. |
Does Large Language Model Contain Task-Specific Neurons? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehensively handling various types of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for task-specific neuron localization based on Causal Gradient Variation with Special Tokens (CGVST) this method identifies task- specific neurons by concentrating on the most significant tokens during task processing, eliminating redundant tokens and minimizing interference from non-essential neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can locate task-specific neurons across eight public tasks. |
MatSci-NLP: Evaluating Scientific Language Models on Materials Science Language Tasks Using Text-to-Schema Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using publicly available materials science text data, we construct a benchmark for evaluating the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models on materials science texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language benchmark for evaluating the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models on materials science text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms BERT-based models on scientific text and a model pretrained on materials science journals. |
Temporal Contrastive Decoding: A Training-Free Method for Large Audio-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large audio-language models (LALMs) can exhibit a temporal smoothing bias . unified decoders can produce less specific audio-grounded outputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a temporally blurred slow-path view that is re-encoded by a token-level logit update. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MMAU and AIR-Bench show consistent improvements on strong unified LALMs. |
Beyond Literal Mapping: Benchmarking and Improving Non-Literal Translation Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced machine translation (MT) a meta-evaluation dataset focused on non-literal translations is lacking . experimental results show the inaccuracies of traditional MT metrics and the limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-evaluation framework that leverages sub-agents to evaluate machine translation metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the knowledge cutoff and score inconsistency problem. |
IELM: An Open Information Extraction Benchmark for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show pre-trained LMs store linguistic and relational knowledge . pre-training LM models can answer "fill-in-the-blank" questions based on pre-defined relations . |
| Approach: | They propose an open information extraction benchmark for pre-trained language models . they turn pre-trained LMs into zero-shot OIE systems to examine open relational information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms state-of-the-art methods on factual OIE datasets without training sets. |
UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengxi Lu, Fei Tang, Guangyi Liu, Jin Ma, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UITARS-1.5-7B. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B on MemGUI-Bench and delivers 17.1% improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model. |
Scoring Sentence Singletons and Pairs for Abstractive Summarization (P19-1)
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Logan Lebanoff, Kaiqiang Song, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Seokhwan Kim, Walter Chang, Fei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for summarizing content from single sentences are inadequately understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine singletons and pairs to create a summarizing sentence . they use a dataset of human-written abstracts to examine human-writing methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on human-written abstracts from three large datasets. |
IPS: In-Prompt Process Supervision for Short Video Content Moderation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) capture semantics of short video content but fail to account for policy-specific details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates In-prompt Process Supervision into MLLMs . they propose sequential reasoning over ancillary questions during fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | IPS outperforms baseline MLLMs on public and proprietary benchmarks . replacing human-annotated ancillary labels with MLML-generated ones results in performance degradation. |
Beyond Transcription: Unified Audio Schema for Perception-Aware AudioLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Linhao Zhang, Yuhan Song, Aiwei Liu, Chuhan Wu, Sijun Zhang, Wei Jia, Yuan Liu, Houfeng Wang, Zhou Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs) excel at reasoning tasks, but struggle at elementary auditory perception. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes audio information into three explicit components in a unified JSON format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts fine-grained perception by 10.9% on MMSU over state-of-the-art models while preserving robust reasoning capabilities. |
Toolscaler: Scalable Generative Tool Calling via Structure-Aware Semantic Tokenization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yunyue Su, Zhang Jinshuai, Bowen Fang, Wen Ye, Jinghao Zhang, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SGTC across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative tool invocation framework that introduces structure-aware semantic tokenization to encode tools as discrete code sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the size of the representation space and underutilizes collaborative signals among tools in downstream tasks. |
Multi-Scale Spectral Selection and Entropy-Guided Uncertainty Fusion for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal content detection fail to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies and ignore inherent noise in multimodal features. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal rumor detection method based on a frequency domain spectral selection method and entropy-guided uncertainty fusion method to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multimodal rumor detection . it shows stronger detection capability and robustness on multiple datasets . |
Profile Consistency Identification for Open-domain Dialogue Agents (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on improving attribute consistency focus on incorporating attribute information in responses, but few efforts have identified the consistency relations between response and attribute profile. |
| Approach: | They propose a key-value structure information enriched BERT model to identify the profile consistency . they propose to incorporate attribute information into the generated responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over strong baselines on downstream tasks. |
Position: LLM Watermarking Should Align Stakeholders’ Incentives for Practical Adoption (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in watermarking algorithms, real-world deployment remains limited . model watermarks can be used to protect intellectual property and promote trust in AI . |
| Approach: | They propose to revisit three classes of watermarking to examine incentives for large language models . model watermarks naturally aligns with LLM provider interests, yet faces new challenges in open-source ecosystems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used in dataset decontamination, user-controlled provenance, and in-context watermarking. |
SAFETY-J: Evaluating Safety with Critique (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current methods focus on binary safety classifications and lack detailed critique, limiting their utility for model improvement and user trust. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual generative safety evaluator for English and Chinese with critique-based judgment that utilizes a robust training dataset and augmented query-response pairs to assess safety across various scenarios comprehensively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves safety evaluations by assessing the quality of critiques with minimal human intervention. |
DYNTEXT: Semantic-Aware Dynamic Text Sanitization for Privacy-Preserving LLM Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Juhua Zhang, Zhiliang Tian, Minghang Zhu, Yiping Song, Taishu Sheng, Siyi Yang, Qiunan Du, Xinwang Liu, Minlie Huang, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods to protect privacy of sensitive data are differential privacy (DP) and DP is used to protect users from privacy leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose an LDP-based Dynamic Text sanitization for privacy-preserving LLM inference that dynamically constructs semantic-aware adjacency lists of sensitive tokens to sample non-sensitive tokens for perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels on three datasets. |
CARE: A Disagreement Detection Framework with Concept Alignment and Reasoning Enhancement (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to disagreement detection are limited by conceptual gap and reasoning gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a conceptual alignment and reasoning enhancement framework to address the conceptual gap and the reasoning gap in disagreement detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows superior performance in zero-shot and supervised learning settings, both within and across domains. |
Glue pizza and eat rocks - Exploiting Vulnerabilities in Retrieval-Augmented Generative Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) models enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit openness of RAG models by injecting deceptive content into the retrieval database, intentionally changing the model’s behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be exploited through crafted content uploads with access to the retriever. |
Act as you think: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Medical Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Songtao Jiang, Yuan Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Yan Zhang, Ruilin Luo, Bohan Lei, Yeying Jin, Sibo Song, ZhiBo Yang, Jimeng Sun, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances have improved the accuracy of medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) however, the high stakes nature of the medical domain has precipitated a shift towards interpretability and transparency of reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards framework that rewards internal consistency and logical coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework rewards internal consistency and logical coherence, and is highly versatile, the authors show. |
Getting the Most out of Simile Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work ignores features other than surface strings and suffers from data hunger issue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use simile sentence classification and simile component extraction to find simile components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current state-of-the-art systems and baselines. |
Stop Hardening Everything: A Training-Free Neuron-Level Defense for Neural Ranking Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses for neural ranking models are data-centric and require retraining and adversarial data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-centric defense that addresses vulnerability at its architectural source without costly retraining or adversarial data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on MS MARCO and TREC 19 while maintaining strong performance on clean data. |
Cost-Optimal Grouped-Query Attention for Long-Context Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Yutong Wu, Chenyang Song, Zhen Leng Thai, Xingyu Shen, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current GQA configurations overlook how context length influences inference cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a recipe for deriving cost-optimal GQA configurations that decouple the total head size from the hidden size and allow more flexible control over attention FLOPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed configurations reduce memory usage and FLOPs by more than 50% compared to Llama-3's GQA, with *no degradation in model capabilities*. |
InFoBench: Evaluating Instruction Following Ability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Yiwei Qin, Kaiqiang Song, Yebowen Hu, Wenlin Yao, Sangwoo Cho, Xiaoyang Wang, Xuansheng Wu, Fei Liu, Pengfei Liu, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) ability to follow instructions have not been able to provide a detailed analysis of their compliance with instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric for evaluating Large Language Models' ability to follow instructions and a benchmark for DRFR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric and benchmark compared with traditional scoring methods and explores annotation sources including human experts, crowd-sourced workers, and GPT-4. |
Improve Decoding Factuality by Token-wise Cross Layer Entropy of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with the issue of generating inaccurate or fabricated content even when they possess correct knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding method that mitigates hallucinations without extra training . they propose entropy eNhanced decoding that leverages inner probability changes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the truthfulness and informativeness of generation while maintaining robust QA accuracy. |
Minimal Distillation Schedule for Extreme Language Model Compression (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for teacher assistant-based distillation require multiple trials to find the optimal teacher assistant. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows scheduling of an optimal teacher assistant in just one trial . they show that student performance is positively correlated with the scale-performance tradeoff . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can select the optimal teacher assistant in just one trial . it can be used to compare performance of student and teacher assistants on GLUE benchmarks. |
Lifting the Curse of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pretrained language models require a tremendous amount of inference compute to perform. |
| Approach: | They propose to compress pretrained language models to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm to fill the capacity gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with competitive baselines. |
Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction by Learning Neural Keyphrase Set Function (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised keyphrase extraction is a task of extracting a keyphrase set that provides readers with highlevel information about the key ideas or important topics described in the document. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction task that is a document-set matching problem instead of modeling the relevance between an individual phrase and the document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised keyphrase extraction baselines by a large margin. |
AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimation (2024.acl-long)
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Zhaowei Wang, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Tianqing Fang, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, Simon See
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that LLMs are deficient in abstract ability, and how to improve it remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework AbsInstruct to enhance LLMs’ abstract ability through instruction tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can enhance LLMs’ abstraction ability with strong generalization performance while maintaining their general instruction-following abilities. |
Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation in E-Commerce Platform with the Context of Historical Dialogue (2020.findings-emnlp)
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WeiSheng Zhang, Kaisong Song, Yangyang Kang, Zhongqing Wang, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu, Shoushan Li, Min Zhang, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing research on customer service dialogue generation generates generic responses from sellers . however, such cost prohibits small businesses, and multiturn dialogue generation is becoming more popular. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel and extensible dialogue generation method by leveraging sellers’ historical dialogue information to generate generic seller responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate high-quality responses that cater to specific sellers’ characteristics and exhibit consistent superiority over baselines on a real-world multi-turn customer service dialogue dataset. |
AutoGraph-R1: End-to-End Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Graph Construction (2026.acl-long)
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Hong Ting Tsang, Jiaxin Bai, Haoyu Huang, Qiao Xiao, Tianshi Zheng, Baixuan Xu, Shujie Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Currently, knowledge graphs are decoupled from their downstream application, resulting in suboptimal graph structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to directly optimize KG construction for task performance using Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance across multiple QA benchmarks and consistently achieves significant performance gains over task-agnostic baseline graphs. |
SegTune: Structured and Fine-Grained Control for Song Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yuejiao Wang, Zihao Ji, Pengfei Cai, Xu Li, Haorui Zheng, Zewen Song, Zhongliang Liu, Chen Zhang, Pengfei Wan
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural song generation have enabled high-quality synthesis from lyrics and global textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to specify local musical descriptions aligned to song segments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in musicality and controllability. |
A Simple Contrastive Learning Framework for Interactive Argument Pair Identification via Argument-Context Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on argument mining uses context-based methods to identify whether two arguments are interactively related. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework to extract valuable information from the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark dataset and visually displays more compact representations. |
Beyond Benchmarks: A Capability-Based Maturity Model for Systematic AI Integration in Hospitals (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in standardized tests focused on medical knowledge recall, but not in real-world healthcare scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a "capability-based hospital AI Maturity Model" framework that categorizes capabilities into distinct maturity levels . medical artificial intelligence is currently at a critical transition stage from technical verification to deep clinical integration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides a clear, stepwise evolutionary path for hospitals from foundational infrastructure construction to ubiquitous intelligence. |
Model-Generated Pretraining Signals Improves Zero-Shot Generalization of Text-to-Text Transformers (2023.acl-long)
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Linyuan Gong, Chenyan Xiong, Xiaodong Liu, Payal Bajaj, Yiqing Xie, Alvin Cheung, Jianfeng Gao, Xia Song
| Challenge: | Recent work in NLP has shown that pretrained language models have made notable progress toward generalization to unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to pretrain T5 using an auxiliary model to construct more challenging token replacements for the main model to denoise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms similar-sized baseline models on prompted NLP benchmarks and rivals the state-of-the-art model with only **8%** of its parameters. |
Complex Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Fast Fourier Transform (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that the choice of space for knowledge graph (KG) embeddings has significant effects on the performance of KG completion tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Fourier transform to convert between real and complex hyperbolic space to capture hierarchical patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the baseline models for knowledge graph (KG) embeddings. |
Reinforced Training Data Selection for Domain Adaptation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn domains with massive data are not easy to implement and require a predefined threshold. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that searches for training instances relevant to the target domain and learns better representations for them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective in data selection and representation, but generalized to accommodate different NLP tasks. |
HyperRank: Hyperbolic Ranking Model for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised keyphrase extraction models overlook latent hierarchical structures when extracting keyphrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a new ranking model that models global and local contexts to estimate the importance of each candidate keyphrase within the hyperbolic space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in keyphrase extraction tasks. |
GPT-RE: In-context Learning for Relation Extraction using Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to in-context learning (ICL) are lacking in relation extraction (RE) . emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 represents a significant advancement in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate task-aware representations into demonstration retrieval and enrich the demonstrations with gold label-induced reasoning logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA and competitive performances on the Semeval and SciERC datasets. |
Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Large Language Models via Path Selection (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown unprecedented performance in various real-world applications, but they are known to generate factually inaccurate outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate external knowledge extracted from Knowledge Graphs (KGs) they propose to generate scores for knowledge paths with input texts via latent semantic matching. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of a framework to extract knowledge from Knowledge Graphs (KGs) incorporating external knowledge has become a promising strategy to improve the factual accuracy of LLM-generated outputs. |
Sandcastles in the Storm: Revisiting the (Im)possibility of Strong Watermarking (2025.acl-long)
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Fabrice Y Harel-Canada, Boran Erol, Connor Choi, Jason Liu, Gary Jiarui Song, Nanyun Peng, Amit Sahai
| Challenge: | Recent theoretical work argues that any watermark can be erased via random walk attacks that perturb text while preserving quality. |
| Approach: | They propose that any watermark can be erased via random walk attacks that perturb text while preserving quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method underperforms the theoretical models in large-scale experiments and human-validated assessments. |
Cross-modal Contrastive Attention Model for Medical Report Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for medical report generation are unable to capture useful information from historical cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that captures both visual and semantic information from similar cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on almost all metrics on IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR benchmarks. |
Generate, Delete and Rewrite: A Three-Stage Framework for Improving Persona Consistency of Dialogue Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing persona-based dialogue models generate human-like responses but can hardly avoid the generation of inconsistent persona words. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that deletes inconsistent words from a generated response prototype and further rewrites it to a personality-consistent one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves good performance on the persona-chat dataset. |
Towards Abstractive Grounded Summarization of Podcast Transcripts (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Podcast summarization is of practical benefit to content providers and consumers . however, podcast summarizing faces significant challenges including factual inconsistencies . speech recognizers induce transcription errors and abstractive summarisation models may hallucinate . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate podcast summaries while grounding segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow full inspection of summary details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can produce an abstractive summary while grounding segments in specific regions of the transcript to allow full inspection of summary details. |
ProxyQA: An Alternative Framework for Evaluating Long-Form Text Generation with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Haochen Tan, Zhijiang Guo, Zhan Shi, Lu Xu, Zhili Liu, Yunlong Feng, Xiaoguang Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Linqi Song
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models are labor-intensive and lack efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework dedicated to assessing long-text generation that includes in-depth human-curated meta-questions spanning various domains . they use a set of proxy-quests with pre-annotated answers to assess the content's quality by incorporating the generated texts as contextual background. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the quality of long-text content by matching it with references through human evaluation or automated metrics. |
From Knowledge to Treatment: Large Language Model Assisted Biomedical Concept Representation for Drug Repurposing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for drug repurposing ignore common-sense biomedical concept knowledge in real-world labs, such as mechanistic priors indicating that certain drugs are fundamentally incompatible with specific treatments. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model-assisted framework for Drug Repurposing which improves the representation of biomedical concepts within KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the representation of biomedical concepts within KGs by extracting treatment-related textual representations of biomedic entities from large language models and fine-tuning knowledge graph embedding models. |
An Efficient Conversational Smart Compose System (2023.acl-demo)
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Yun Zhu, Xiayu Chen, Lei Shu, Bowen Tan, Xinying Song, Lijuan Liu, Maria Wang, Jindong Chen, Ning Ruan
| Challenge: | a cloud-based smart compose system is designed to improve human-to-human conversation efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a cloud-based smart compose system to improve conversation efficiency . they propose heuristics to achieve the best trade-off between quality and latency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces latency without losing composing quality further. |
Modeling Sentiment Association in Discourse for Humor Recognition (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on sentiment information is limited to the number of emotional words. |
| Approach: | They propose to model sentiment association between discourse units to indicate how punchline breaks expectation of setup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that discourse relation, sentiment conflict and sentiment transition are effective indicators for humor recognition. |
TIGER: Text-Informed Generalized Enzyme-Reaction Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enzyme–reaction retrieval suffer from poor generalization across tasks and distributions . TIGER is a text-informed generalized enzyme-reaction retrieval framework that bridges enzymes and biochemical reactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-informed generalized enzyme-reaction retrieval framework that leverages protein-to-text generation models to distill textual knowledge from enzyme sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in enzyme–reaction retrieval tasks and distributions. |
Subgraph-Guided Executable Logical Form Generation for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuhang Tian, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Changzhi Zhou, Jun Yang, Huipeng Ma, Chenhao Li, Luan Zhang, Yading Li, Xudong Li, Shenxi Liu, Jing Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented approaches focus on ignoring the structural information of the Knowledge Base (KB) and the question. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware subgraph retrieval stage that ranks candidate subgraphs by aligning them with the question’s structure, along with semantic relevance. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GrailQA, WebQSP, and GraphQuestions show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
STINMatch: Semi-Supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network for Financial Risk Detection via News Label Diffusion (2023.emnlp-main)
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Xurui Li, Yue Qin, Rui Zhu, Tianqianjin Lin, Yongming Fan, Yangyang Kang, Kaisong Song, Fubang Zhao, Changlong Sun, Haixu Tang, Xiaozhong Liu
| 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. |
Conv-Basis: A New Paradigm for Efficient Attention Inference and Gradient Computation in Transformers (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a large computational cost for attention computation in large language models is a major obstacle . |
| Approach: | They propose a convolution-like structure for attention computation using convolution matrices . they then propose an efficient approximation method to approximate the attention matrix . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves nearly linear time complexity in n1+o(1) time. |
ALIS: Aligned LLM Instruction Security Strategy for Unsafe Input Prompt (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing instruction tuning methods may fail to balance performance with robustness against attacks from user input like prompt injection and jailbreaking. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction tuning paradigm to decompose user inputs into irreducible atomic instructions and organize them into instruction streams to guide response generation of model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can maintain security constraints by ignoring or rejecting user mode instructions when user mode instruction conflicts with kernel mode instructions. |
PDAMeta: Meta-Learning Framework with Progressive Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text data augmentation methods can not ensure the diversity and quality of the generated data, which leads to sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework with progressive data augmentation for few-shot text classification using prompt-based data augmented by attention-based methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models and shows better robustness on four public few-shot text classification datasets. |
Rewiring the Transformer with Depth-Wise LSTMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Stacking non-linear layers allows deep neural networks to model complicated functions . but residual connections within each layer fail to fuse information from previous layers effectively . |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer with depth-wise LSTMs connecting cascading Transformer layers and sub-layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in English-German / French and multilingual tasks with BLEU. |
LeCoDe: A Benchmark Dataset for Interactive Legal Consultation Dialogue Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Weikang Yuan, Kaisong Song, Zhuoren Jiang, Junjie Cao, Yujie Zhang, Jun Lin, Kun Kuang, Ji Zhang, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Current systems for legal consultation are insufficient to handle the knowledge-intensive nature of real-world consultations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn benchmark dataset to evaluate LLMs in legal consultation settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses LLMs’ consultation capabilities in terms of (1) clarification capability and (2) professional advice quality. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset . |
When Personalization Tricks Detectors: The Feature-Inversion Trap in Machine-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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Lang Gao, Xuhui Li, Chenxi Wang, Mingzhe Li, Wei Liu, Zirui Song, Jinghui Zhang, Rui Yan, Preslav Nakov, Xiuying Chen
| Challenge: | Personalized MGT detection remains largely underexplored due to personalization challenges . large language models (LLMs) can imitate personal writing styles, but they can generate fake news and misinformation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate detector robustness under personalization . they attribute this limitation to a feature-inversion trap that flips the effect in personalized contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework predicts detector robustness under personalization with an 85% correlation to actual results. |
Advancing Abductive Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs through Complex Logical Hypothesis Generation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abductive reasoning is the process of making educated guesses to provide explanations for observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of complex logical hypothesis generation to generate a complex logique hypothesis that can explain a set of observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates logical hypotheses closer to the reference hypothesis, but not better on unseen observations. |
Well Begun is Half Done: Low-resource Preference Alignment by Weak-to-Strong Decoding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource methods for LLM alignment have been popular, but still face challenges in obtaining high-quality and aligned content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance alignment ability of base models by the guidance of a small aligned model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods while avoiding degradation on downstream tasks. |
EventGround: Narrative Reasoning by Grounding to Eventuality-centric Knowledge Graphs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for leveraging background knowledge of narratives are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to ground free-texts to eventuality-centric KGs for narrative reasoning . their framework is based on a set of probabilistic probabilistic models that are grounded in the real world . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while providing interpretable evidence. |
DCMKC: A Dual Consistency Matching Approach for Multi-hop Question Answering in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning based on chains of thought (CoTs) fails to find logical connections between reasoning steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to match KG reasoning chains with CoTs based on semantic similarity . they use a knowledge graph to find relevant information "within" each reasoning step . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on multi-answer questions with 5.1% improvement over baselines. |
Boosting LLM Agents with Recursive Contemplation for Effective Deception Handling (2024.findings-acl)
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Shenzhi Wang, Chang Liu, Zilong Zheng, Siyuan Qi, Shuo Chen, Qisen Yang, Andrew Zhao, Chaofei Wang, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant success in using LLMs as agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive framework that incorporates first-order and second-order perspective transitions into LLMs to enhance their ability to identify and counteract deceptive information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances LLMs’ ability to identify and counteract deceptive information without extra fine-tuning and data. |
Exploring Fine-Grained Human Motion Video Captioning (2025.coling-main)
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Bingchan Zhao, Xinyi Liu, Zhuocheng Yu, Tongchen Yang, Yifan Song, Mingyu Jin, Sujian Li, Yizhou Wang
| Challenge: | Existing video captioning models fail to capture nuanced semantics of videos . existing models generate coarse descriptions of human motions, resulting in poor quality . |
| Approach: | They construct a fine-grained human motion video captioning dataset named BoFiT and a model that generates fine-grain descriptions of human motions via prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on comprehensive metrics. |
EconProver: Towards More Economical Test-Time Scaling for Automated Theorem Proving (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) Existing cost analyses regulate only the number of sampling passes, ignoring the substantial disparities in sampling costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate two complementary methods into a unified EconRL pipeline to increase pass rates under constrained sampling passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. |
Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human States (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess basic Theory of Mind abilities but neglect temporal evolution of mental states in real-world social contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate Large Language Models' ability to understand and track the temporal progression of mental states across interconnected scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks underperform humans by 44.7% and show that they can model the dynamic nature of human mental states better than existing models. |
InteGround: On the Evaluation of Verification and Retrieval Planning in Integrative Grounding (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing grounding approaches work well for simple queries, but many real-world information needs require synthesizing multiple pieces of evidence. |
| Approach: | They introduce "integrative grounding" to evaluate the ability to ground large language models in external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is robust to redundant evidence, but rationalizes using internal knowledge when information is incomplete. |
COF: Adaptive Chain of Feedback for Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction (COQE) aims to extract all comparative sentiment quintuples from product review text. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-unaware adaptive chain-of-feedback method to extract quintuples from product review text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on three benchmarks. |
FIER: Fine-Grained and Efficient KV Cache Retrieval for Long-context LLM Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dongwei Wang, Zijie Liu, Song Wang, Yuxin Ren, Jianing Deng, Jingtong Hu, Tianlong Chen, Huanrui Yang
| Challenge: | Key-Value (KV) cache reading latency increases with context lengths hindering LLM inference . important tokens are sparsely distributed across the long context, making existing retrieval inaccurate . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retain a small fraction of KV cache based on token importance . important tokens are often sparsely distributed across the long context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces decoding latency by 1.2 to 1.5. |
Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Jiahao Zhu, Daizong Liu, Pan Zhou, Xing Di, Yu Cheng, Song Yang, Wenzheng Xu, Zichuan Xu, Yao Wan, Lichao Sun, Zeyu Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal sentence grounding ignore two crucial issues . 1) Boundary-bias: the video downsampling process may lose these two frames . 2) Reasoning-biases: such incorrect new boundary frames lead to the reasoning bias . |
| Approach: | They propose a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames . they use a reasoning strategy to learn the inter-relationship among these frames a . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of a new siamese sampling network on three challenging datasets. |
Discourse Self-Attention for Discourse Element Identification in Argumentative Student Essays (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite its importance, discourse element identification is challenging due to the ambiguity of sentences . the number of elaboration sentences could be 10 times more than the number edna sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sentence positional encodings to explicitly represent sentence positions and inter-sentence attentions to capture sentence interactions and enhance sentence representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a Chinese and English dataset. |
Double Path Networks for Sequence to Sequence Learning (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for Sequence to Sequence learning have been developed . convolutional neural networks and self-attention networks are the most popular . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate convolutional and self-attention layers into a double path network for sequence to sequence learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance over state-of-the-art systems. |
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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Baixuan Xu, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Huihao Jing, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Long Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods. |
A Role-Selected Sharing Network for Joint Machine-Human Chatting Handoff and Service Satisfaction Analysis (2021.emnlp-main)
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Jiawei Liu, Kaisong Song, Yangyang Kang, Guoxiu He, Zhuoren Jiang, Changlong Sun, Wei Lu, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to predict chatbot failure hatches vital apprehensions due to complexity of human conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework. |
Gold: A Global and Local-aware Denoising Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Graph Noise Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to construct CSKGs with large semantic coverage are expensive and introduce spurious noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a denoising framework that incorporates entity semantic information, global rules, and local structural information from the CSKG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in noise detection tasks on synthetic noisy CSKG benchmarks. |
UniDataBench: Evaluating Data Analytics Agents Across Structured and Unstructured Data (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks do not assess agents’ capabilities across data types . Existing tools only evaluate agents' ability to extract reasonable insights across data formats. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source benchmark to evaluate the performance of data analytics agents in handling diverse data sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs end-to-end analysis over diverse data sources by automatically discovering cross-source linkages, decomposing goals, and generating robust, self-correcting code to extract actionable insights. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
UNO Arena for Evaluating Sequential Decision-Making Capability of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhanyue Qin, Haochuan Wang, Deyuan Liu, Ziyang Song, Cunhang Fan, Zhao Lv, Jinlin Wu, Zhen Lei, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Xiaoyan Yu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs demonstrate powerful capabilities between tasks, but can they make sequential decisions? |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate sequential decision-making capability of large language models (LLMs) using novel metrics based Monte Carlo methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves sequential decision-making performance compared to the vanilla LLM player. |
Improving Embedding-based Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction by Incorporating Structural Information (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised keyphrase extraction models ignore the indicative role of the highlights in certain locations, leading to wrong keyphrases extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Highlight-Guided Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction model that models phrase-document relevance via the highlights of documents and calculates cross-phrase relevance between all candidate phrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised keyphrase extraction models on three benchmarks. |
Exploiting Syntactic Structures for Humor Recognition (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using syntactic structure features, we find humor recognition is a kind of style . |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit syntactic structure features to enhance humor recognition . they find syntastic structure features consistently correlate with humor . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements compared with baselines. |
Revisiting Epistemic Markers in Confidence Estimation: Can Markers Accurately Reflect Large Language Models’ Uncertainty? (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes domains, but their confidence is inconsistent in out-of-distribution scenarios. |
| Approach: | They define "marker confidence" as the observed accuracy when a model employs an epistemic marker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generalizes well within the same distribution, but its confidence is inconsistent in out-of-distribution scenarios. |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
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Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
DPGA-TextSyn: Differentially Private Genetic Algorithm for Synthetic Text Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhonghao Sun, Zhiliang Tian, Yiping Song, Yuyi Si, Juhua Zhang, Minlie Huang, Kai Lu, Zeyu Xiong, Xinwang Liu, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune large language models pose privacy risks . researchers have synthesized data with strong generation capabilities closed-source LLMs to alleviate this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine general LLMs with genetic algorithm to produce relevant and diverse synthetic text under differential privacy constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of the model in downstream tasks while ensuring privacy. |
Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Context Denoising (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to ABSA use text encoders to locate important context features or remove them from input. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve ABSA with context denoising to remove noise from text . they use diffusion networks to perform denoizing process to gradually eliminate noise . paper shows that aspect-based sentiment analysis is effective for fine-grained analysis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves ABSA on five widely used ABSA datasets. |
Debiasing LLMs by Masking Unfairness-Driving Attention Heads (2026.findings-acl)
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Tingxu Han, Wei Song, Ziqi Ding, Ziming Li, Chunrong Fang, Yuekang Li, Dongfang Liu, Zhenyu Chen, Zhenting Wang
| Challenge: | Existing work probes when biased outputs appear, but gives little insight into the mechanisms that generate them, leaving existing mitigations largely fragile. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight debiasing framework that detects bias heads and selectively masks only those heads that activate under DA and CoT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces unfairness by 391.9%- 534.5% in both one- and two-turn dialogues. |
Generating Responses with a Specific Emotion in Dialog (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | EmoDS can express emotions in both ways, but it is difficult to scale to large datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an emotional dialog system that can express emotions in both ways . they use strong emotional words and neutral words to increase the intensity of emotions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs better than baselines in BLEU, diversity and quality of emotional expression. |
IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Wenxuan Ding, Weiqi Wang, Sze Kwok, Minghao Liu, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Junxian He, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that distill intentions from LMs fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms. |
LongDocURL: a Comprehensive Multimodal Long Document Benchmark Integrating Understanding, Reasoning, and Locating (2025.acl-long)
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Chao Deng, Jiale Yuan, Pi Bu, Peijie Wang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Jian Xu, Xiao-Hui Li, Yuan Gao, Jun Song, Bo Zheng, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding benchmarks only handle a small number of pages . existing models are limited to handling only a limited number of documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a long document understanding benchmark that integrates three primary tasks and 20 sub-tasks based on different primary tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on open-source and closed-source models . the model outpersforms other models on more than 33,000 pages of documents . |
HAT: Hardware-Aware Transformers for Efficient Natural Language Processing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on four machine translation tasks demonstrate that HAT can discover efficient models for different hardware (CPU, GPU, IoT device). |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a large design space with arbitrary encoder-decoder attention and heterogeneous layers and then train a SuperTransformer that efficiently produces many SubTransformers with weight sharing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can find efficient models for different hardware (CPU, GPU, IoT device) it achieves 3 speedup, 3.7 smaller size over baseline Transformer; 2.7 speed up, 3.6 smaller sizes over Evolved Transformer with 12,041 less search cost and no performance loss. |
MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Fuxiao Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao, Jianshu Chen, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Yaser Yacoob, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing large language models have limited ability to perform tasks effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale multimodal chart instruction dataset with 600k instances supporting diverse tasks and chart types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LMM achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing chart QA benchmarks. |
MTO: A Multi-turn Conversational Text-to-OverpassQL Dataset for Enhanced OpenStreetMap Query Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a framework for constructing multi-turn Text-to-OverpassQL dialogue datasets is proposed . a dataset of over 7,800 dialogues contains more than 20,000 individual utterances . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for constructing multi-turn Text-to-OverpassQL dialogue datasets . they convert Overpass queries into syntax trees using a custom parser based on OverpassQl . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes over 7,800 dialogues, each containing 2 to 4 user utterances . it is the first multi-turn Text-to-OverpassQL dataset built upon the OverpassNL corpus . |
Sens-Merging: Sensitivity-Guided Parameter Balancing for Merging Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing task vector-based model merging methods apply uniform coefficients across all parameters, overlooking varying parameter importance both within and across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a sensitivity-guided coefficient adjustment method that optimizes existing model merging techniques by operating at both task-specific and cross-task levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing model merging techniques on mistral 7B and LLaMA2 7B/13B models and enables them to outperformed specialized models. |
AQuilt: Weaving Logic and Self-Inspection into Low-Cost, High-Relevance Data Synthesis for Specialist LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to synthesis large language models often suffer from performance limitations and high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for constructing instruction-tuning data from unlabeled data for any specialized domains from corresponding unlabed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is comparable to DeepSeek-V3 while utilizing just 17% of the production cost. |
COSMIC: Generalized Refusal Direction Identification in LLM Activations (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods depend on predefined refusal templates detectable in output tokens or manual review. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimally identifies steering directions and target layers using cosine similarity, entirely independent of output text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable steering effectiveness without any prior knowledge or assumptions of a model’s refusal behavior such as the use of certain refusal tokens. |
LMGQS: A Large-scale Dataset for Query-focused Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruochen Xu, Song Wang, Yang Liu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Dan Iter, Pengcheng He, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Lack of large-scale datasets for query-focused summarization hinders model development . lack of data limits the ability of QFS models to train robust neural models . |
| Approach: | They propose to generate a query for each summary sentence in a generic summarization annotation using a pretrained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot and supervised performance on multiple existing QFS benchmarks. |
Consistency Regularization for Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning (2021.acl-long)
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Bo Zheng, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Wenhui Wang, Zewen Chi, Saksham Singhal, Wanxiang Che, Ting Liu, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that consistency regularization improves cross-lingual fine-tuning . pre-trained cross-linguistic models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the other . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization . they use example consistency regularized to penalize prediction sensitivity to four types of data augmentations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves cross-lingual fine-tuning across tasks . it can be generalized to other target languages without additional training . |
EMA: An Episodic Memory Agent for Efficient and Selective Memory (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory-augmented methods often incorporate full dialog histories without filtering, resulting in information redundancy and inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that abstracts conversational context into Episodic Memory Units (EMUs) they propose EMA, MemDecider and a filtering decision module to reduce noise and improve overall performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token consumption by 11.48% while improving performance on two widely-used benchmarks. |
Toward Unifying Text Segmentation and Long Document Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive strategies produce more condensed summaries, but they suffer from hallucinations and factual errors, which pose a more difficult generation challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns robust sentence representations by performing summarization and segmentation simultaneously, which is further enhanced by an optimization-based regularizer to promote selection of diverse summary sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on publicly available benchmarks and better cross-genre transferability when equipped with text segmentation. |
CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to zero-shot commonsense question answering use incomplete CSKBs . lack of human annotations makes sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that abstracts a commonsense knowledge triple to many higher-level instances, which increases the coverage of the CSKB and expands the ground-truth answer space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CAR can generalize to zero-shot commonsense scenarios . lack of human annotations makes sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. |
Towards A Better Initial Policy Model For Scalable Long-CoT Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long-CoT reasoning and reinforcement learning are demonstrating remarkable performance and scalability, however, there is a lack of systematic guidelines for obtaining a better initial policy model. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic guideline and a novel Re-RFT method to obtain more efficient reasoning patterns from different initial models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B model by 4.6%, demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority. |
Multi-Modal Multi-Granularity Tokenizer for Chu Bamboo Slips (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer, we analyze ancient Chinese scripts . a large proportion of the characters in ancient Chinese are rare or undeciphered . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer specifically designed for ancient Chinese scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer improves on the part-of-speech tagging task on the Chu bamboo slip script. |
SecureSQL: Evaluating Data Leakage of Large Language Models as Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the vulnerability of large language models to SQL injection have been limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the potential of language models to leak sensitive data when generating SQL queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model with the best performance has an accuracy of 61.7%, compared to humans who achieve 94% accuracy. |
CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generalize commonsense reasoning lack instantiated knowledge and require pre-built concept taxonomies and annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. |
Exploring the Potential of ChatGPT on Sentence Level Relations: A Focus on Temporal, Causal, and Discourse Relations (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated ChatGPT's remarkable few-shot, even zero-shot learning abilities when compared to other models. |
| Approach: | They quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. |
ECON: On the Detection and Resolution of Evidence Conflicts (2024.emnlp-main)
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Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Qianqian Zhuang, Lin Qiu, Tianhang Zhang, Tengxiao Liu, Yangqiu Song, Yue Zhang, Pengfei Liu, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that AI generated content is more likely to dominate search results, making it difficult to detect when compared to human-produced content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating diverse, validated evidence conflicts to simulate real-world misinformation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables the detection of conflicting information in real-world scenarios and shows that weaker models struggle with similar answer conflicts while stronger models show robust performance. |
SafeKey: Amplifying Aha-Moment Insights for Safety Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduce a new paradigm of explicitly reasoning before answering, but they pose great safety risks against harmful queries and adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety aha moment that activates safety reasoning and leads to a safe response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to unseen jailbreak prompts while maintaining general abilities. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion from Pretrained Language Models with Knowledge Constraints (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multilingual knowledge graph completion do not align with mKGC tasks because of their English-centric bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual pretrained language models to solve queries in different languages by reasoning a tail entity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous SOTA on Hits@1 and Hits @10 by 12.32% and 16.03% on public datasets. |
HoneyComb: A Flexible LLM-Based Agent System for Materials Science (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | specialized large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in materials science but often struggle with the distinct complexities of materials science tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM-based agent system specifically designed for materials science that leverages a reliable materials science knowledge base and a sophisticated tool hub. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baseline models across tasks in materials science while ensuring accuracy and relevance. |
SimpleDeepSearcher: Deep Information Seeking via Web-Powered Reasoning Trajectory Synthesis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuang Sun, Huatong Song, Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Jinhao Jiang, Junjie Zhang, Fei Bai, Jia Deng, Xin Zhao, Zheng Liu, Lei Fang, Zhongyuan Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deep search training lack high-quality training trajectories, prohibitive computational costs and lack of high-fidelity training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating real user interactions in live web search environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating user interactions in live web search environments. |
Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhen Tan, Dawei Li, Song Wang, Alimohammad Beigi, Bohan Jiang, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Mansooreh Karami, Jundong Li, Lu Cheng, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing surveys focus on LLMs' specific utility for data annotation and synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate annotations from raw data . they also propose to review learning strategies for models utilizing LLM-generated annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to improve the efficacy of machine learning models by generating and labeling raw data with relevant information. |
Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for User Intention Relation Modeling (2026.eacl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Zhaobo Wang, Junfei Cheng, Dan Yu, Zerui Huang, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Chen Luo, Yanming Zhu, Bo Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs focus on connecting intentions but lacks the ability to model the relationships between different intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically generate an intention knowledge graph, capturing connections between user intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods and shows its utility. |
On Temperature-Constrained Non-Deterministic Machine Translation: Potential and Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on the non-deterministic properties of language models, but these properties remain under-explored in machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that evaluates MT systems and identifies temperature-constrained non-deterministic MT as a distinct phenomenon. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides higher-quality candidates than Deterministic MT under temperature constraints. |
Question-Aware Knowledge Graph Prompting for Enhancing Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models require costly fine-tuning or retrieve noisy KG information. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate KG-based input embedding prefixes as soft prompts but fail to account for question relevance, resulting in noisy prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets. |
Content- and Topology-Aware Representation Learning for Scientific Multi-Literature (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on learning textual information at sentence- or document-level, but ignore inter-document connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that extends representation learning to the multi-document level . it integrates latent semantic and rich relatedness information from topological networks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns latent semantic information from content and rich relatedness information from topological networks. |
DIXITWORLD: Evaluating Multimodal Abductive Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Multi-Agent Dixit Gameplay (2026.acl-short)
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Yunxiang MO, Tianshi Zheng, Qing Zong, Jiayu Liu, Baixuan Xu, Yauwai Yim, Chunkit Chan, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of multimodal abductive reasoning are limited to static, single-agent tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multiagent evaluation suite that deconstructs the current evaluations of multimodal abductive reasoning in vision–language models. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite is based on two core components: DixitArena and DixitsBench. |
LAGCL4Rec: When LLMs Activate Interactions Potential in Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Leqi Zheng, Chaokun Wang, Canzhi Chen, Jiajun Zhang, Cheng Wu, Zixin Song, Shannan Yan, Ziyang Liu, Hongwei Li
| Challenge: | Traditional contrastive learning methods treat negative feedback as equally hard or easy, ignoring informative semantic difficulty during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework leveraging Large Language Models to Activate interactions in Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on multiple benchmarks. |
Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries (2026.acl-long)
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Ki Sen Hung, Xi Yang, Chang Liu, Haoran Li, Kejiang Chen, Changxuan Fan, Tsun On Kwok, Weiming Zhang, Xiaomeng Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | a goal of LLM alignment is to balance usefulness with harmlessness, but this conflictes when knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines safety-research contexts with adversarial interactions to exploit a vulnerability in Jargon queries. |
| Outcome: | a framework outperforms existing methods in analyzing Jargon queries, a study shows . it achieves 93% of attacks across seven models, while remaining useful, the authors say . |
DiscoPrompt: Path Prediction Prompt Tuning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing works on implicit discourse relation recognition focus on syntax features and lack of connectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based path prediction method that integrates the interactive information and intrinsic senses among the hierarchy in IDRR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows significant improvement against competitive baselines. |
On-the-fly Denoising for Data Augmentation in Natural Language Understanding (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve data augmentation performance may introduce noisy data that impairs training. |
| Approach: | They propose an on-the-fly denoising technique that learns from soft augmented labels provided by an organic teacher model trained on the cleaner original dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on text classification and question-answering tasks on general augmentation techniques and prevents overfitting on noisy labels. |
Exploring the Impact of Layer Normalization for Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that layer normalization (LayerNorm) overfits training data and therefore has low generalizability for ZST. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Transformer architecture to set the default layer normalization setting for zero-shot translation (ZST) they also propose to set LayerNorm after residual connections to outperform PreNorm by 12.3 BLEU points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current model by 12.3 BLEU points on 54 directions on OPUS, IWSLT, and Europarl datasets. |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuqi Yang, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Wei Fan, Qing Zong, Chunkit Chan, Zheye Deng, Xin Liu, Yifan Gao, Changlong Yu, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Zheng Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to capture and model customer intention effectively because of insufficient information exploitation and only apparent information like descriptions and titles are used. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit existing session data to capture and model intention in E-commerce product purchase sessions using a multimodal benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can bridge the gap between intention understanding in simplified research cases like co-buy intention and more complex yet practical scenarios like session history. |
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)
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Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Existing intention-based studies on recommendation tasks are limited and use models to implicitly model the intention memberships. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the generation power of large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the intention knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications. |
Response-Anticipated Memory for On-Demand Knowledge Integration in Response Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural conversation models generate appropriate but non-informative responses in general. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a document memory with anticipated responses in mind using a teacher-student framework and a student's input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art for the Conversing by Reading task. |
Detecting RAG Extraction Attack via Dual-Path Runtime Integrity Game (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems augment large language models with external knowledge, but introduce a critical security vulnerability: Knowledge Base Leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a runtime defense mechanism inspired by stack canaries in software security . canaryRAG embeds carefully designed canary tokens into retrieved chunks and reformulates RAG extraction defense as a dual-path runtime integrity game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can detect and prevent RAG Knowledge Base Leakage in real time . it can be integrated into arbitrary RAG pipelines without retraining or structural modifications . |
Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained Transformers are more effective at detecting anomalous or OOD examples, while many previous models are frequently worse than chance. |
| Approach: | They construct a new robustness benchmark with real distribution shifts to measure out-of-distribution generalization for seven NLP datasets and compare them to previous models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generalizations for seven datasets show that pretrained Transformers are significantly less effective at detecting anomalous or OOD examples, while many previous models are often worse than chance. |
Divide-Then-Align: Honest Alignment based on the Knowledge Boundary of RAG (2025.acl-long)
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Xin Sun, Jianan Xie, Zhongqi Chen, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Yuehe Chen, Bowen Song, Zilei Wang, Weiqiang Wang, Liang Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval systems have significantly advanced natural language processing tasks by integrating external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that conditions large language models to generate answers even in the absence of reliable knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach balances accuracy with appropriate abstention, enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of retrieval-augmented systems. |
PrivLM-Bench: A Multi-level Privacy Evaluation Benchmark for Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Haoran Li, Dadi Guo, Donghao Li, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Xin Liu, Chunkit Chan, Duanyi Yao, Yuan Yao, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | generative large language models (LLMs) exhibit surprising capability and integrate previous tasks into a unified text generation formulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy evaluation benchmark to quantify the privacy leakage of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares PPLMs with different privacy implementations to find out how privacy leakage is handled. |
DiningBench: A Hierarchical Multi-view Benchmark for Perception and Reasoning in the Dietary Domain (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models lack fine-grained classification, single-view imagery, and inaccurate metadata. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical, multi-view benchmark to evaluate VLMs across three levels of cognitive complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates vision-language models across three levels of complexity . it systematically identifies five primary failure modes . the proposed benchmarks are available on https://github.com/meituan/DiningBench. |
GlossaGen: Making Academic Translation Smarter with Glossing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine translation systems obscure or mistranslate key terminology, while paraphrasing aimed at lay readers often oversimplifies it, hindering their ability to master domain-specific technical vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They propose a task which produces translations dynamically adapted to a reader’s academic proficiency, or level, and a framework to address this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves higher scores than baselines on a synthesized benchmark and human evaluations. |
ProgCo: Program Helps Self-Correction of Large Language Models (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs fail to self-correct and generate correct feedback, leading to misleading refinement and failure of self-refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose a program-driven self-correction approach that uses program-based verification to self-refine initial responses without external feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves self-correction and can be further enhanced when combined with real program tools. |
DeepStruct: Pretraining of Language Models for Structure Prediction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models perform structural understanding tasks that focus on understanding one aspect of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models by pretraining them to generate structures from the text on task-agnostic corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on 21 of 28 datasets. |
DPWriter: Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Planning Branching for Creative Writing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing large language models (LLMs) lack explicit mechanisms for guiding diverse exploration and instead prioritize efficiency and performance over diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning-based framework that decomposes the generation process into explicitly planned intermediate steps and introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing baselines on creative writing benchmarks on a semi-structured long chain-of-thought (CoT) it introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation, alongside a group-aware diversity reward to encourage distinct trajectories. |
Learning to Customize Model Structures for Few-shot Dialogue Generation Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training generative models with minimal corpus are difficult . fine-tuning distinguishes tasks from parameter perspective but ignores model-structure perspective . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that can customize a unique dialogue model for each task in the few-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two datasets in task consistency, response quality, diversity and consistency. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion via Efficient Multilingual Knowledge Sharing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing MKGC research ignores the shareability of cross-lingual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual knowledge Graph Completion framework that leverages multilingual shared knowledge to significantly enhance performance through two components: Knowledge-level Grouped Mixture of Experts (KL-GMoE) and Iterative Entity Reranking (IER). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves improvements of 5.47%, 3.27%, and 1.01% in the Hits@1, Hits @3, and Hits_10 metrics, respectively, compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) MKGC method. |
Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Global Intent-Slot Co-occurrence (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing joint models only use training procedure to determine the implicit correlation between intents and slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to make full use of the statistical co-occurrence frequency between intents and slots as prior knowledge to enhance joint multiple intent detection and slot filling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two public multi-intent datasets. |
TinyJudge: Unverifiable Constraint Alignment via Lightweight Specialist Ensembles (2026.acl-long)
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Yirong Zeng, Yufei Liu, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Wu Ning, Haonan Song, Dandan Tu, Qixun Zhang, Yuxiang He, Bibo Cai, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Instruction Following (IF) is a core capability of LLMs, requiring strict adherence to diverse constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses tiny language models to evaluate instruction following . they propose to use a set of specialized tiny language model to provide rewards for soft constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models by 12% and speeds up training time by 3. |
A Variational Approach to Weakly Supervised Document-Level Multi-Aspect Sentiment Classification (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing weakly supervised methods for document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification are not easy to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational approach to weakly supervised document-level multi-aspect sentiment classification using target-opinion word pairs as "supervision" they aim to learn a sentiment polarity classifier by optimizing the lower bound . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms weakly supervised baselines on TripAdvisor and BeerAdvocate datasets and can be comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods with hundreds of labels per aspect. |
GenTool: Enhancing Tool Generalization in Language Models through Zero-to-One and Weak-to-Strong Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
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Jie He, Jennifer Neville, Mengting Wan, Longqi Yang, Hui Liu, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jeff Z. Pan, Pei Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can expand their capabilities by integrating external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that prepares LLMs for diverse generalization challenges in tool utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the tool-usage capabilities of LLMs by up to 8B parameters, surpassing GPT-4o. |
TOREE: Evaluating Topic Relevance of Student Essays for Chinese Primary and Middle School Education (2024.findings-acl)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Hongyi Wu, Xinshu Shen, Peimin Yu, Gaowei Yi, Xinhao Chen, Tu Hu, Yang Chen, Yupei Ren, Yadong Zhang, Youqi Song, Binxuan Liu, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Existing research on Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) for Chinese essays has overlooked topic relevance and lacks detailed feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to use TOREE to assess topic relevance in Chinese primary and middle school students’ essays to improve automatic and human evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves both automatic and human evaluations across four diverse LLMs. |
Knowledge-guided Open Attribute Value Extraction with Reinforcement Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for open attribute value extraction for emerging entities are noisy or incomplete, even missing. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-guided reinforcement learning framework for open attribute value extraction for emerging entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines by 16.5 - 27.8%. |
HoneyBee: Progressive Instruction Finetuning of Large Language Models for Materials Science (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | LLaMa-based language model for materials science is first of its kind in the world . |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-based process for trustworthy data curation in materials science (MatSci-Instruct) they then apply this process to finetune a LLaMa-based language model targeted for materials science. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing language models on materials science tasks and improves in successive stages of refinement. |
Is Parameter Collision Hindering Continual Learning in LLMs? (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn multiple tasks in parallel often lead to catastrophic forgetting, resulting in overwriting knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-collision low-rank Adaptation approach that leverages low collision rates to enhance continual learning (CL) in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves better task orthogonality and higher task orthognality than existing SOTA methods. |
ContextCheck: Sentence-Level Faithfulness Verification with Context-Aware Disambiguation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yueqin Yin, Yaxi Li, Xin Liu, Xun Wang, Kaiqiang Song, Simin Ma, Shujian Liu, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Haoyun Deng, Pengcheng He, Mingyuan Zhou, Song Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models often hallucinate, producing content that is factually incorrect or not grounded in the sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for sentence-level faithfulness verification with context-aware disambiguation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Macro F1 by over 10 points compared to baselines on three context-dependent datasets. |
Entity Linking within a Social Media Platform: A Case Study on Yelp (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on entity linking focus on linking entities to knowledge bases, but on social media platforms, such as Yelp, it can be more practical. |
| Approach: | They propose to link entities within a social media platform with a new entity linking problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can link business mentions to corresponding businesses on a social media platform. |
Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yuchong Sun, Che Liu, Kun Zhou, Jinwen Huang, Ruihua Song, Xin Zhao, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | Existing studies overlook the multi-turn instruction following ability of large language models (LLMs) Extensive experiments show that Parrot improves current LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi- turn instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for collecting multi-turn instructions that feature human-like queries, such as anaphora and ellipsis, and a context-aware preference optimization strategy to further enhance LLMs for complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi-turn instruction following. |
Knowledge Triplets Derivation from Scientific Publications via Dual-Graph Resonance (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods aim to extract explicit triplet knowledge from documents, but they can hardly perceive unobserved factual relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Extraction-Contextualization-Derivation strategy to generate a document-specific dynamic graph from a shared static knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate richer explicit and implicit relations under the guidance of static and dynamic knowledge topologies. |
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Chenyang Song, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Xiyu Shi, Kuai Li, Chen Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Guangli Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance. |