Papers by Tao Zhou
Prior Knowledge and Memory Enriched Transformer for Sign Language Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sign language translation do not explore all of them . visual and textual understanding and additional prior knowledge learning are challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates auxiliary information into vanilla transformer for SLT . they use visual-textual context information and additional auxiliary knowledge of a word . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the understanding of sign language videos with visual and textual understanding and additional prior knowledge learning. |
Dolphin: Moving Towards Closed-loop Auto-research through Thinking, Practice, and Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Jiakang Yuan, Xiangchao Yan, Bo Zhang, Tao Chen, Botian Shi, Wanli Ouyang, Yu Qiao, Lei Bai, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that AI-assisted research methods can improve research efficiency . a closed-loop framework is used to enhance the automation level of scientific research . |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop LLM-driven framework to enhance the automation level of scientific research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of scientific research by improving data analysis, accelerating computation, and fostering novel idea generation. |
Corpus-Steered Query Expansion with Large Language Models (2024.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show query expansions generate hypothetical documents that answer queries as expansions. |
| Approach: | They propose a corpus-steered query expansion to promote incorporation of knowledge embedded within the corpus. |
| Outcome: | et al. analyzed corpus-based Query Expansion (CSQE) using LLMs to generate hypothetical documents that answer the query. |
OpenSR: Open-Modality Speech Recognition via Maintaining Multi-Modality Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Speech Recognition often gets stuck in the lack of new domain utterances when training a model of new-domain speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a training system Open-modality Speech Recognition that enables zero-shot modality transfer . they use multi-modal alignment in phoneme space to maintain multi-modality alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves zero-shot modality transfer compared to existing methods . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on audio-visual speech recognition and lip-reading with 2.7% and 25.0%, respectively. |
FinToolSyn: A forward synthesis Framework for Financial Tool-Use Dialogue Data with Dynamic Tool Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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Caishuang Huang, Yang Qiao, Rongyu Zhang, Junjie Ye, Pu Lu, null Wuwenxi, Meng Zhou, Xiku Du, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing data synthesis methods rely on static tools to generate queries . this approach fails to capture the implicit, event-driven nature of real-world needs . |
| Approach: | They propose a forward synthesis framework to generate high-quality financial dialogues . they construct a repository of 43,066 tools and synthesize over 148k dialogue instances . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that models trained on FinToolSyn achieve a 21.06% improvement . the framework is designed to generate high-quality financial dialogues . |
Semantic-conditioned Dual Adaptation for Cross-domain Query-based Visual Segmentation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual segmentation from language queries require expensive labeling and degradation when deployed to an unseen domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to adapt a visual segmentation model from a labeled domain to an unseen domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves precise feature- and relation-invariant across domains via universal semantic structure. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
DynamicFocalPO: Adaptive Focusing Strategy for Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become prevalent for aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference optimization algorithm that introduces a modulating factor that down-weighs misranked preference pairs and employs focusing strategy that adapts over the course of training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DynamicFocalPO surpasses both DPO and FocalPO on benchmarks including Alpaca Eval 2.0 and Arena-Hard using Mistral-Base-7B and Llama-3-Instruct-8B. |
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Yan Liu, Songyang Gao, Wei Shen, Limao Xiong, Yuhao Zhou, Xiao Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Shiliang Pu, Jiang Zhu, Rui Zheng, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting. |
The Retrieval Bottleneck: Scaling Laws for Reinforcement Learning in RAG (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become the dominant paradigm for building knowledge-intensive language systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a sigmoidal scaling law that shows that retrieval quality determines the asymptotic performance ceiling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while retaining the predictable scaling long available for pre-training but previously absent in RAG-RL. |
Causal Intervention Improves Implicit Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural models struggle with implicit sentiment analysis because they latch onto spurious correlations, resulting in poor generalization and robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a CausaL intervention model for implicit sEntiment ANalysis using instrumental variable to eliminate confounding causal effects and extract the pure causal effect between sentence and sentiment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts the pure causal effect between sentence and sentiment using instrumental variable. |
TextMixer: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Privacy-Preserving Inference (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often deployed as cloud services, enabling users to upload textual data and perform inference remotely. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy-preserving inference framework called MixPi which aims to obfuscate a user's private input by mixing it with multiple other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing privacy-preserving methods on token and sentence classification tasks. |
SimulSpeech: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech to Text Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | SimulSpeech is an end-to-end simultaneous speech to text translation system . conventional approaches to simultaneous speech translation divide the translation process into two stages . |
| Approach: | They develop an end-to-end simultaneous speech to text translation system which translates speech in source language to text in target language concurrently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves reasonable BLEU scores and lower delay compared to full-sentence translation model. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
TAVT: Towards Transferable Audio-Visual Text Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing transfer learning techniques focus on uni-modal analysis and lack consideration of multi-modal content and cross-modal relation. |
| Approach: | They propose a transferable audio-visual text generation framework that incorporates two components: Audio-Visual Meta-Mapper and Dual Counterfactual Contrastive Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across multiple domains and modal settings. |
Revisiting Over-Smoothness in Text to Speech (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive text to speech models ignore correlation in time and frequency domains, causing blurry results. |
| Approach: | They revisit the problem of over-smoothness in non-autoregressive text to speech models . they use methods that reduce complexity of data distributions and improve modeling methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve better voice quality and faster inference speed than autoregressive models. |
Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Binghai Wang, Senjie Jin, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Zhihao Zhang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current methods rely on ranking losses to teach reward model to assess preferences, but they are susceptible to noise and ambiguous data, often failing to deeply understand human intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates contrastive learning into the reward modeling process to enhance generalization and stabilize the reinforcement learning training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances generalization of the reward model, stabilizes the reinforcement learning training process, and improves the final alignment with human preferences. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
Beyond Preserved Accuracy: Evaluating Loyalty and Robustness of BERT Compression (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on compression of pretrained language models usually use preserved accuracy as the metric for evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose two new metrics that measure how closely a compressed model mimics the original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics measure how closely a compressed model (i.e., student) mimics the original model (e.g., teacher). |
Enhancing Tool Learning in Large Language Models with Hierarchical Error Checklists (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, but their effectiveness is often hampered by parameter mis-filling during tool calling. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical tool error checklist framework to diagnose and mitigate tool-calling errors without relying on extensive real-world interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves parameter-filling accuracy and tool-calling success rates compared to baseline methods. |
Bridging the Pose-Semantic Gap: A Cascade Framework for Text-Based Person Anomaly Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for person anomaly search fail to address the complexities of real-world security, authors say . Existing approaches fail to detect subtle semantic distinctions, authors argue . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples retrieval into two stages . structure-aware coarse retrieval and detective squad interaction are proposed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance by balancing efficiency and semantic reasoning. |
ProofInfer: Generating Proof via Iterative Hierarchical Inference (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing proof generation models focus on generating several proof paths instead of a whole tree. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates the proof tree via iterative hierarchical inference . they propose coding the proof as plain text without losing structure information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed proof generation model significantly improves performance on widely-used datasets. |
DB-LLM: Accurate Dual-Binarization for Efficient LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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Hong Chen, Chengtao Lv, Liang Ding, Haotong Qin, Xiabin Zhou, Yifu Ding, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang, Jinyang Guo, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ultra-low bit quantization cause severe accuracy drops . a novel Dual-Binarization method is proposed for efficient Large Language Models . |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Binarization method that takes 2-bit-width and binarization into account . they propose DB-LLM, which uses a 2-bit binarized weighted model to represent weights efficiently . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the current State-of-the-Art in ultra-low bit quantization and achieves 20% reduction in computational consumption compared to the SOTA method under the same bit-width. |
Weakly-Supervised Spoken Video Grounding via Semantic Interaction Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on spoken video grounding challenges extracting semantic information from speech . previous studies focused on textual queries, but recent work focuses on spoken queries . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for weakly-supervised spoken video grounding to represent cross-modal semantics without expensive temporal annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is more efficient than existing methods. |
Inductive Relation Inference of Knowledge Graph Enhanced by Ontology Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to inference knowledge graphs lack ontology information, which is often too sparse. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge graph inductive inference method that fuses ontology information to learn the semantic information of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms large language models like ChatGPT on two benchmark datasets and improves the MRR metrics by 15.4% and 44.1%, respectively. |
DARM: Distribution-Aware Reward Modeling by Alleviating Biases from Low Preference-Context Dependency Data (2026.acl-long)
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Shaofan Liu, Guoqiang Zhang, Shihan Dou, Huiyuan Zheng, Yiming Zhou, Junjie Ye, Shaowen Wang, Shichun Liu, Jiazheng Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training reward models are vulnerable to context neglect and degraded accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose distribution-aware reward modeling that augments the RM objective with a conditional mutual information regularizer that maximizes context and the predicted reward conditioned on the response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance in RLHF and improves accuracy in other settings. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Blow the Dog Whistle: A Chinese Dataset for Cant Understanding with Common Sense and World Knowledge (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Cant is important for understanding advertising, comedies and dogwhistle politics . currently, there are very few resources available for the research of cant . |
| Approach: | They propose a large and diverse dataset for creating and understanding cant from a computational linguistics perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to test word embedding similarity and pretrained language models. |
AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling (2024.acl-long)
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Jun Zhan, Junqi Dai, Jiasheng Ye, Yunhua Zhou, Dong Zhang, Zhigeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Ruibin Yuan, Ge Zhang, Linyang Li, Hang Yan, Jie Fu, Tao Gui, Tianxiang Sun, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing language models that use discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities are limited to text generation and do not include multimodal output. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained stably without any alterations to existing models or training paradigms. |
DeepSynth-Eval: Objectively Evaluating Information Consolidation in Deep Survey Writing (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongzhi Zhang, Yuanze Hu, Tinghai Zhang, Jia Fu, Tao Wang, Junwei Jing, Zhaoxin Fan, Wei Bi, Ruiming Tang, Han Li, Guorui Zhou, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving towards autonomous agents . retrieval capabilities are well-benchmarked, but post-retrieval synthesis is under-evaluated due to open-ended writing. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate information consolidation capabilities using survey papers as gold standards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark analyzes the post-retrieval synthesis stage of large language models . it leverages high-quality survey papers as gold standards and reverse-engineers research requests . the proposed benchmark outperforms single-turn generation and reduces hallucinations . |
A Confidence-based Partial Label Learning Model for Crowd-Annotated Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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Limao Xiong, Jie Zhou, Qunxi Zhu, Xiao Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Jin Ma, Ying Shan
| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) are based on large-scale labeled datasets, which always obtain using crowdsourcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a CONfidence-based partial Label Learning method to integrate prior and posterior confidences for crowd-annotated named entity recognition models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on real-world and synthetic datasets compared with baselines. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Ningyu Zhang, Fei Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
LFKQG: A Controlled Generation Framework with Local Fine-tuning for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing KBQG models focus on the most relevant part of the answer entity, while neglecting the rest of the subgraph. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled generation framework for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases that generates questions with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) predicates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods significantly on three widely-used benchmark datasets SimpleQuestion, PathQuestions, and WebQuestIONS. |
Unveiling and Consulting Core Experts in Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xin Zhou, Ping Nie, Yiwen Guo, Haojie Wei, Zhanqiu Zhang, Pasquale Minervini, Ruotian Ma, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, but internal mechanisms that contribute to RAG’s effectiveness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the internal mechanisms within the popular Mixture-of-Expert (MoE)-based LLMs and examine their ability to improve RAG by examining expert activations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model (2023.findings-acl)
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Xiao Wang, Weikang Zhou, Qi Zhang, Jie Zhou, SongYang Gao, Junzhe Wang, Menghan Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use end-task knowledge to select a tiny subset of pretraining corpus to influence performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pretrained models on eight datasets covering four domains with 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost. |
Domain Generalization via Causal Adjustment for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to domain adaptation fail to generalize well on unknown test data. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor adjustment-based causal model to disentangle domain-specific and domain-invariant representations that play essential roles in tackling domain shift. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model disentangles domain-specific and domain-invariant representations that play essential roles in tackling domain shift. |
TASA: Deceiving Question Answering Models by Twin Answer Sentences Attack (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial models rely on keyword matching and ignore relevant contextual relations for answer prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use keyword matching to attack model with two biases that rely on a perturbed answer sentence and a distracting answer sentence to misguide model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces fluent and grammatical adversarial contexts while maintaining gold answers. |
Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Yuhao Zhou, Rui Zheng, Songyang Gao, Jia Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods have been used to enhance multistep reasoning capabilities of large language models, but they have overlooked the potential of formulating higher-quality problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts from the problem side and refines problems to be more comprehensible and solvable for models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models. |
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)
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Shihan Dou, Jiazheng Zhang, Jianxiang Zang, Yunbo Tao, Weikang Zhou, Haoxiang Jia, Shichun Liu, Yuming Yang, Shenxi Wu, Zhiheng Xi, Muling Wu, Rui Zheng, Changze Lv, Limao Xiong, Shaoqing Zhang, Lin Zhang, Wenyu Zhan, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yueming Wu, Ming Wen, Yixin Cao, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs). |
Coarse-to-fine Few-shot Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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Ruotian Ma, Zhang Lin, Xuanting Chen, Xin Zhou, Junzhe Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen
| Challenge: | Existing few-shot NER solutions do not consider sub-class discrimination and various granularity of new classes during coarse training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a cluster-based prototype loss to learn group-wise discriminative representations of coarse-grained classes and a mixture prototype loss for learning the representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows superior performance over baseline methods on in-domain and cross-domain settings with various target granularity. |
Multimodal Prompt Learning with Missing Modalities for Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis often fail due to equipment failure, data corruption, privacy issues and the like. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal Transformer framework using prompt learning to address the issue of missing modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods significantly across evaluation metrics. |
Enhancing Online Recruitment with Category-Aware MoE and LLM-based Data Augmentation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure the matching degree of a job and a candidate face several challenges, such as low-quality job descriptions and similar candidate-job pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model-based method that polishes and rewrites low-quality job descriptions by leveraging chain-of-thought prompts and category-aware Mixture of Experts (MoE) module incorporates category embeddings to dynamically assign weights to the experts and learns more distinguishable patterns for similar candidate-job pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods by 2.40% in AUC and 7.46% in GAUC and boosts click-through conversion rate (CTCVR) by 19.4% in online tests, saving millions of CNY in external headhunting expenses. |
AsymKV: Enabling 1-Bit Quantization of KV Cache with Layer-Wise Asymmetric Quantization Configurations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models require substantial storage space to perform tasks such as text generation and video generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to compress large language models using integer replacements for floating-point numbers, in a process known as Quantization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model allows for quantization of up to 75% decoder layers with 1 bit while maintaining performance levels comparable to those of the models with floating parameters. |
PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis (2023.findings-eacl)
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Maximillian Chen, Alexandros Papangelis, Chenyang Tao, Seokhwan Kim, Andy Rosenbaum, Yang Liu, Zhou Yu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Currently, collecting high quality conversational data is expensive and infeasible for many applications . a promising direction is to generate synthetic dialogues by prompting large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose to use expert-written conversations as in-context examples to generate synthetic dialogues by prompting large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is generalizable to multi-party conversations, compared to human-collected conversations. |
The Role of Visual Modality in Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: Challenges and Insights (2025.acl-long)
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Yufang Liu, Yao Du, Tao Ji, Jianing Wang, Yang Liu, Yuanbin Wu, Aimin Zhou, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing models that leverage visual information do not improve math reasoning performance . authors suggest that visual information is important for multimodal reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to require image reliance for problem-solving and challenge models with similar, yet distinct, images that change the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance is unaffected by changes to or removal of images in the dataset. |
Merging Experts into One: Improving Computational Efficiency of Mixture of Experts (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments show that MEO significantly improves computational efficiency . compared to dense networks, sparsely activated networks only employ a few parameters for each input . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that merges multiple experts into one to reduce computation costs . they demonstrate that a sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) can reduce the cost by activating a small subset of parameters for each input . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the computational cost to that of a single expert by 83.3% compared to 82.6% in vanilla MoE. |
PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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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. |
MulDimIF: A Multi-Dimensional Constraint Framework for Evaluating and Improving Instruction Following in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Junjie Ye, Caishuang Huang, Zhuohan Chen, Wenjie Fu, Chenyuan Yang, Leyi Yang, Yilong Wu, Peng Wang, Meng Zhou, Xiaolong Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on constraint categories, offering little guidance for improving instruction following abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional constraint framework that allows for instruction following . they construct 9,106 code-verifiable samples and evaluate 18 LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction following performance without compromising general performance. |
LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle to process lengthy inputs due to limited length generalization and attention’s quadratic computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that allows each head to attend to important context chunks instead of allowing each head a full sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks multi-head attention's untapped potential by allowing each head to attend to important context chunks instead of the full sentence. |
Making Parameter-efficient Tuning More Efficient: A Unified Framework for Classification Tasks (2022.coling-1)
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Xin Zhou, Ruotian Ma, Yicheng Zou, Xuanting Chen, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Rui Xie, Wei Wu
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that re-uses existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier. |
ClarET: Pre-training a Correlation-Aware Context-To-Event Transformer for Event-Centric Generation and Classification (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on event-centric reasoning fails to model event-level correlations . Existing studies limit their scope to specific scenarios or overlook event- level correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train a general Correlation-aware context-to-Event Transformer for event-centric reasoning by highlighting event-level correlations with effective training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is applicable to a wide range of event-centric reasoning scenarios, considering its versatility of event correlation types, application formulations, and reasoning types. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
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Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
LADR: Locality-Aware Dynamic Rescue for Efficient Text-to-Image Generation with Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference are expensive and lack spatial redundancy . Discrete Diffusion Language Models are a promising paradigm for multimodal generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a locality-aware dynamic rescue method that exploits spatial Markov property of images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an approximate 4 speedup over baselines on four text-to-image generation benchmarks. |
Improving the Efficiency of Grammatical Error Correction with Erroneous Span Detection and Correction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the efficiency of GEC are not efficient enough for GEC. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-independent approach to improve the efficiency of GEC by dividing the task into two subtasks: ESD and ESC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs comparably to conventional seq2seq approaches in English and Chinese GEC benchmarks with less than 50% time cost for inference. |
XFormParser: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Multilingual Semi-structured Form Parser (2025.coling-main)
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Xianfu Cheng, Hang Zhang, Jian Yang, Xiang Li, Weixiao Zhou, Fei Liu, Kui Wu, Xiangyuan Guan, Tao Sun, Xianjie Wu, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Document AI parsing semi-structured image form is a key information extraction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal and multilingual semi-structured FORM PARSER which integrates SER and relation extraction into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 1.79% improvement on RE tasks in multilingual and zero-shot settings. |
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). |
| Approach: | They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency. |
GroundingGPT: Language Enhanced Multi-modal Grounding Model (2024.acl-long)
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Zhaowei Li, Qi Xu, Dong Zhang, Hang Song, YiQing Cai, Qi Qi, Ran Zhou, Junting Pan, Zefeng Li, Vu Tu, Zhida Huang, Tao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal large language models focus on capturing global information while neglecting the fine-grained local information in multimodal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end language enhanced multi-modal grounding model that performs fine-grained grounding tasks for image, video and audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive fine-grained understanding of multi-modal inputs while maintaining or improving its global comprehension capabilities. |
T2A-Feedback: Improving Basic Capabilities of Text-to-Audio Generation via Fine-grained AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Zehan Wang, Ke Lei, Chen Zhu, Jiawei Huang, Sashuai Zhou, Luping Liu, Xize Cheng, Shengpeng Ji, Zhenhui Ye, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Text-to-audio (T2A) models still struggle to satisfy human preferences for prompt-following and acoustic quality when generating complex multi-event audio. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI feedback learning to enhance basic capabilities of text-to-audio models . they use a large audio preference dataset to evaluate the model's capabilities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in simple and complex scenarios with AI feedback learning. |
Structured Attention for Unsupervised Dialogue Structure Induction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using structured attention, a model can learn dialogue structure in unsupervised fashion. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate structured attention layers into a Variational Recurrent Neural Network model with discrete latent states to learn dialogue structure in an unsupervised fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns semantic structures similar to templates used to generate a dialogue corpus on two-party datasets and on multi-party dialogues, disentangling dialogues without human annotation. |
RethinkingTMSC: An Empirical Study for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that current TMSC systems rely on textual information, and the progress in tackling this task has slowed down. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate both visual and textual information to improve the performance of TMSC by considering multimodal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates both visual and textual information to improve performance. |
Subspace Defense: Discarding Adversarial Perturbations by Learning a Subspace for Clean Signals (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that extract discrete inputs into fixed-length representations are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that place perturbations on clean inputs to fool DNNs. |
| Approach: | They propose to inspect the subspaces of sample features through spectral analysis to better understand adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy enables the model to inherently suppress adversaries, which boosts model robustness and motivates new directions of effective adversarial defense. |
Detecting Adversarial Samples through Sharpness of Loss Landscape (2023.findings-acl)
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Rui Zheng, Shihan Dou, Yuhao Zhou, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Xuanjing Huang, Menghan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that adversarial samples are more vulnerable than normal ones to textual adversarials. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple and effective sharpness-based detector that can distinguish adversarial samples by maximizing the loss increment within the region where the inference sample is located. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous detection methods by large margins on three text classification tasks. |
View-R1: Asymmetric Policy Optimization for Difficulty-Aware Multimodal Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are powerful at integrating diverse data but struggle with complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which separates responses into positive and negative groups to stabilize training and preserve knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model View-R1 achieves a 10.55% improvement in reasoning and outperforms larger models while maintaining and improving performance on general tasks. |
ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang, Zeyue Tian, Shangda Wu, Tianhao Shen, Ge Zhang, Yuhang Wu, Cong Liu, Ziya Zhou, Liumeng Xue, Ziyang Ma, Qin Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yinghao Ma, Yiming Liang, Xiaowei Chi, Ruibo Liu, Zili Wang, Chenghua Lin, Qifeng Liu, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen, Jie Fu, Emmanouil Benetos, Gus Xia, Roger Dannenberg, Wei Xue, Shiyin Kang, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Despite LLMs' impressive capabilities in musical knowledge, music reasoning remains an unsolved task. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source large language model (LLM) that integrates intrinsic musical abilities into LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. |
Nested Browser-Use Learning for Agentic Information Seeking (2026.acl-long)
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Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Kuan Li, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin, Zhengwei Tao, Liwen Zhang, Pengjun Xie, Jingren Zhou, Yong Jiang, Wentao Zhang, Zhiqiang Gao
| Challenge: | Existing information-seeking (IS) agents rely on the web for their information acquisition. |
| Approach: | They propose a browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. |
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Binghai Wang, Rui Zheng, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Wei Shen, Yuhao Zhou, Dong Yan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets. |
Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Machine Translation Pairs (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate error-corrected sentence pairs for improving grammatical error correction are not available. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate error-corrected sentence pairs for improving grammatical error correction based on machine translation models of different qualities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate multiple error-corrected sentence pairs from Chinese to English text. |
You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Zhaoming Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Grace Ziqi Zhou, Haiyang Zhang, Tao Shen, Wei Wang, John Torous, Shaoxiong Ji, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Psychological defenses are strategies people use to manage distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level and a DMRS Co-Pilot pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation time by 24.0% in a counterbalanced study. |
Automatic Annotation Augmentation Boosts Translation between Molecules and Natural Language (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in AI for biological research focus on integrating molecular data with natural language to accelerate drug discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a Language-based Automatic Annotation Augmentation framework that leverages large language models to augment existing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on text-based tasks and validates its versatility and utility. |
When Rules Learn: A Self-Evolving Agent for Legal Case Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing dense retrieval methods have achieved notable progress, but their effectiveness in legal case retrieval remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, especially when powered by a high-capacity core LLM. |
Safe-SAIL: Towards a Fine-grained Safety Landscape of Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoder Interpretation Framework (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Weng, Han Zheng, Hanyu Zhang, Ej Zhou, Qinqin He, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue, Zhixuan Chu, Xiting Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on how SAEs derive most fine-grained latent features for safety remain unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for interpreting SAE features in safety-critical domains . they train a suite of SAEs with human-readable explanations and systematic evaluations based on pornography, politics, violence, and terror . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces interpretation cost by 55% and improves safety-critical features. |
Revisit Self-Debugging with Self-Generated Tests for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Xiancai Chen, Zhengwei Tao, Kechi Zhang, Changzhi Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Wanli Gu, Yuanpeng He, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai, Haiyan Zhao, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in code generation, but they still face challenges when tackling complex programming tasks beyond their basic capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate self-generated tests into the code generation process . they propose to use post-execution and in-exection self-debugging to mitigate test bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models in code generation tasks by leveraging execution feedback from tests. |
Contrastive Token-Wise Meta-Learning for Unseen Performer Visual Temporal-Aligned Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a novel generalization framework for visual temporal-aligned translation is proposed to transfer recognition skills to unseen performers . ambiguity in the visual sequence can hinder current methods for visual language translation . |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable framework to transfer recognition skills to unseen performers . they use visual temporal-aligned translation to generate multiple words autoregressively . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is generalized to transfer recognition skills to unseen performers . it is compared with existing methods on lipreading and fingerspelling datasets . |
V-GameGym: Visual Game Generation for Code Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Wei Zhang, Jian Yang, Renshuai Tao, Linzheng Chai, Shuyue Guo, Jiajun Wu, Xiaoming Chen, Ganqu Cui, Ning Ding, Xander Xu, HU Wei, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing code-related benchmarks focus on single modality rather than visual game development. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark for evaluating code large language models in visual game generation that integrates a clustering-based curation methodology and a pipeline for visual code synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses code generation and visual game generation using a sandbox environment. |
Robust Lottery Tickets for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pre-trained language models contain smaller matching subnetworks that are not robust to adversarial examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to find robust tickets hidden in pre-trained language models by learning binary weight masks and an adversarial loss objective to guide the search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on previous work on adversarial robustness evaluation. |
SDAR-VL: Stable and Efficient Block-wise Diffusion for Vision-Language Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing block-wise discrete diffusion models lack robust autoregressive (AR) decoders. |
| Approach: | They propose a block-wise discrete diffusion framework for large-scale vision-language understanding with a progressive beta noise curriculum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves training efficiency, convergence stability, and task performance over conventional block diffusion. |
Meta-Task Prompting Elicits Embeddings from Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language modeling are based on task-related instructions or prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) using meta-task prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality sentences without fine-tuning . it excels on STS benchmarks and in downstream tasks, surpassing models with similar prompts . |
IPIGuard: A Novel Tool Dependency Graph-Based Defense Against Indirect Prompt Injection in LLM Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks rely on assumptions about the model's inherent security, which lacks structural constraints on agent behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task execution paradigm that models the agents’ task execution process as a traversal over a planned Tool Dependency Graph (TDG). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces unintended tool invocations triggered by injected instructions, enhancing robustness against IPI attacks. |
Learning from LLM Agents: In-Context Generative Models for Text Casing in E-Commerce Ads (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing NER-based transformer models are expensive and lack contextual dependencies, making them less reliable when handling unseen or ad-specific terms, e.g., brand names. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage approach to casing correction in e-commerce ad content that leverages Chain-of-Actions to enforce content policies while accurately handling ads-specific terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing NER-based models and achieves near-LLM performance at a fraction of the cost. |
ORTicket: Let One Robust BERT Ticket Transfer across Different Tasks (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are susceptible to subtle perturbations and require multiple adversarial training during fine-tuning to improve their robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial defense method ORTicket that fine-tunes a model for downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable robustness to other defense methods while maintaining the efficiency of fine-tuning. |
TextFusion: Privacy-Preserving Pre-trained Model Inference via Token Fusion (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xin Zhou, Jinzhu Lu, Tao Gui, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Yuran Wang, Yong Ding, Yibo Cheung, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to preserve inference privacy are available as cloud services . however, the risk of privacy leakage remains, according to recent studies . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to preserve inference privacy by fusing token representations in the cloud. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves inference privacy without sacrificing performance on different scenarios. |
TransFace: Unit-Based Audio-Visual Speech Synthesizer for Talking Head Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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Xize Cheng, Rongjie Huang, Linjun Li, Zehan Wang, Tao Jin, Aoxiong Yin, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Baoxing Huai, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for talking head translation rely on cascading, resulting in delays and cascadic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for talking head translation, TransFace, which can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
BERT-of-Theseus: Compressing BERT by Progressive Module Replacing (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel approach to compress neural networks by progressive module replacement is proposed . a number of techniques have been proposed to compress pretraining and fine-tuning models . |
| Approach: | They propose a model compression approach that divides BERT into modules and builds their compact substitutes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing knowledge distillation approaches on GLUE benchmark . it is based on a model that divides the original BERT into several modules and builds their substitutes . |
Learning “O” Helps for Learning More: Handling the Unlabeled Entity Problem for Class-incremental NER (2023.acl-long)
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Ruotian Ma, Xuanting Chen, Zhang Lin, Xin Zhou, Junzhe Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen
| Challenge: | Existing Named Entity Recognition systems are typically trained on a large-scale dataset with predefined entity classes, then deployed for entity recognition on the test data without further adaptation or refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation learning method that adaptively detects entity clusters in "O" and two effective distance-based relabeling strategies for better learning the old classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 10.62% improvement over the baseline methods. |
ChatASU: Evoking LLM’s Reflexion to Truly Understand Aspect Sentiment in Dialogues (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on interactive ASU ignore the coreference issue for opinion targets while this phenomenon is ubiquitous in interactive scenarios especially dialogues, limiting the ASU performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chat-based Aspect Sentiment Understanding task that integrates various NLP tasks with the chat paradigm and propose 'trusted self-reflexion' approach with ChatGLM as backbone to address aspect coreference issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and shows that it is highly effective. |
PromptIntern: Saving Inference Costs by Internalizing Recurrent Prompt during Large Language Model Fine-tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in fine-tuning large language models have greatly enhanced their usage in domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which internalizes prompt knowledge during model fine-tuning to achieve efficient inference and save costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces input tokens by 90%, accelerates inference by 4.2 times, and reduces monetary inference costs by 88.3%. |
Improving Long-Tail Relation Extraction with Collaborating Relation-Augmented Attention (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to handle wrong labeling and long-tail relations are labor-intensive and scarce training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network to handle wrong labeling and long-tail relations by collaborating relation-augmented attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed neural network improves the state-of-the-art on the NYT dataset . |
Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Yuming Yang, Mingyoung Lai, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Mingqi Wu, Chiyue Huang, Jun Zhao, Haijun Lv, Jian Tong, Yunhua Zhou, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model’s current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rank–Surprisal Ratio metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
Automatic Grammatical Error Correction for Sequence-to-sequence Text Generation: An Empirical Study (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) models have a weakness: they cannot always generate sentences without grammatical errors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use automatic grammatical error correction to improve seq2seq models . they conduct experiments on machine translation, formality style transfer, sentence compression and simplification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can improve grammaticality of generated text and improve formal style tasks. |
Improving Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training via Sequence Span Rewriting (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text infilling objectives for pretrained language models require self-supervision by masking out tokens or spans in text. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend text infilling to a self-supervised sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Sequen) task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves the model's performance on various natural language generation tasks. |
Investigating and Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Pretrained Vision-Language (CLIP) Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have revealed that Large Vision-Language Models suffer from hallucinations in practice, including object hallucines, spatial hallucinos, attribute hallucinications, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose to use CLIP model to mitigate object hallucinations by using a data augmentation method to create negative samples with a variety of hallucinian issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates object hallucinations and can be used as a visual encoder, effectively alleviating the object halluination issue in LVLMs. |
Modeling Event-Pair Relations in External Knowledge Graphs for Script Reasoning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph triples with event overlap, but ignore more supportive triples . Script reasoning relies on understanding the relationship between two events . |
| Approach: | They propose a model to learn the inferential relations between events from the whole eventuality KG . they propose 'script adapter' to extend the model to infer the associated relations between an event chain and a subsequent event candidate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with baselines using external KG or not on a script reasoning task. |
Rethinking the Multimodal Correlation of Multimodal Sequential Learning via Generalizable Attentional Results Alignment (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the alignment of multimodal sequential learning using transformers. |
| Approach: | They propose a constrained scheme to align the multiple attentional results from both local and global perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme could align the multiple attentional results from both local and global perspectives, making the information capture more efficient. |
AscendKernelGen: LLM-Driven Kernel Generation for NPUs (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinzi Cao, Jianyang Zhai, Pengfei Li, Zhiheng Hu, Cen Yan, null Mubingxu, Guanghuan Fang, Bin She, Jiayu Li, Yihan Su, Dongyang Tao, Feidiao Yang, Chang-Dong Wang, Yutong Lu, Weicheng Xue, Bin Zhou, Yonghong Tian
| Challenge: | Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are critical for AI infrastructure, but their development remains a bottleneck due to vendor-specific Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for NPU kernel development that bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding . compiler success on complex Level-2 kernels improves from 0% to 95.5%, they say . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding, showing a near-zero success rate on complex kernels. |
CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Tao Zhang, ChengLIn Zhu, Yanjun Shen, Wenjing Luo, Yan Zhang, Hao Liang, Tao Zhang, Fan Yang, Mingan Lin, Yujing Qiao, Weipeng Chen, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Zenan Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user’s perspective. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs that compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs a systematic framework for constraint types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment. |
Tensorized Self-Attention: Efficiently Modeling Pairwise and Global Dependencies Together (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks equipped with self-attention have parallelizable computation and the ability to capture both long-range and local dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attention mechanism called "Multi-mask Tensorized Self-Attention" it captures pairwise and global dependencies by a compatibility function composed of dot-product and additive attentions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms CNN-/RNN-/attention-based models on nine NLP benchmarks with compelling memory- and time-efficiency. |
MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiahang Lin, Kai Hu, Binghai Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Shichun Liu, Junzhe Wang, Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Hang Yan, Zhenhua Han, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on long document visual question answering is based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where textual or visual content is encoded into embeddings and relevance is determined by similarity scores with respect to the original query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing RL systems by 10.4% on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark and demonstrates superior training performance over GRPO. |
WebQuality: A Large-scale Multi-modal Web Page Quality Assessment Dataset with Multiple Scoring Dimensions (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on web page quality assessment neglect the aspect of web page content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese dataset for web page quality assessment . the dataset includes over 65,000 detailed an-notations spanning four sub-dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes over 65,000 detailed an-notations spanning four sub-dimensions and incorporates elements such as HTML+CSS, text, and visual screenshot. |
TCSinger 2: Customizable Multilingual Zero-shot Singing Voice Synthesis (2025.findings-acl)
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Yu Zhang, Wenxiang Guo, Changhao Pan, Dongyu Yao, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ziyue Jiang, Yuhan Wang, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot singing voice synthesis models depend on phoneme and note boundary annotations, limiting their robustness and producing poor transitions between phonemes and notes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task multilingual zero-shot SVS model with style transfer and style control based on various prompts. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that TCSinger 2 outperforms baseline models in subjective and objective metrics across multiple related tasks. |
MERIT: Multi-Agent Collaboration for Unsupervised Time Series Representation Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to time series representation learning are time-consuming and expert-dependent, which are difficult to generalize across different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language model agent to guide unsupervised time series representation learning and a framework to integrate three LLM agents to collaboratively generate positive views for time series data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates large language model (LLM) agent to guide unsupervised time series representation learning and compares it with state-of-the-art baselines on multiple time series datasets. |
Retrieval-Augmented Retrieval: Large Language Models are Strong Zero-Shot Retriever (2024.findings-acl)
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Tao Shen, Guodong Long, Xiubo Geng, Chongyang Tao, Yibin Lei, Tianyi Zhou, Michael Blumenstein, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Large-scale retrieval is indispensable in information-seeking tasks such as open-domain question answering and knowledgegrounded dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large language model (LLM) to augment a query with its potential answers by prompting LLMs with a composition of the query and the query’s in-domain candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method breaks brute-force combinations of retrievers with LLMs and lifts the performance of zero-shot retrieval to be very competitive on benchmark datasets. |
T-REG: Preference Optimization with Token-Level Reward Regularization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a dominant approach for large language models to follow instructions and produce meaningful alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages human feedback to optimize large language models . they propose to use sequence-level and token-level rewards to optimize preference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on Alpaca Eval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks. |
Uni-Dubbing: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis from Visual Articulation (2024.acl-long)
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Songju Lei, Xize Cheng, Mengjiao Lyu, Jianqiao Hu, Jintao Tan, Runlin Liu, Lingyu Xiong, Tao Jin, Xiandong Li, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal speech synthesis is a key challenge due to the scarcity of datasets that pair audio with corresponding video. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates modality alignment during the pre-training phase on multimodal datasets and freezes the video modality extraction component and the encoder module within the pretrained weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a reduced word error rate (WER) of 31.73%, surpassing the previous best of 33.9% with single-modality audio. |
Prompt-Singer: Controllable Singing-Voice-Synthesis with Natural Language Prompt (2024.naacl-long)
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Yongqi Wang, Ruofan Hu, Rongjie Huang, Zhiqing Hong, Ruiqi Li, Wenrui Liu, Fuming You, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent singing-voice-synthesis methods lack ability to control style attributes of synthesized singing. |
| Approach: | They propose a singing-voice-synthesis method that enables attribute controlling on singer gender, vocal range and volume with natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves favorable control ability and audio quality. |
Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Senjie Jin, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Sirui Song, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbo Zhang, Peng Sun, Hong Lu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline. |
On Vision Features in Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on multimodal machine translation (MMT) has focused on the way of incorporating vision features into translation but little attention is given to the quality of vision models. |
| Approach: | They develop a selective attention model to study the patch-level contribution of an image in multimodal machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to learn translation from the visual modality on probing tasks and is compared with existing models. |
Event Detection without Triggers (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to event detection require annotated triggers and event types in training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encodes the representation of a sentence based on target event types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performances compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Scheduled DropHead: A Regularization Method for Transformer Models (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | DropHead is a structured dropout method for regularizing multi-head attention . DropHed drops entire attention heads during training to prevent overfitting . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured dropout method specifically designed for regularizing multi-head attention mechanism . DropHead drops entire attention heads during training to prevent overfitting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve transformer models by 0.9 BLEU score on translation task and around 1.0 accuracy for various text classification tasks. |
Eliminating Sentiment Bias for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification with Unsupervised Opinion Extraction (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-level sentiment classification (ALSC) is a practical setting in aspect-based sentiment analysis due to no opinion term labeling needed, but it fails to interpret why a sentiment polarity is derived for the aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based anti-bias aspect representation learning framework that eliminates the sentiment bias in the aspect embedding by adversarial learning against aspects’ prior sentiment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks, with the capability of unsupervised opinion extraction. |
Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are often customized by fine-tuning for the requirements of different domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable training framework to make undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process while preserving the ability to learn other information. |
SENT: Sentence-level Distant Relation Extraction via Negative Training (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction use bag labels, which introduce noise, to train the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to use negative training to train a model using complementary labels to separate the noisy data from the training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on previous methods on sentence-level evaluation and de-noise effect. |
EventWiki: A Knowledge Base of Major Events (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge bases focus on static entities such as people, locations and organizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a new knowledge base resource called EventWiki which concentrates on major events . they show that EventWiki is a very useful resource for information extraction regarding events in NLP . |
| Outcome: | The proposed resource is the first knowledge base resource of major events. |
ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Yang, Honglin Guo, Li Ji, Jiazheng Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhikai Lei, Shuo Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Shichun Liu, Yuxin Wang, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
| Outcome: | The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
Fine-grained Coordinated Cross-lingual Text Stream Alignment for Endless Language Knowledge Acquisition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel information network decipherment paradigm is proposed for fine-grained coordinated cross-lingual text stream alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Burst Information Networks as media to represent text streams . they propose a simple yet effective information network decipherment algorithm with diverse clues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on bilingual lexicon extraction from coordinated text streams and can harvest high-quality alignments from large amounts of streaming data for endless language knowledge mining. |
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality. |
Improving Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Transfer for Multilingual Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve multilingual question answering over knowledge graph (KGQA) use of bilingual lexicon induction to map training questions into those in target language circumvents language inconsistency . |
| Approach: | They propose to use bilingual lexicon induction to map training questions in source and target languages as augmented training data to minimize syntax-disorder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model narrows the gap in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer between source and target languages. |
A Relation-Oriented Clustering Method for Open Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for open relation extraction (OpenRE) are designed for predefined relations, which cannot deal with new emerging relations in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-oriented clustering model that leverages readily available labeled data to learn a relationship-oriented representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces error rate by 29.2% and 15.7% on two datasets compared with current SOTA methods. |
MIND: A Large-scale Dataset for News Recommendation (2020.acl-main)
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Fangzhao Wu, Ying Qiao, Jiun-Hung Chen, Chuhan Wu, Tao Qi, Jianxun Lian, Danyang Liu, Xing Xie, Jianfeng Gao, Winnie Wu, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Personalized news recommendation is an important technique for personalized news service. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a large-scale news recommendation dataset from Microsoft News . they demonstrate that news recommendation relies on the quality of news content understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 1 million users and more than 160k English news articles, each of which has rich textual content such as title, abstract and body. |
A Novel Framework Based on Medical Concept Driven Attention for Explainable Medical Code Prediction via External Knowledge (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict medical codes from clinical notes lack interpretability due to lengthy and noisy clinical notes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework based on medical concept driven attention to integrate external knowledge for explainable medical code prediction from clinical notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a benchmark dataset showing that it is more accurate than existing methods. |
RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Enyu Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Songyang Gao, Xiaoran Fan, Zichu Fei, Jingting Ye, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on human-like behaviors in foundation models do not verify their faithfulness . a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-type behaviors . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to characterize humanoid behaviors in foundation models . they argue that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal consistency, and generalizability. |
Soft Contextual Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing training data are limited in natural language tasks due to text characteristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method that softly augments a randomly chosen word in a sentence by its contextual mixture of multiple related words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on small and large scale machine translation datasets. |
VRPO: Rethinking Value Modeling for Robust RL under Noisy Supervision in LLM Post-Training (2026.acl-long)
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Dingwei Zhu, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Guoqiang Zhang, Jiazheng Zhang, Junjie Ye, Mingxu Chai, Enyu Zhou, Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Caishuang Huang, Chenhao Huang, Yunke Zhang, Yuran Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world environments often suffers from ambiguous or incomplete supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances value modeling for robust RL in LLM post-training by integrating auxiliary losses guided by entropy and perplexity from a frozen language model and variational information bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multi-turn dialogue, math reasoning, and science QA with rule-based and model-based rewards. |
Towards Robust Ranker for Text Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text retrieval are based on a 'retrieval & rerank' pipeline, which uses a fast retriever to fetch a set of top document candidates, while a robust ranker is based upon a weak negative mining during contrastive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-adversarial training strategy that leverages multiple retrievers as generators to challenge a ranker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing de facto ranker training paradigms on the passage retrieval benchmarks using BM25-reranking, full-ranking and retriever distillation. |
Multi-Grained Knowledge Distillation for Named Entity Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained big models have delivered top performance in Seq2seq modeling, but their deployments in real-world applications are often hindered by excessive computations and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation scheme to efficiently transfer knowledge from big models to their cheaper counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme maximizes the assimilation of knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
Rectifying the Emotional Flow: Aligning Priors and Dynamic Guidance for High-Arousal Text-to-Speech (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference framework that introduces a neutral prosody bias and a uniform Classifier-Free Guidance that distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior linguistic accuracy and expressiveness without model retraining. |
MMAPS: End-to-End Multi-Grained Multi-Modal Attribute-Aware Product Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing product summarization methods lack end-to-end product summaries and multi-grained multi-modal modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end multi-grained multi-modal attribute-aware product summarization method that jointly models product attributes and generates product summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art product summarization methods on a large-scale Chinese e-commence dataset. |
Template-free Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied in few-shot learning tasks . however, when applied to token-level labeling tasks, it would be time-consuming to enumerate the template queries over all potential entity spans. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reformulate NER tasks as LM problems without templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 30.12 times faster than the template-based method under few-shot settings. |
Data-Efficiently Learn Large Language Model for Universal 3D Scene Perception (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for 3D scene understanding are limited to specific downstream tasks, hindering their practicality in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a 3D visual perceptual ability and advanced reasoning capabilities for 3D scenes by aligning 3D representations into the feature space of advanced LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves a 82.2% relative score compared with state-of-the-art methods with limited data. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
Fluency Boost Learning and Inference for Neural Grammatical Error Correction (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Seq2seq models for grammatical error correction (GEC) have two limitations: (1) a seq2q model may not be well generalized with only limited error-corrected data; (2) a model may fail to completely correct a sentence with multiple errors through normal seq1sequeq inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a fluency boost learning and inference mechanism to improve the performance of seq2seq models for grammatical error correction (GEC) by generating fluency-boost sentence pairs during training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model improves on both CoNLL-2014 and JFLEG benchmark datasets. |
BERT-based Lexical Substitution (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lexical substitution tend to overlook good substitute candidates that are not the synonyms of the target words in the lexicals and fail to take into account the substitution’s influence on the global context of the sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end BERT-based lexical substitution approach which proposes and validates substitute candidates without using annotated data or manually curated resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs well in proposing and ranking substitute candidates, achieving the state-of-the-art results in both LS07 and LS14 benchmarks. |
When More Thinking Hurts: Overthinking in LLM Test-Time Compute Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research implicitly assumes that longer thinking leads to better results . a recent study suggests that test-time compute scaling is more effective than model scaling . |
| Approach: | They challenge the assumption that longer thinking yields better results . they show that models exhibit overthinking and marginal returns diminish at higher budgets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces computation significantly while maintaining comparable accuracy. |
QCRD: Quality-guided Contrastive Rationale Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on smaller, task-specific models enhanced by distilling knowledge from LLMs, but the diversity and quality of negative knowledge remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-guided contrastive rationale distillation framework that aims to enhance reasoning capabilities through contrastive knowledge learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently outperforms existing distillation techniques yielding higher-quality rationales. |
Visual Self-Refinement for Autoregressive Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiamian Wang, Ziqi Zhou, Chaithanya Kumar Mummadi, Sohail Dianat, Majid Rabbani, Raghuveer Rao, Chen Qiu, Zhiqiang Tao
| Challenge: | Autoregressive models excel in sequential modeling but the spatial nature of visual signals conflicts with the sequential dependencies of next-token prediction, leading to suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play refinement module to enhance the spatial correspondence modeling within the generated visual sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module enhances vision-language modeling under a shared sequential prediction framework. |
TextObfuscator: Making Pre-trained Language Model a Privacy Protector via Obfuscating Word Representations (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference services are plagued by privacy concerns, such as sharing sensitive data with service providers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for protecting inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework protects inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
FormLM: Recommending Creation Ideas for Online Forms by Modelling Semantic and Structural Information (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | FormLM is a pre-trained language model for creating semi-structured forms where questions and descriptions are organized by predefined structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance pre-trained language model with form structural information to model online forms and recommend form creation ideas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms general-purpose language models on all tasks, with an improvement by 4.71 on Question Recommendation and 10.6 on Block Type Suggestion in terms of ROUGE-1 and Macro-F1, respectively. |
Pseudo-Bidirectional Decoding for Local Sequence Transduction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Local sequence transduction tasks involve massive overlapping between source and target sequences . experimental results show that Pseudo-Bidirectional Decoding improves performance of standard seq2seq models. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but versatile approach for local sequence transduction tasks . they propose to copy source tokens to decoder as pseudo future context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of standard seq2seq models on LST tasks. |