Papers by Song Yang
ProUIE: A Macro-to-Micro Progressive Learning Method for LLM-based Universal Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
RoleCDE: Benchmarking and Mitigating Role–Alignment Trade-offs in Role-Playing Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for role-playing agents only evaluate surface-level fidelity and provide limited insight into decision making under role–alignment value conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RPAs under role–alignment value conflicts . they use 8k diverse role profiles and 240k dilemma instances to evaluate role-aware decision making . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 8k diverse role profiles and scenarios and nearly 240k dilemma instances across three difficulty levels and eight role categories. |
OmniCharacter: Towards Immersive Role-Playing Agents with Seamless Speech-Language Personality Interaction (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Towards Modern Topic Models: A Survey of Taxonomies and Paradigm Shifts from Algorithm-Centric to LLM-Centered Topic Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Topic modeling (TM) is a classic unsupervised learning task in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a new taxonomy that emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows. |
Static Models, Dynamic World: A Unified Perspective on Temporal Perception in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Chenhao Li, Dandan Song, Changzhi Zhou, Jun Yang, Yuhang Tian, Huipeng Ma, Guangyuan Feng, Luan Zhang, Xudong Li, Ke Duan
| Challenge: | Large language models are trained on static corpora but deployed in a dynamic world . a foundational tension remains between time and the ability to understand it . |
| Approach: | They formalize temporal queries in an information-theoretic framework based on parametric reachability of temporal premises and answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework formalizes temporal queries in an information-theoretic framework based on parametric reachability of temporal premises and answers . the framework induces four temporal information regimes corresponding to internal reasoning, answer recency, premise anchoring, and genuine world indeterminacy . |
Two Pathways to Truthfulness: On the Intrinsic Encoding of LLM Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wen Luo, Guangyue Peng, Wei Li, Shaohang Wei, Feifan Song, Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Xingxing Zhang, Jing Jin, Furu Wei, Houfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Previous work shows that large language models generate hallucinations, yet the origins and mechanisms of these signals remain unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to validate and disentangle two different pathways for truthfulness cues . they also propose to use the same mechanism to derive self-contained evidence from the generated answer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed applications improve hallucination detection performance by integrating two different inputs. |
Unified Thinker: A General Reasoning Core for Image Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Sashuai Zhou, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu, Hanqing Yang, Yue Cao, Junpeng Ma, Yinchao Ma, Jun Song, Tiezheng Ge, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | generative models struggle with logic-intensive instruction following, exposing a persistent reasoning–execution gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic reasoning architecture for general image generation . they propose pixel-level feedback to ground the Thinker's policy in pixel feedback . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly improves image reasoning and generation quality. |
Bringing Real-World Relations into Video Generation with Graph-Structured Knowledge (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-video models struggle to accurately simulate real-world physics and dynamic entity interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates graph-structured temporal knowledge into video latent diffusion models to enhance compositional generation and interaction fidelity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances compositional generation and interaction fidelity by integrating graph-structured temporal knowledge into video latent diffusion models. |
Mid-Think: Training-Free Intermediate-Budget Reasoning via Token-Level Triggers (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Van Yang, Shouren Wang, Debargha Ganguly, Xinpeng Li, Chaoda Song, Vikash Singh, Vipin Chaudhary, Xiaotian Han
| Challenge: | Explicit /think> tags are used to expose intermediate reasoning and enable hybrid thinking behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free prompting format that combines these triggers to achieve intermediate-budget reasoning, outperforming fixed-token and prompt-based baselines in terms of the accuracy–length trade-off. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fixed-token and prompt-based prompts in accuracy–length trade-offs while improving Qwen3-8B on AIME from 69.8% to 72.4% and on GPQA from 58.5% to 61.1%. |
Beyond Function-Level Search: Repository-Aware Dual-Encoder Code Retrieval with Adversarial Verification (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
CLOMO: Counterfactual Logical Modification with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yinya Huang, Ruixin Hong, Hongming Zhang, Wei Shao, Zhicheng Yang, Dong Yu, Changshui Zhang, Xiaodan Liang, Linqi Song
| Challenge: | Existing studies on evaluating model reasoning are limited in both form and content. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to cultivate counterfactual thought processes within large language models and an evaluation metric to evaluate their natural language output instead of modeling the task as a multiple-choice problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric aligns well with human preference. |
PPC-GPT: Federated Task-Specific Compression of Large Language Models via Pruning and Chain-of-Thought Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming more popular and are gaining widespread use in artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that addresses both privacy preservation and model compression in federated settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maintains competitive performance comparable to full-sized LLMs while ensuring robust privacy protection through its federated architecture. |
PhotoChat: A Human-Human Dialogue Dataset With Photo Sharing Behavior For Joint Image-Text Modeling (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
MERMAID: Multi-perspective Self-reflective Agents with Generative Augmentation for Emotion Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models struggle to handle ambiguous emotional expressions and implicit affective cues, which are crucial for affective understanding but largely overlooked. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that integrates a self-reflection module, an emotion-guided visual augmentation module, and a cross-modal verification module to enhance emotion recognition. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that MERMAID outperforms existing methods and achieves absolute accuracy gains of 8.70%–27.90% across diverse benchmarks. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Generating Long and Informative Reviews with Aspect-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Decoding (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for review generation lack topical and syntactic characteristics of natural languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a review generation model that uses aspect semantics, syntactic sketch, and context information to generate a sentence and corresponding words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate long and informative review text for users given a product and her/his rating on it. |
ServImage: An Image Generation and Editing Benchmark from Real-world Commercial Imaging Services (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Fengxian Ji, Jingpu Yang, Zirui Song, Lang Gao, Junhong Liang, Zhenhao Chen, Jinghui Zhang, Xiuying Chen
| Challenge: | Recent image generation and editing models demonstrate robust adherence to instructions and high visual quality on academic benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that correlates image outputs with economic value in commercial design projects. |
| Outcome: | ServImage benchmarks show image generation models perform well on academic benchmarks but are uncertain on commercial projects. |
ZSEE: A Dataset based on Zeolite Synthesis Event Extraction for Automated Synthesis Platform (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Automated synthesis of zeolite holds great significance for attaining economic and environmental benefits. |
| Approach: | They propose an event extraction task to mine structural synthesis actions from experimental narratives for modular automated synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can significantly expedite automated synthesis of zeolites owing to its machine readability. |
RAG-Star: Enhancing Deliberative Reasoning with Retrieval Augmented Verification and Refinement (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but struggle with complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RAG approach that integrates retrieved information to guide tree-based reasoning process based on LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in large language models . iteratively plans intermediate sub-queries and answers based on the LLM itself . |
Knowledge-Augmented Multimodal Clinical Rationale Generation for Disease Diagnosis with Small Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to balance predictive accuracy with human-understandable rationales. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance LLMs by leveraging rationale distillation and domain knowledge injection for trustworthy multimodal rationale generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on real-world medical datasets show that ClinRaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in disease diagnosis and rationale generation. |
Z-Code++: A Pre-trained Language Model Optimized for Abstractive Summarization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Improving Chinese Grammatical Error Detection via Data augmentation by Conditional Error Generation (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
FastCuRL: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Stage-wise Context Scaling for Efficient Training R1-like Reasoning Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Improving training efficiency remains a challenge in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum RL framework with stage-wise context scaling to improve RL training efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning models on five benchmarks and achieves 49.6% accuracy on AIME 2024. |
FedCoT: Federated Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative force in artificial intelligence, demonstrating exceptional proficiency across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated framework for the Chain-of-Thought distillation of knowledge from LLMs to SLMs, while adhering to privacy requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures secure knowledge transfer from an LLM on a high-powered server to an SLM on resource-constrained client while adhering to privacy requirements. |
KG-Agent: An Efficient Autonomous Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graph (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to design the interaction strategy between large language models and knowledge graphs (KGs) are not effective for large language model (LLM)s to solve complex tasks due to the large volume and structured format of KG data. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework that enables small LLMs to actively make decisions over knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on in-domain and out-domain datasets using 10K samples. |
Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Natural Language Processing: Past, Present, and Future (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Tribrid: Stance Classification with Neural Inconsistency Detection (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new neural architecture can be used to classify stances on social media without relying on linguistic features. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture where the input also includes automatically generated negated perspectives over a given claim. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the original input and removes doubtful predictions over the retained information. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
MIND: From Passive Mimicry to Active Reasoning through Capability-Aware Multi-Perspective CoT Distillation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jin Cui, Jiaqi Guo, Jiepeng Zhou, Ruixuan Yang, Jiayi Lu, Jiajun Xu, Jiangcheng Song, Boran Zhao, Pengju Ren
| Challenge: | Existing approaches restrict students to following a single golden rationale and treat different reasoning paths independently, causing suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a capability-adaptive framework that transitions distillation from passive mimicry to active cognitive construction and employ a feedback-driven inertia calibration mechanism to align supervision with the student’s current adaptability. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-distribution and out-of distribution benchmarks. |
Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models with Self-Synthesized Rehearsal (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jianheng Huang, Leyang Cui, Ante Wang, Chengyi Yang, Xinting Liao, Linfeng Song, Junfeng Yao, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train LLMs on previous training data are not feasible in real-world applications because of catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses the LLM to generate synthetic instances for rehearsal and refine the instance outputs based on the synthetic inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior or comparable performance compared to conventional rehearsal-based approaches while being more data-efficient. |
VQA-Augmented Machine Translation with Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal machine translation methods often extract visual features using pre-trained models while learning text features from scratch, leading to representation imbalance. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal VQA-augmented multimodal machine translation method . it aligns image-source text pairs and image-question text pairs through dual-text contrastive learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple evaluation metrics. |
Reasoning-Enhanced Domain-Adaptive Pretraining of Multimodal Large Language Models for Short Video Content Governance (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Zixuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hongwei Wang, Baoyu Jing, Xiang Shen, Xin Dong, Zhuolin Hao, Hongyu Xiong, Yang Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying inappropriate content require extensive human-labeled data and lack cross-issue generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-enhanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) pretraining paradigm for unified inappropriate content detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the MLLM's performance in both zero-shot and supervised fine-tuning settings and shows strong generalization capabilities to emergent, previously unseen issues. |
Language Scaling for Universal Suggested Replies Model (2021.naacl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Qianlan Ying, Payal Bajaj, Budhaditya Deb, Yu Yang, Wei Wang, Bojia Lin, Milad Shokouhi, Xia Song, Yang Yang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | We consider scaling automated suggested replies (SR) to multiple languages for a commercial email application. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-lingual multi-task continual learning framework with auxiliary tasks and language adapters to train universal language representation across regions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces catastrophic forgetting and improves cross-lingual transfer across languages while reducing training costs. |
Path-enhanced Pre-trained Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable knowledge graph completion (KGC) success. |
| Approach: | They propose a path-enhanced pre-trained language model-based knowledge graph completion method which uses multi-view generation to infer missing facts in triple-level and path-level simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of the knowledge graph completion task. |
Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Implicit Narratives in Comic Strip? (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaochen Wang, Heming Xia, Jialin Song, Longyu Guan, Qingxiu Dong, Rui Li, Yixin Yang, Yifan Pu, Weiyao Luo, Yiru Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language benchmarks, yet current evaluations focus on single-image reasoning. |
| Approach: | STRIPCIPHER is a benchmark designed to evaluate model ability on understanding implicit narratives in silent comics. |
| Outcome: | STRIPCIPHER is a high-quality, human-annotated dataset featuring fine-grained annotations and comprehensive coverage of varying difficulty levels. |
TestAug: A Framework for Augmenting Capability-based NLP Tests (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Time-RA: Towards Time Series Reasoning for Anomaly Diagnosis with LLM Feedback (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
SrDetection: A Self-Referential Framework for Data Leakage Detection in Code Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuaimin Li, Liyang Fan, Zeyang li, Zhuoyue Wan, Yufang Lin, Shiwen Ni, Feiteng Fang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Yuanfeng Song, Kun Jing, Chen Jason Zhang, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating code large language models assume access to proprietary training corpora or use external reference sets with manually tuned, non-generalizable thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-referential leakage detection for gray-box and black-box settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves average F1 by 21.52 points in the gray-box setting and 14.46 points in black-box settings over strong baselines. |
Logical Phase Transitions: Understanding Collapse in LLM Logical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Symbolic logical reasoning is a critical yet underexplored capability of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns natural language with logical symbols to establish a shared representation and reshapes training dynamics around phase-transition boundaries to progressively strengthen reasoning at increasing logical depths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates logical reasoning collapse at high complexity while improving generalization to unseen logical compositions. |
TofuEval: Evaluating Hallucinations of LLMs on Topic-Focused Dialogue Summarization (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Liyan Tang, Igor Shalyminov, Amy Wong, Jon Burnsky, Jake Vincent, Yu’an Yang, Siffi Singh, Song Feng, Hwanjun Song, Hang Su, Lijia Sun, Yi Zhang, Saab Mansour, Kathleen McKeown
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs hallucinate significant amounts of factual errors in the dialogue domain, regardless of the model’s size. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate topic-focused dialogue summarization by using large language models (LLMs) they use human annotations to evaluate factual consistency and explain factually inconsistent sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation benchmark on topic-focused dialogue summarization shows that existing LLMs hallucinate significant amounts of factual errors regardless of the model’s size. |
PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ruixiang Feng, Yuntao Wen, Silin Zhou, Ke Shi, Yifan Wang, Ran Le, Zhenwei An, Zongchao Chen, Chen Yang, Guangyue Peng, Yiming Jia, Dongsheng Wang, Tao Zhang, Lisi Chen, Yang Song, Shen Gao, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing LRMs often suffer from "overthinking" and excessively long reasoning traces . a dual-level framework for length compression of LRM is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prefix-protected and difficulty-aware compression under hierarchical supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage while improving accuracy on math benchmarks. |
A Framework of Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Large Language Model Based on Question Decomposition and Atomic Retrieval (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance LLMs with knowledge graphs have limited results . knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) provides interpretable reasoning for large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for KG-enhanced LLM based on question decomposition and atomic retrieval . they propose question decomposing tree as framework for LLM reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing reasoning-based baselines on KGQA datasets. |
Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing via Critic-Guided Multi-Agent Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Model Surgery: Modulating LLM’s Behavior Via Simple Parameter Editing (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current approaches for detoxification or preventing jailbreaking involve fine-tuning billions of parameters through gradient descent with substantial computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from human feedback to modify LLMs' behavior by directly editing a small subset of parameters. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that editing a small subset of parameters can modulate specific behaviors of LLMs, such as detoxification and resistance to jailbreak, with only inference-level computational resources. |
Reasoning’s Razor: Reasoning Improves Accuracy but Hurts Recall at Critical Operating Points in Safety and Hallucination Detection (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Atoosa Chegini, Hamid Kazemi, Garrett Souza, Maria Safi, Yang Song, Samy Bengio, Sinead Williamson, Mehrdad Farajtabar
| Challenge: | a new study examines the suitability of reasoning for precision-sensitive classification tasks . false positives carry severe operational consequences, such as blocking legitimate queries . |
| Approach: | They propose to use reasoning for classification tasks under low false positive rate regimes . they find that Think On improves overall accuracy, but performs poorly at low FPRs a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning-augmented generation model outperforms self-verbalized confidence in precision-sensitive deployments. |
Human-in-the-loop Robotic Grasping Using BERT Scene Representation (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes are expensive and lack structure information. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop framework for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes . they substitute scene-graph representation with a text representation of the scene using BERT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms object-agnostic and scene-graph based methods on robots and physical robots. |
MultiCodeAttack: Iterative Jailbreak Attacking on LLMs with Multi-Code Prompt Injection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to jailbreak rely on fixed template design and a single programming language . however, existing approaches do not consider language diversity or adaptive template evolution . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured jailbreak framework that explores and optimizes multi-language code templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing jailbreak baselines and produces higher harmful outputs than baseline methods. |
Representation Learning with Ordered Relation Paths for Knowledge Graph Completion (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
EvoAgent: Towards Automatic Multi-Agent Generation via Evolutionary Algorithms (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on extending specialized agents to multi-agent systems is dependent on human-designed frameworks, limiting the functional scope and scalability of agent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic method to automatically extend specialized agents to multi-agent systems via evolutionary algorithm . they consider existing agent frameworks as the initial individual and apply evolutionary operators to generate multiple agents with diverse settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can extend specialized agents to multi-agent systems . it can generate multiple agents with diverse settings, and improves performance across tasks . |
Separation and Fusion: A Novel Multiple Token Linking Model for Event Argument Extraction (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jing Xu, Dandan Song, Siu Hui, Zhijing Wu, Meihuizi Jia, Hao Wang, Yanru Zhou, Changzhi Zhou, Ziyi Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event argument extraction (EAE) lack cross-event information and require longer role sequences . et al. (2017): outperforms state-of-the-art methods for EE. |
| Approach: | They propose a separation-and-fusion paradigm to separate the acquisition of cross-event information and fuse it into the argument extraction of a target event. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on four widely used datasets. |
Enhancing Partially Relevant Video Retrieval with Robust Alignment Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on enhancing multi-scale clip representations but lack robust data alignment . inherent data uncertainty renders PRVR vulnerable to distractor videos with spurious similarities . |
| Approach: | proposed framework for partially relevant video retrieval aims to retrieve untrimmed videos partially relevant to a given query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be seamlessly integrated into existing architectures. |
Covariance Matrix-Driven Image Channel Allocation for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Sparse Teachers Can Be Dense with Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for transferring knowledge from a teacher of large scale to a student of smaller scale are limiting in overall knowledgeableness. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse teacher trick to remove over-parameterized teachers that produce student-unfriendly knowledge and thus limit overall knowledgeableness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed trick removes the parameters that result in student-unfriendliness and leads to compelling performance in comparison with baselines. |
Auto Search Indexer for End-to-End Document Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Generative retrieval heavily relies on the “preprocessed” document identifiers, thus limiting its retrieval performance and ability to retrieve new documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully end-to-end retrieval paradigm that can learn the best docids for existing and new documents automatically via a semantic indexing module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and industrial datasets and can handle new documents. |
Semantic-Aware Logical Reasoning via a Semiotic Framework (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yunyao Zhang, Xinglang Zhang, Junxi Sheng, Wenbing Li, Junqing Yu, Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen, Wei Yang, Zikai Song
| Challenge: | Existing studies largely overlook the interplay between logical complexity and semantic complexity, limiting their robustness under abstract propositions, ambiguous contexts, and conflicting stances. |
| Approach: | They propose a semiotic-square-guided framework that integrates automated deduction with reflective verification to manage logical complexity across deeper reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on RepublicQA with 6.25% average gain, and generalizes well to four mainstream logical reasoning benchmarks with an additional 7.05% improvement. |
A Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese (2026.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Sentiment Word Aware Multimodal Refinement for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with ASR Errors (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for multimodal sentiment analysis are limited in their capacity to be deployed in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can dynamically refine erroneous sentiment words by leveraging multimodal sentiment clues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art models on three datasets. |
From Observation to Understanding: Front-Door Adjustments with Uncertainty Calibration for Enhancing Egocentric Reasoning in LVLMs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shenshen Li, Wenxin Meng, Lei Wang, Hao Yang, Chong Peng, Peng Yan, Fumin Shen, Jingkuan Song, Heng Tao Shen, Xing Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods that adapt LVLMs to egocentric tasks overlook critical agent-environment interactions, limiting their ability to perform egoic reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot paradigm to enhance egocentric reasoning by simulating human causal reasoning by formalizing ego-centric reasoning using a structural causal model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves egocentric reasoning abilities on six tasks. |
Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
TESTEVAL: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Test Case Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenhan Wang, Chenyuan Yang, Zhijie Wang, Yuheng Huang, Zhaoyang Chu, Da Song, Lingming Zhang, An Ran Chen, Lei Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate test cases using large language models are limited in their ability to generate unit test cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a test case generation benchmark that uses large language models to generate unit test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test case generation benchmarks compare LLMs with commercial and open-source LLM platforms and find that they lack the ability to comprehend program logic and execution paths. |
When "Correct" Is Not Safe: Can We Trust Functionally Correct Patches Generated by Code Agents? (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yibo Peng, James Song, Lei Li, Xinyu Yang, Mihai Christodorescu, Ravi Mangal, Corina S. Pasareanu, Haizhong Zheng, Beidi Chen
| Challenge: | Code agents are increasingly trusted to autonomously fix bugs on platforms such as GitHub, yet their security evaluation focuses on functional correctness. |
| Approach: | They propose to attack functionally correct yet vulnerable (FCV) patches by combining multi-turn reasoning with tool invocation and environment interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed FCV-Attack achieves an attack success rate of 40.7% on GPT-5 Mini + OpenHands. |
Table-R1: Region-based Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
Improving Deep Embedded Clustering via Learning Cluster-level Representations (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to learn meaningful representations at the instance level are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep embedded clustering model with cluster-level representation learning to jointly learn cluster and instance level representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces meaningful clusters on real-world short text datasets. |
Imagination and Contemplation: A Balanced Framework for Semantic-Augmented Multimodal Machine Translation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) is effective in resolving linguistic ambiguities, but visual information often introduces redundancy or noise, potentially impairing translation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-augmented framework that integrates "Imagination" and "Contemplation" they first generate synthetic images from source text and align them with authentic images via an optimal transport loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on translation datasets with visually ambiguous or weakly correlated content. |
Model-Based Imaginative Planning for Embodied Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junru Song, Hengzhe Jin, Yucong Huang, Tingsong Jiang, Weien Zhou, Feifei Wang, Yang Yang, Ying Wen, Wen Yao
| Challenge: | a lightweight world model converts raw pixels into object-centric symbolic states amenable to language-based reasoning . IMPLEMENT is a framework for grounding language agents in visual embodied environments . |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based reasoning framework that enables frozen large language models to perform imaginative planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to ground language agents in visual embodied environments. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
From Long Videos to Engaging Clips: A Human-Inspired Video Editing Framework with Multimodal Narrative Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangfeng Wang, Xiao Li, Yadong Wei, null Songxueyu, Yang Song, null Xiaxiaoqiang, Fangrui Zeng, Zaiyi Chen, null Liuliu, Gu Xu, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video editing rely on textual cues from ASR transcripts and segment selection, often neglecting rich visual context. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-inspired automatic video editing framework that leverages multimodal narrative understanding to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines across general and advertisement-oriented editing tasks. |
Cross-domain Generalization for AMR Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to predict an AMR graph from textual input. |
| Approach: | They evaluate five representative AMR parsers on five domains and analyze challenges to cross-domain parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the domain distribution divergence of text and AMR features on two out-of-domain sets. |
PiKGL: Leveraging Pruned Knowledge Graphs for Explainable Stance Detection (2026.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Bingbing Wang, Jingjie Lin, Zhixin Bai, Xintong Song, Qianlong Wang, Min Yang, Xi Zeng, Jing Li, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that a Pruned interpretable knowledge Graph Learning framework for explainable stance detection is state-of-the-art for social media stance prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pruned interpretable knowledge Graph Learning framework for explainable stance detection that incorporates commonsense knowledge and prunes redundant information to ensure precision and minimize noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on three public datasets. |
Enhanced Reasoning for Biomedical Document-Level Relation Extraction via a Novel Cascade Language Model Framework (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are the leading paradigm in document-level relation extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a cascade framework that leverages the complementary strengths of PLMs and LLMs through a detect-then-rethink paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on BioRED and CDR datasets and improves existing models. |
YuLan-Mini: Pushing the Limits of Open Data-efficient Language Model (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hu Yiwen, Huatong Song, Jie Chen, Jia Deng, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Zican Dong, Yang Lu, Xu Miao, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | prevailing pre-training approaches for large language models involve several complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-cost training recipe and a robust optimization approach to mitigate training instability . they also propose synthesis, curriculum, and data selection pipelines to integrate data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves top-tier performance among models with similar parameter scale . it is comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data . |
Temporal Alignment of Time Sensitive Facts with Activation Engineering (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models are trained on diverse and conflicting knowledge spanning multiple domains and time periods. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for temporally aligning large language models to improve factual recall without training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves factual recall without training. |
Task-agnostic Distillation of Encoder-Decoder Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing distillation methods that focus on encoder-only LMs fail to handle the distillation of encoder decoder LM. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that finetunes pretrained language models (LMs) they propose 'MiniEnD' that allows for task-agnostic distillation of LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed distillation method is generally effective and competitive compared to other alternatives. |
MARIO-0.5B: A Multi-Agent Lightweight Model for Real-Time Open Information Extraction in Low-Resource Settings (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable capabilities in open information extraction, but their resource requirements often restrict their deployment in resource-constrained industrial settings. |
| Approach: | They introduce an ultra-lightweight large language model trained on instruction-based samples in Chinese, English, Korean, and Russian. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms large-scale models with up to 70B parameters, reducing computational resources by 140x and delivering 11x faster response times. |
Memo-SQL: Structured Decomposition and Experience-Driven Self-Correction for Training-Free NL2SQL (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing NL2SQL systems rely on in-context learning with only correct examples . current test-time scaling methods often decompose questions arbitrarily, resulting in poor performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured decomposition and experience-aware self-correction framework for NL2SQL . they build a dynamic memory of successful queries and historical error–fix pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 68.5% execution accuracy on BIRD, setting new state of the art among open, zero-fine-tuning methods. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
A Sentence is Worth 128 Pseudo Tokens: A Semantic-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Sentence Embeddings (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to contrastive learning are heavily affected by superficial features like sentence length and syntax. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning framework for sentence embeddings that explores the pseudo-token space representation of a sentence while eliminating the impact of superficial features such as sentence length and syntax. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on six standard semantic textual similarity tasks while maintaining an additional queue to store the representation of sentence embeddings. |
Achieving binary weight and activation for LLMs using Post-Training Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for quantizing large language models suffer from performance degradation when weights are quantized to 1 bit. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-training quantization framework with W(1+1)A(14) configuration . they propose utilizing Hessian-aware fine-grained grouping along with an EM-based quantization scheme . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM quantization baselines on W2A4 across multiple tasks. |
Rethink Rumor Detection in the Era of LLMs: A Review (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | rumor detection has been reshaped by large language models (LLMs) this paper proposes a Cognition-Interaction-Behavior (CIB) framework for rumour detection based on collective intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a Cognition-Interaction-Behavior framework for rumor detection based on collective intelligence and explore synergistic relationship between LLMs and collective intelligence in rumour governance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies existing methods and reveals synergistic relationship between LLMs and collective intelligence in rumor governance. |
Fast WordPiece Tokenization (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for tokenization of text are not efficient, but they are based on Aho-Corasick's algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient algorithm for WordPiece tokenization using a longest-match-first strategy . they propose an algorithm whose tokenization complexity is strictly O(n) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 8.2x faster than HuggingFace Tokenizers and 5.1x faster on average for general text tokenization. |
OASum: Large-Scale Open Domain Aspect-based Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing generic summarization methods generate only one summary for all different requests which is not optimal for diverse demands. |
| Approach: | They use crowd-sourced knowledge on Wikipedia to create a large-scale open-domain aspect-based summarization dataset with 1 million different aspects on 2 million Wikipedia pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse aspect-based summarizations on Wikipedia with zero/few-shot and fine-tuning on seven downstream datasets. |
FastAdaSP: Multitask-Adapted Efficient Inference for Large Speech Language Model (2024.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Unlike other modalities, speech has unique temporal dependencies, making efficient inference methods unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a weighted token merging framework specifically designed for speech-related tasks to improve the trade-off between efficiency and performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art efficiency-performance trade-off on speech-related tasks. |
MARS: Unleashing the Power of Speculative Decoding via Margin-Aware Verification (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jingwei Song, Xinyu Wang, Hanbin Wang, Xiaoxuan Lei, Tianyu Shi, Shixin Han, Eric Yang, Xiao-Wen Chang, Lynn Ai
| Challenge: | Autoregressive large language models suffer from high inference latency due to memorybandwidth constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decouples generation and verification by decoupling tokens and a lightweight draft model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method delivers consistent and significant speedups over state-of-the-art baselines while preserving generation quality across diverse benchmarks. |
DivScene: Towards Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation with Large Vision Language Models in Diverse Scenes (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaowei Wang, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Ye Tian, Yue Yang, Kaixin Ma, Xiaoman Pan, Yangqiu Song, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant progress in tasks like visual question answering and document understanding. |
| Approach: | They introduce DivScene, a large-scale dataset with 4,614 houses across 81 scene types and 5,707 kinds of target objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides a much greater diversity of target objects and scene types than existing datasets, enabling a comprehensive task evaluation. |
RTFE: A Recursive Temporal Fact Embedding Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for static knowledge graph embedding (SKGE) ignore the continuity of states of TKGs in time evolution. |
| Approach: | They propose a Recursive Temporal Fact Embedding framework to transplant SKGE models to TKGs and enhance the performance of existing TKGE models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to transplant SKGE models to TKGs and improve existing models for TKG completion. |
Extremely Small BERT Models from Mixed-Vocabulary Training (2021.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods cannot be directly applied to train student models with reduced vocabulary and embedding dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to align teacher and student embeddings via mixed-vocabulary training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compresses BERT-LARGE to a task-agnostic model with smaller vocabulary and hidden dimensions, which is an order of magnitude smaller than other distilled models. |
IPS: In-Prompt Process Supervision for Short Video Content Moderation (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Multi-Scale Spectral Selection and Entropy-Guided Uncertainty Fusion for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
Augmenting Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs with Graph Structures in Knowledge Base Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yuhang Tian, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Changzhi Zhou, Hao Wang, Jun Yang, Jing Xu, Ruanmin Cao, HaoYu Wang
| Challenge: | Recent work uses Large Language Models (LLMs) for semantic parsing to address Knowledge Base Question Answering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments reasoning capabilities of LLMs with Graph Structures in Knowledge Base Question Answering to retrieve question-related graph structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on GrailQA and WebQSP under the few-shot setting. |
What Matters in Training a GPT4-Style Language Model with Multimodal Inputs? (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yan Zeng, Hanbo Zhang, Jiani Zheng, Jiangnan Xia, Guoqiang Wei, Yang Wei, Yuchen Zhang, Tao Kong, Ruihua Song
| Challenge: | Recent advances in GPT-4V have demonstrated remarkable multi-modal capabilities in processing image inputs and following open-ended instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play technique to enhance multi-modal LLMs . they propose 'lynx' to train multi-modal LLM models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy improves understanding accuracy and instruction-following proficiency of multi-modal models. |
DYNTEXT: Semantic-Aware Dynamic Text Sanitization for Privacy-Preserving LLM Inference (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Act as you think: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Medical Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Reading Like HER: Human Reading Inspired Extractive Summarization (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting text summarization are abstractive and extractive. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for extractive summarization by simulating two stages . they adopt a convolutional neural network to encode gist of paragraphs for rough reading . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art extractive methods on CNN and DailyMail datasets. |
Minimal Distillation Schedule for Extreme Language Model Compression (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Why LLM Safety Guardrails Collapse After Fine-tuning: A Similarity Analysis Between Alignment and Fine-tuning Datasets (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing mitigation strategies focus on reactively addressing jailbreak incidents after safety guardrails have been compromised. |
| Approach: | They investigate the degradation of safety guardrails through the lens of representation similarity between upstream alignment datasets and downstream fine-tuning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces harmfulness score by 10.33% when compared to baseline models. |
Lifting the Curse of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
ReAgent: Reversible Multi-Agent Reasoning for Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Hop QA (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhao Xinjie, Fan Gao, Xingyu Song, Yingjian Chen, Rui Yang, Yanran Fu, Yuyang Wang, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering (QA) is a central challenge in natural language processing . early mistakes can cause errors and undermine the final result, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a reversible multi-agent reasoning framework that backtracks to earlier valid states when conflicts arise. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluation shows that the framework improves on forward-only benchmarks by 6% . the approach enables agents to backtrack to valid states when conflicts arise . |
FedMKT: Federated Mutual Knowledge Transfer for Large and Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research in large language models (LLMs) has focused on enabling clients to fine-tune their locally deployed homogeneous LLMs collaboratively or on transferring knowledge from server-based LLM to small language models at downstream clients. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient federated mutual knowledge transfer framework for large and small language models that allows for token alignment and selective knowledge transfer between client-side LLMs and a server-side SLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the performance of both LLMs and SLMs with clients' unique domain insights while preserving the server's LLM and client's unique domain insight. |
FineState-Bench: Benchmarking State-Conditioned Grounding for Fine-grained GUI State Setting (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | FineState-Bench evaluates whether an agent can correctly ground an instruction to the intended UI control and reach the exact target state. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates whether an agent can correctly ground an instruction to the intended UI control and reach the exact target state. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates whether an agent can ground an instruction to the intended UI control and reach the exact target state. |
Interpretable User Satisfaction Estimation for Conversational Systems with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ying-Chun Lin, Jennifer Neville, Jack Stokes, Longqi Yang, Tara Safavi, Mengting Wan, Scott Counts, Siddharth Suri, Reid Andersen, Xiaofeng Xu, Deepak Gupta, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Xia Song, Georg Buscher, Saurabh Tiwary, Brent Hecht, Jaime Teevan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to user satisfaction estimation are hard to interpret and lack generalizable patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised prompting to extract interpretable user satisfaction signals from natural language utterances to tailor an LLM to USE using labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts interpretable signals of user satisfaction from natural language utterances more effectively than embedding-based approaches. |
VeraCT Scan: Retrieval-Augmented Fake News Detection with Justifiable Reasoning (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Niu, Yang Guan, Yuanhao Wu, Juno Zhu, Juntong Song, Randy Zhong, Kaihua Zhu, Siliang Xu, Shizhe Diao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | generative artificial intelligence has exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented system that extracts the core facts from a given piece of news and conducts an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection. |
FedProxy: Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Proxy SLMs and Heterogeneity-Aware Fusion (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a performance bottleneck . Existing approaches like Offsite-Tuning (OT) secure the LLMs IP . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that replaces weak adapters with a unified, powerful Proxy Small Language Model (SLM) they propose 'resource-friendly' compression and 'robust optimization' to handle data heterogeneity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FedProxy outperforms OT and centralized fine-tuning methods. |
LLM-SLM Collaborative Framework of Idiomatic Expression Generation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idiomatic expression generation lack parallel data and manual annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative LLM-SLM collaborative framework that replaces human supervision for idiomatic expression data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms DeepSeek-R1 in Chinese Idiom Polishing with a 25.2% improvement in accuracy. |
HAHE: Hierarchical Attention for Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs in Global and Local Level (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haoran Luo, Haihong E, Yuhao Yang, Yikai Guo, Mingzhi Sun, Tianyu Yao, Zichen Tang, Kaiyang Wan, Meina Song, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Existing research on HKGs rarely models the graphical and sequential structure of HKG, limiting their representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Attention model for HKG Embedding that includes global-level and local-level attention to model the graphical structure of HKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on HKG standard datasets and addresses the issue of HKG multi-position prediction for the first time. |
GrandGuard: Taxonomy, Benchmark, and Safeguards for Elderly-Chatbot Interaction Safety (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Changxuan Fan, Xi Yang, Yueyuan Zheng, Bin Zhou, Yuanping Wang, Wenbin Hu, Huihao Jing, Ki Sen Hung, Dazhao Du, Haoran Li, Janet Hui-wen Hsiao, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | a survey of older adults shows that many LLMs mishandle elderly-specific contextual risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess elderly-specific contextual risks in LLM interactions . they use a taxonomy to identify 50 fine-grained risk types across mental well-being, financial, medical, toxicity, and privacy domains . |
| Outcome: | a new framework assesses elderly-specific contextual risks in LLM interactions . it achieves 96.2% and 90.9% unsafe-prompt detection accuracy, respectively . |
Extending Complex Logical Queries on Uncertain Knowledge Graphs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on logical queries on knowledge graphs overlook the incompleteness of KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose an ML-based approach to answer soft queries on uncertain knowledge . they propose to use forward inference and backward calibration to avoid catastrophic errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method ensures there are no catastrophic cascading errors while maintaining the same complexity as state-of-the-art inference algorithms for first-order queries. |
Cultural Bias Matters: A Cross-Cultural Benchmark Dataset and Sentiment-Enriched Model for Understanding Multimodal Metaphors (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Metaphors are pervasive in communication, making them crucial for natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multicultural multimodal metaphor dataset designed for cross-cultural studies of metaphor in Chinese and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves metaphor comprehension across cultural backgrounds and cultural domains. |
100-LongBench: Are de facto Long-Context Benchmarks Literally Evaluating Long-Context Ability? (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for long-context capability are too synthetic and do not represent the real world usage of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a length-controllable, real-life reflective benchmark that disentangles baseline knowledge from long-context capabilities. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed benchmarks disentangle baseline knowledge from long-context capabilities. |
GRPO-Guided Modality Selection Enhanced LoRA-Tuned LLMs for Multimodal Emotion Recognition (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) aims to identify speakers’ emotional states by utilizing text, audio, and visual modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive modality selection framework for multimodal emotion recognition in conversation that integrates all available modalities into one . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multimodal dialogue datasets and is available at https://github.com/youflyaway/Modality-Selection-Enhanced-LoRA-Tuned-LLMs. |
Subgraph-Guided Executable Logical Form Generation for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Towards Infinite-Long Prefix in Transformer (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prefix Learning is an empirically efficient and effective method for language models . but the theoretical understandings are limited on the performance of such methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can train an ultra-long prefix in a stylized setting using the Neural Tangent Kernel framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve superior performance on vision, natural language, and math data. |
Rewiring the Transformer with Depth-Wise LSTMs (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset . |
MuKA: Multimodal Knowledge Augmented Visual Information-Seeking (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual information-seeking tasks rely on textual knowledge . existing methods can impair information retrieval and confuse MLLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which leverages a multimodal knowledge base to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the InfoSeek and E-VQA benchmarks. |
Domain Adaptation for Person-Job Fit with Transferable Deep Global Match Network (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve person-job fit in single-domain setting are limited by labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep global match network for capturing the global semantic interactions between two sentences from a job posting and a candidate resume respectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is effective when there is not enough labeled data. |
Boosting LLM Agents with Recursive Contemplation for Effective Deception Handling (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Peer-Label Assisted Hierarchical Text Classification (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to hierarchical text classification focus on parent-child relationships . however, some texts with a category hierarchy also have latent relevancy among labels in the same level of the hierarchy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to analyze latent relevancy of peer labels and a sample importance learning method to ameliorate the side effects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the latent relevancy of peer labels on standard datasets. |
Chameleon: A Language Model Adaptation Toolkit for Automatic Speech Recognition of Conversational Speech (D19-3)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language model adaptation (LMA) is a promising solution for conversational speech recognition systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use language model adaptation techniques to adapt language models to conversational speech recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit compares state-of-the-art language model adaptation techniques in conversational speech recognition tasks. |
Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human States (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
FIER: Fine-Grained and Efficient KV Cache Retrieval for Long-context LLM Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | EASYTOOL combines tools from diverse tool documentation into a single tool instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms tool documentation into a unified tool instruction. |
| Outcome: | EASYTOOL combines extensive tool documentation into a concise tool instruction . it reduces token consumption and improves performance of LLM-based agents . |
Amadeus: Autoregressive Model with Bidirectional Attribute Modelling for Symbolic Music (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing symbolic music generation models represent musical notes as a sequence of attribute tokens with fixed unidirectional dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic music generation framework that adopts a autoregressive and a discrete diffusion architectures for note attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves state-of-the-art models across objective and subjective metrics. |
Improved Word Sense Disambiguation with Enhanced Sense Representations (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing supervised word sense disambiguation systems do not provide enough information about word senses. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate synonyms, example phrases or sentences showing usage of word senses and sense gloss of hypernyms into the sense representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves an F1 score of 82.0% on the standard benchmark test dataset of the English all-words WSD task. |
PibE-MPP: A Play-it-by-Ear Masking Performance Plug-in for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Mengwei Wang, Simin Niu, Xun Liang, Yuefeng Ma, Sensen Zhang, Jiawei Yang, Shichao Song, Hanyu Wang, Huayi Lai
| Challenge: | Random masking is a widely adopted classic baseline in large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a play-it-by-ear masking performance plug-in which enables LLMs to adaptively select masking target combinations for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed performance plug-in retains the advantages and mitigates the drawbacks of random masking in large language models. |
Treble Counterfactual VLMs: A Causal Approach to Hallucination (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies link hallucination to data or representation biases, but their causal origins remain unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a causal framework to analyze and mitigate hallucination in vision-language models by using counterfactual analysis to estimate the Natural Direct Effect (NDE) of each modality and their interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces hallucination while preserving task performance while retaining reliability. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
FPC: Fine-tuning with Prompt Curriculum for Relation Extraction (2022.aacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction ignore semantics of relation labels . prompt-based fine-tuning has been proposed for RE . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for relation extraction using prompt-based fine-tuning . they use auxiliary prompt-tuned learning task to make the model capture semantics of relation labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on four widely used RE benchmarks under fully supervised and low-resource settings. |
GA-S3: Comprehensive Social Network Simulation with Group Agents (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing social network simulations focus on discrete events or system dynamics instead of elucidating underlying mechanisms or causal relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a Social network simulation system that leverages newly designed Group Agents to make intelligent decisions regarding various online events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can make intelligent decisions regarding online events at a manageable cost. |
GRV-KBQA: A Three-Stage Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Decoupled Logical Structure, Semantic Grounding and Structure-Aware Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Knowledge Base Question Answering generate non-executable queries and inefficiencies in query execution. |
| Approach: | a framework that decouples logical structure generation from semantic grounding is proposed . the framework explicitly enforces KB constraints to improve alignment between generated logical forms and KB structures. |
| Outcome: | GRV-KBQA decouples logical structure generation from semantic grounding and incorporates structure-aware validation to enhance accuracy. |
Efficient Data Labeling by Hierarchical Crowdsourcing with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been gaining attention for their impressive performance in in-context dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical framework that leverages multiple LLMs for efficient data labeling under budget constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms human labelers and GPT-4 in terms of accuracy and efficiency. |
Tracking Satisfaction States for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for customer satisfaction prediction (CSP) focus on analyzing subjective customer satisfaction in conversational service, but they are hard to represent the important dynamic satisfaction states throughout the customer journey. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to track customer satisfaction in chatbots using a dialogue-level classification module to represent the dynamic satisfaction states at each turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and shows that it significantly outperformed multiple baselines. |
T2R-BENCH: A Benchmark for Real World Table-to-Report Task (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Zhang, Changzai Pan, Sishi Xiong, Kaiwen Wei, Yu Zhao, Xiangyu Li, Jiaxin Peng, Xiaoyan Gu, Jian Yang, Wenhan Chang, Zhenhe Wu, Jiang Zhong, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of table reasoning in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual table-to-report task and a table-based benchmark to assess the quality of table reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a bilingual benchmark with 457 industrial tables and evaluation criteria to measure the quality of report generation. |
Improving Pre-trained Language Models with Knowledge Enhancement and Filtering Framework (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge enhancement techniques for pre-trained language models (PLMs) introduce noisy entity representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge enhancement filter that integrates external knowledge bases to enhance PLMs' ability to capture entity knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy while reducing the computational cost by 1.7-2.5x. |
UCS-SQL: Uniting Content and Structure for Enhanced Semantic Bridging In Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenhe Wu, Zhongqiu Li, JieZhangChinaTele JieZhangChinaTele, Zhongjiang He, Jian Yang, Yu Zhao, Ruiyu Fang, Bing Wang, Hongyan Xie, Shuangyong Song, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods overlook the challenge of effectively transforming structure information from NL to SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework that unites content and structure pipes to bridge the gap between NL and SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between natural language questions and SQL by combining content and structure pipes. |
Following the Autoregressive Nature of LLM Embeddings via Compression and Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jingcheng Deng, Zhongtao Jiang, Liang Pang, Zihao Wei, Liwei Chen, Kun Xu, Yang Song, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches when using the same amount of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new contrastive learning method built on embedding conditional probability distributions that integrates two tasks: information compression and conditional distribution alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches and achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art models when using the same amount of data. |
Language Models as Continuous Self-Evolving Data Engineers (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their further evolution is often hampered by the scarcity of high-quality training data and the heavy reliance of traditional methods on expert-labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enables LLMs to train themselves by generating, cleaning, reviewing and annotating data with preference information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate, clean, review, and annotate data with preference information significantly reducing time and cost of post-training data construction. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
PEK: A Parameter-Efficient Framework for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have shown great dialogue generation capability in different scenarios, but the huge VRAM consumption when fine-tuning them is one of their drawbacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient framework for knowledge-enhanced dialogue generation that leverages external knowledge documents and knowledge graphs to enhance its generation capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on multiple evaluation metrics on Wizard of Wikipedia and CMU_DoG datasets. |
COSMIC: Generalized Refusal Direction Identification in LLM Activations (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
MiMoTable: A Multi-scale Spreadsheet Benchmark with Meta Operations for Table Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for table reasoning are incomplete due to the complexity of the tables and user questions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-scale spreadsheet benchmark with Meta operations for Table reasoning that incorporates two key features and a new criterion with six categories of meta operations for measuring the difficulty of each question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Claude-3.5-Sonnet with 77.4% accuracy on the existing benchmarks. |
LMGQS: A Large-scale Dataset for Query-focused Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Hallucination Detection in Long-Form Text Generated by LLMs: A Benchmark and a Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Approach (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection are coarse-grained and lack long-range consistency checks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-form hallucination detection that incorporates diverse entity types and intricate factual dependencies spanning extended contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and robustly integrates fact-centric hyper-relational knowledge graphs. |
LongEmbed: Extending Embedding Models for Long Context Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing embedding models support only 512 input tokens, hindering their application in scenarios requiring long inputs. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the performance of existing embedding models by using a new benchmark and a training-free context window extension strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extends the input window of existing models by several folds. |
P-QuASAR: A Unified Probabilistic Framework for Holistic Patent Quality Assessment and Refinement (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing patent quality rely on modular pipelines or generic detectors, resulting in fragmented decisions and limited integration across quality dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic framework that represents patent specifications as Quality Graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on 500 patents against seven baselines. |
LBLLM: Lightweight Binarization of Large Language Models via Three-Stage Distillation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for implementing large language models are limited by high computational and memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight binarization framework that achieves effective W(1+1)A4 quantization through a novel three-stage quantization strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods on W2A4 quantization settings across languages. |
Lock on Target! Precision Unlearning via Directional Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning harmful, sensitive, or outdated knowledge suffer from two critical limitations: (1) collateral forgetting, where erasing target data inadvertently removes related but desirable knowledge, and (2) generality forgetting degrades the model’s general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that identifies and leverages a targeted "unlearning direction" in the model's parameter space and selectively updates along this direction. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art unlearning precision while preserving both related knowledge and general capabilities. |
A Robust Dual-debiasing VQA Model based on Counterfactual Causal Effect (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing VQA models suffer from language bias that indicates a spurious correlation between textual questions and answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a model agnostic dual-debiasing framework that models two types of language bias by separate branches under counterfactual inference framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces language bias and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets. |
Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
SessionIntentBench: A Multi-task Inter-session Intention-shift Modeling Benchmark for E-commerce Customer Behavior Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Cat-MoD: Accelerating Multimodal Alignment via Caption Token Guided Asymmetric Mixture-of-Depths (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing query-based alignment modules enforce uniform cross-attention across all layers, leading to computational redundancy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for asynchronous query-based alignment with large-scale visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or surpasses baseline performance while reducing alignment FLOPs by approximately 37% during training and inference. |
VC4VG: Optimizing Video Captions for Text-to-Video Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in text-to-video generation highlight the critical role of high-quality video-text pairs in training models capable of producing coherent and instruction-aligned videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a caption optimization framework tailored to the needs of T2V models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves video caption quality and video generation performance. |
SSR-Zero: Simple Self-Rewarding Reinforcement Learning for Machine Translation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in machine translation, but most MT-specific LLMs rely heavily on external supervision during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework for machine translation that is reference-free and relies solely on self-judging rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs and larger general LLM models on English Chinese translation benchmarks and performs competitively with leading closed-source systems. |
Group Preference Alignment: Customizing LLM Responses from In-Situ Conversations Only When Needed (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Ishani Mondal, Jack W. Stokes, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Longqi Yang, Mengting Wan, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber, Jennifer Neville
| Challenge: | Existing methods for group-aware adaptation capture divergent preferences from real-world conversation logs into interpretable rubrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a group-aware personalization framework that captures context-specific preferences and steers LLMs accordingly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves group alignment without compromising perfomance on benchmarks. |
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
| Challenge: | Traditional alignment methods rely on human annotations and are subjective and misalignment with real-world user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages in-situ user feedback during conversations with LLMs to create preference datasets automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and classifies user feedback to LLM responses between conversation turns and creates examples of preferred and dispreferred responses according to user preferences. |
SafeRAG: Benchmarking Security in Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Model (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xun Liang, Simin Niu, Zhiyu Li, Sensen Zhang, Hanyu Wang, Feiyu Xiong, Zhaoxin Fan, Bo Tang, Jihao Zhao, Jiawei Yang, Shichao Song, Mengwei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) however, the incorporation of external knowledge increases the vulnerability of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the RAG security using a dataset . they classify attack tasks into silver noise, inter-context conflict, soft ad, and white Denial-of-Service . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the security of RAG against 14 representative RAG components. |
EHRAG: Bridging Semantic Gaps in Lightweight GraphRAG via Hybrid Hypergraph Construction and Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing lightweight approaches to retrieval-augmented generation fail to capture latent semantic connections between disjoint entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight RAG framework that constructs a hypergraph capturing both structure and semantic relationships using a hybrid structural-semantic retrieval mechanism. |
| Outcome: | EHRAG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four datasets while maintaining zero token consumption. |
GenTool: Enhancing Tool Generalization in Language Models through Zero-to-One and Weak-to-Strong Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Hate Speech Detection Based on Sentiment Knowledge Sharing (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hate speech detection are stereotyped and biased . et al., a paper examining the effectiveness of multitask learning in hate speech recognition tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a hate speech detection framework based on sentiment knowledge sharing . they extract affective features of the target sentence and use sentiment features from external resources . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect hate speech over two public datasets. |
CompKBQA: Component-wise Task Decomposition for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yuhang Tian, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Pan Yang, Changzhi Zhou, Jun Yang, Hao Wang, Huipeng Ma, Chenhao Li, Luan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering methods struggle with complex queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes the process of fine-tuning a LLM for generating logical forms by enabling it to learn relevant sub-tasks like skeleton generation, topic entity generation, and relevant relations generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on two benchmark KBQA datasets, WebQSP and CWQ. |
Adaptive Ranking-based Sample Selection for Weakly Supervised Class-imbalanced Text Classification (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to synthesize training labels with labeling rules ignore data imbalance issue . weak supervision paradigm is often used to reduce human efforts to produce training labels inexpensively. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework to alleviate the data imbalance issue in the weak supervision paradigm by combining labeling rules with a probabilistic margin score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art imbalanced learning and WS methods on four text classification datasets with four different imbalance ratios. |
TOREE: Evaluating Topic Relevance of Student Essays for Chinese Primary and Middle School Education (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Is Parameter Collision Hindering Continual Learning in LLMs? (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zewen Chi, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Nan Yang, Saksham Singhal, Wenhui Wang, Xia Song, Xian-Ling Mao, Heyan Huang, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning cross-lingual representations are lacking in the field of NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves cross-lingual transferability on benchmarks. |
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
OMGM: Orchestrate Multiple Granularities and Modalities for Efficient Multimodal Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering lack multimodal retrieval . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization and reasoning capabilities in text-based systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal vision-language retrieval-augmented generation system that harmonizes multiple modalities and modality to enhance retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance and competitive answers on InfoSeek and Encyclopedic-VQA benchmarks. |
Multimodal Machine Translation with Text-Image In-depth Questioning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal machine translation (MMT) models focus on intermodal interactions, but focus on simple interactions between nouns and entities in image, overlooking global semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a Text-Image In-depth Questioning method to deepen interactions and optimize translations by utilizing visual data to capture global semantic alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on five translation directions of Multi30K and AmbigCaps, with +2.35 BLEU on the challenging MSCOCO benchmark. |