Papers by Ting Liu
SelF-Eval: Self-supervised Fine-grained Dialogue Evaluation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics are expensive and easy to conduct but ineffective to reflect dialogue quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised fine-grained dialogue evaluation framework which can automatically assign fine-granular scores for arbitrarily dialogue data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly consistent with human evaluations and better than the state-of-the-art models. |
A Self-verified Method for Exploring Simile Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have succeeded in natural language processing because they learn generic knowledge from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows pre-trained language models to explore simile knowledge from PLMs . they enhance PLM models with a multi-level simile recognition task that evaluates similes aplenty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can explore more accurate simile knowledge for PLMs. |
Learning Event Graph Knowledge for Abductive Reasoning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for abductive reasoning based on formal logic lack commonsense knowledge and effective reasoning mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative text-based abductive reasoning task NLI with a latent variable to capture commonsense knowledge from event graph for guiding the abductive reasoning task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods on the abductive reasoning task. |
CogBERT: Cognition-Guided Pre-trained Language Models (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods fine-tune pre-trained models on cognitive data, ignoring the semantic gap between texts and cognitive signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into pre-trained language models by adaptively adjusting the weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into BERT by adaptively adjusting weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
MaPPER: Multimodal Prior-guided Parameter Efficient Tuning for Referring Expression Comprehension (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) lack specific domain abilities for precise local visual perception and visual-language alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning to localize a visual region via natural language using a prior-guided prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the best accuracy compared to the current methods with only 1.41% tunable backbone parameters. |
VPTQ: Extreme Low-bit Vector Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on pushing weight-only quantization to extremely low-bit due to numerical representation limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a vector-based quantization approach that pushes LLMs to extremely low-bit . they propose scalar-based weight quantization that reduces memory requirements and optimizes storage costs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model quantization perplexity by 0.01-0.34 on LLaMA-2, 0.38-0.68 on mistral-7B, 4.41-7.34, on llaMA-3 on QA tasks on average. |
Event Representation Learning Enhanced with External Commonsense Knowledge (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn event representations from text lack commonsense knowledge about the intents and emotions of event participants. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage external commonsense knowledge about the intent and sentiment of the event to learn distributed representations for structured events from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on hard similarity tasks and yields more precise inferences on subsequent events under given contexts. |
ReCo: Reliable Causal Chain Reasoning via Structural Causal Recurrent Neural Networks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Causal chain reasoning models suffer from two main transitive problems: threshold effect and scene drift. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses exogenous variables to represent causal pairs and estimates the threshold and scene contradictions using structural causal recurrent neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on Chinese and English CCR datasets. |
Lil: Less is Less When Applying Post-Training Sparse-Attention Algorithms in Long-Decode Stage (2026.findings-acl)
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Junhao Hu, Fangze Li, Mingtao Xu, Feifan Meng, Shiju Zhao, Tiancheng Hu, Ting Peng, Anmin Liu, Wenrui Huang, Chenxu Liu, Ziyue Hua, Tao Xie
| Challenge: | Prior work typically decomposes inference into prefill and decode stages, with the decode stage dominating total latency. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that detects threshold where information loss exceeds information gain during sparse decoding to reduce token consumption by up to 90% and a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces token consumption by 90% with a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2% across reasoning-intensive benchmarks. |
TableGPT: Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation with Table Structure Reconstruction and Content Matching (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models can produce informative and fluent text with the help of large-scale datasets, but they suffer insufficient learning problem with limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use table transformation module with template to rewrite structured table in natural language as input for GPT-2 and exploit multi-task learning with two auxiliary tasks to preserve table’s structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems on most few-shot settings. |
Stimulate the Critical Thinking of LLMs via Debiasing Discussion (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that large language models (LLMs) are often prone to stance homogeneity and human preference biases when faced with conflicting perspectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel two-stage training framework to address stance homogeneity bias and human preference bias by generating multi-model discussion datasets and optimizing reinforcement learning from human feedback to align with discussion correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces stance homogeneity bias and human preference bias and improves generalization capabilities on non-discussion scenarios and out-of-domain datasets. |
AS-ES Learning: Towards efficient CoT learning in small models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to induce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in LLMs are limited and do not consider the importance of efficiently utilizing existing CoT data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new training paradigm which exploits the inherent information in CoT for iterative generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm surpasses direct seq2seq training on CoT-extensive tasks without data augmentation or altering the model itself. |
Adaptive Multi-pass Decoder for Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end neural machine translation (NMT) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive multi-pass decoder which introduces a flexible multi- pass polishing mechanism to extend the capacity of NMT via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves Chinese-English translation with 1.55 BLEU . the proposed architecture adopts a flexible multi-pass polishing mechanism . |
IFlyEA: A Chinese Essay Assessment System with Automated Rating, Review Generation, and Recommendation (2021.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Automated Essay Assessment (AEA) aims to judge students’ writing proficiency in an automatic way. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese AEA system IFlyEssayAssess to evaluate essays written by native Chinese students from primary and junior schools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system provides application services for essay scoring, review generation, recommendation, and explainable analytical visualization. |
Slot-consistent NLG for Task-oriented Dialogue Systems with Iterative Rectification Network (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to natural language generation are prone to errors, such as neglecting input slot values and generating redundant slot values. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative rectification network to improve general NLG systems . they apply bootstrapping algorithms to sample training candidates and incorporate reward . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly reduce the slot error rate for strong baselines. |
ExpeTrans: LLMs Are Experiential Transfer Learners (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies provide large language models with textual task-solving experiences via prompts to improve their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompts to provide LLMs with textual task-solving experiences during their inference stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of large language models on 13 datasets. |
Towards Generalizable and Faithful Logic Reasoning over Natural Language via Resolution Refutation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in various natural language reasoning tasks, but struggle with performing first-order logic reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which introduces the paradigm of resolution refutation to solve first-order logic reasoning problems by extending reasoning rules and employing the principle of proof by contradiction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models while maintaining performance in simple scenarios. |
How Does Selective Mechanism Improve Self-Attention Networks? (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that selective SANs outperform the standard SAN by paying more attention to content words that contribute to the meaning of the sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose to implement selective SANs with a flexible Gumbel-Softmax to improve word order encoding and structure modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the standard SANs on several representative NLP tasks including natural language inference, semantic role labelling, and machine translation. |
A Survey on LLMs for Story Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Maria Teleki, Vedangi Bengali, Xiangjue Dong, Sai Tejas Janjur, Haoran Liu, Tian Liu, Cong Wang, Ting Liu, Yin Zhang, Frank Shipman, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Methods for story generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) have come into the spotlight recently. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel taxonomy of LLMs for story generation consisting of two major paradigms: independent story generation by an LLM, and author-assistance for story creation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy compares existing work on the topic with those of novel author-assistance models. |
Entity-Consistent End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialogue System with KB Retriever (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on sequence-to-sequence dialogues treats the KB query as an attention over the entire KB without the guarantee that the generated entities are consistent with each other. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which queries the knowledge base in two steps to improve consistency . they first return the most relevant KB row given a dialogue history . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and produces entity-consistent responses. |
Allocating Large Vocabulary Capacity for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models require a more expressive vocabulary to represent all languages . however, increasing the vocabulary size significantly slows down the pre-training speed . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm VoCap to determine the desired vocabulary capacity of each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves cross-lingual model pre-training while reducing side effects of increasing vocabulary size. |
Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Jiahe Guo, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, An Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing role-play fine-tuning techniques improve role adaptability but may degrade safety performance, especially for villainous characters. |
| Approach: | They propose safety-aware Role-Play Fine-Tuning (SaRFT) to balance role-playing capabilities and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning settings. |
Conversational Graph Grounded Policy Learning for Open-Domain Conversation Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-level policy models that learn dialog policy and language generation from dialog corpora often lead to degeneration issues where the utterances become ungrammatical or repetitive. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent prior dialog transitions as a graph and learn a CG grounded dialog policy that can foster a more coherent and controllable dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to learn dialog policy in open-domain multi-turn conversation. |
UniCoRN: Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN bridging cognitive signals and human language (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on decoding word-level fMRI volumes from a restricted vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-vocabulary task to bridge fMRI time series and human language . they use a pre-trained language model to construct a robust encoder for cognitive signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task bridges fMRI time series and human language with a baseline model. |
Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on machine reading comprehension task is focused on English, but there are few efforts on other languages due to the lack of large-scale training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual machine reading comprehension task for other languages . they propose cloze-style reading comprehension and various neural network approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves reading comprehension performance of Chinese datasets over state-of-the-art systems by a large margin over existing systems. |
Beyond Frameworks: Unpacking Collaboration Strategies in Multi-Agent Systems (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks prioritize structural architectures and role assignments but neglect granular mechanics of agent collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose to use centralized governance, instructor-led participation, ordered interaction patterns to optimize task accuracy and computational efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves task accuracy and computational efficiency under two context-dependent scenarios. |
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 . |
Zero Pronoun Resolution with Attention-based Neural Network (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent neural network methods for zero pronoun resolution use contextual information to encode the zero pronomins since they contain no actual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-attention mechanism for encoding zero pronouns that focus on some informative parts of the associated texts and produce an efficient way of encode them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly surpasses existing Chinese zero pronoun resolution baseline systems. |
RAG+: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Application-Aware Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Zhihu Wang, Ming Fan, Xicheng Zhang, Yubo Zhang, Zhengfan Wang, Heyuan Huang, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RAG paradigms often overlook the cognitive step of applying knowledge, leaving a gap between retrieved facts and task-specific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They introduce a module extension that integrates application-aware reasoning into the RAG pipeline. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAG+ outperforms standard RAG variants and achieves gains of 3–5% in complex scenarios. |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios. |
Multi-Stage Pre-training for Automated Chinese Essay Scoring (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automatic essay scoring are based on hand-crafted surface-level features, but recent advances in representation learning have improved performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training based automated Chinese essay scoring method with weakly supervised pre- training, supervised cross- prompt fine-tuning and supervised target- prompt refine-tuneing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves a state-of-the-art neural essay scorer in terms of effectiveness and domain adaptation ability, while in-depth analysis also reveals its limitations. |
A Stack-Propagation Framework with Token-Level Intent Detection for Spoken Language Understanding (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Intent detection and slot filling are two main tasks for building a spoken language understanding system. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to incorporate intent information into slot filling tasks . they use a joint model with Stack-Propagation to capture intent semantic knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two publicly available datasets and outperformed existing models by a large margin. |
Learning to Ask Unanswerable Questions for Machine Reading Comprehension (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for extractive reading comprehension are not good at deciding whether no answer is presented in the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation technique by automatically generating relevant unanswerable questions according to an answerable question paired with its corresponding paragraph that contains the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on the SQuAD 2.0 dataset than the baseline model and the BERT-large model. |
Learning to Bridge Metric Spaces: Few-shot Joint Learning of Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot learning methods learn a single task each time with a few examples . but, real-world applications often contain multiple closely related tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot joint learning scheme that captures intent and slot relationships from only a handful of examples and adapts the bridged metric space to specific few- shot domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two public datasets on intent and slot . the proposed model significantly outperformed baseline models in one and five shots settings. |
CLIP Models are Few-Shot Learners: Empirical Studies on VQA and Visual Entailment (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Previously, CLIP was only regarded as a powerful visual encoder. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to boost CLIP's few-shot performance on a visual entailment task without introducing any additional pre-training procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy achieves competitive zero/few-shot results on visual question answering and visual entailment tasks without introducing any additional pre-training procedure. |
CXR Data Annotation and Classification with Pre-trained Language Models (2022.coling-1)
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Nina Zhou, Ai Ti Aw, Zhuo Han Liu, Cher heng Tan, Yonghan Ting, Wen Xiang Chen, Jordan sim zheng Ting
| Challenge: | Existing tools for clinical data annotation are limited to specific institutions due to differences in writing style, structure, language use and label definition. |
| Approach: | They propose a weak supervision annotation framework with two improvements over existing ones . the framework provides an efficient form of sample selection and data auto-annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides better results for clinical data annotation tasks compared to existing frameworks. |
Examining Inter-Consistency of Large Language Models Collaboration: An In-depth Analysis via Debate (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on inconsistency issues within a single LLM, while we explore the inter-consistencies among multiple LLMs for collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal debate framework to examine whether LLMs can collaborate effectively to achieve a consensus for a shared goal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to achieve consensus in three real-world debate scenarios with real-time scenarios aligned to the LLM's goals. |
Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models for Empathetic Response Generation: Empirical Investigations and Improvements (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empathetic dialogue is an essential part of building harmonious social relationships and contributes to the development of a helpful AI. |
| Approach: | They propose three methods to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) they propose semantically similar in-context learning, two-stage interactive generation and combination with the knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art in automatic and human evaluations and the possibility of GPT-4 simulating human evaluators. |
Multilingual Encoder Knows more than You Realize: Shared Weights Pretraining for Extremely Low-Resource Languages (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | XLM-R and mBART have advanced multilingualism in NLP, but low-resource languages such as Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Mongolian are underserved. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adapting multilingual encoders to text generation in extremely low-resource languages by reusing the weights between the encoder and the decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on various downstream tasks even when compared with much larger models. |
Adversarial Training for Machine Reading Comprehension with Virtual Embeddings (2021.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples that have been mixed with certain perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial training method that perturbs the embedding matrix instead of word vectors to differentiate the roles of passages and questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective universally and further improves the performance of MRC tasks. |
Tool Zero: Training Tool-Augmented LLMs via Pure RL from Scratch (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yirong Zeng, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Li Du, Juyi Dai, Qiuyang Ding, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Weiwen Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve over 7% performance improvement compared to both SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic generalization-guided reward design for rule-based RL that shifts rewards from exploratory to exploitative tool-use patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves over 7% performance improvement compared to SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. |
DuReadervis: A Chinese Dataset for Open-domain Document Visual Question Answering (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering is a task that requires answering questions based on a collection of document images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use document images to answer questions using layouts and visual features instead of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces human cost and improves scalability of QA systems by incorporating layouts and visual features. |
Learning Sentence Representations over Tree Structures for Target-Dependent Classification (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on tree structures uses syntactic parsers or Treebank annotations to perform target-dependent classifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning based approach which automatically induces target-specific sentence representations over tree structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model gives superior performance on two benchmark tasks compared to previous work on parsed trees . |
Combining Self-Training and Self-Supervised Learning for Unsupervised Disfluency Detection (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to disfluency detection rely on human annotations, which are expensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised learning paradigm which can work with unlabeled text corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than existing supervised systems using word embeddings. |
From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zekun Zhou, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Xiachong Feng, Ziyun Song, Ruihan Chen, Liang Zhao, Weitao Ma, Yuxuan Gu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has inspired researchers to explore how AI can accelerate and enhance research. |
| Approach: | They organize the relevant studies into three main categories: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. |
| Outcome: | The authors summarize the current state of research in three main areas: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication. |
Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue with Dialogue State Representation (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipeline models for task-oriented dialogue system require explicit modeling of dialogue states and hand-crafted action spaces to query domain-specific knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the advantages of classic pipeline and sequence-to-sequence models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on automatic and human evaluation on a Stanford Multi-turn Multi-domain task-oriented dialogue dataset. |
On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yichen Zhang, Yingshuo Wang, Yang Deng, Yanyan Zhao, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Wanxiang Che, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks. |
| Approach: | They investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments. |
| Outcome: | The findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation. |
MPO: Multilingual Safety Alignment via Reward Gap Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Tongtong Wu, Wenxuan Zhang, Jiahe Guo, An Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing preference learning methods for safety alignment are monolingual and struggle with noisy multilingual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual reward gaP optimization approach that leverages the well-aligned safety capabilities of the dominant language to improve safety alignment across multiple languages. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three LLMs, LLaMA-3.1, Gemma-2 and Qwen2.5, validate MPO’s efficacy in multilingual safety alignment without degrading general multilingual utility. |
Alleviating Hallucinations from Knowledge Misalignment in Large Language Models via Selective Abstention Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Yuchun Fan, Xiachong Feng, Yuxuan Gu, Yangfan Ye, Liang Zhao, Weihong Zhong, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Xiao, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) suffer from severe hallucination issues due to the knowledge misalignment between the pre-training stage and the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a training objective with an abstention mechanism that selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token. |
HyperEdit: Unlocking Instruction-based Text Editing in LLMs via Hypernetworks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiming Zeng, Jinghan Cao, Zexin Li, Wanhao Yu, Zhankai Ye, Dawei Xiang, Ting Hua, Xin Liu, Shangqian Gao, Tingting Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat instruction-based text editing as a generic text generation problem. Existing methods either over-edit or fail to apply modifications consistently. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that processes each editing request to best align with it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 9% improvement over the state-of-the-art model. |
Sequence-to-Sequence Data Augmentation for Dialogue Language Understanding (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work which augments an utterance without considering its relation with other utterrances, however, has failed to improve the language understanding module. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence generation based data augmentation framework that leverages one utterance’s same semantic alternatives in the training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 6.38 and 10.04 F-scores on the Airline Travel Information System dataset and a newly created semantic frame annotation on the Stanford Multi-turn, Multi-domain Dialogue Dataset. |
LEMON: Language-Based Environment Manipulation via Execution-Guided Pre-training (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to language-based environment manipulation are difficult to generalize across environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework for language-based environment manipulation tasks that can deal with various environments using the same generative language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art results on four of the tasks and the execution-guided pre-training strategy brings remarkable improvements on all experimental tasks. |
CharBERT: Character-aware Pre-trained Language Model (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) construct word representations at subword level with Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or its variations . but these methods split a word into subword units and make it incomplete and fragile . |
| Approach: | They propose a character-aware pre-trained language model to tackle OOV problems . they construct contextual word embedding for each token from sequential character representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the existing models on multiple NLP benchmarks. |
Enhancing Contrastive Learning with Noise-Guided Attack: Towards Continual Relation Extraction in the Wild (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual relation extraction (CRE) excel in preserving old knowledge but falter when confronted with contaminated data streams. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-resistant contrastive framework for continual relation extraction (CRE) that preserves old knowledge while learning incremental corrupted relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks with increasing noise rates. |
Verb Metaphor Detection via Contextual Relation Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on verb metaphor detection focuses on analyzing restricted forms of linguistic context. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which explicitly models the relation between a verb and its various contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model gets competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches on the VUA, MOH-X and TroFi datasets. |
Aligning Translation-Specific Understanding to General Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language models (LLMs) have remarkable abilities in understanding complex texts . however, understanding misalignment leads to LLMs mistakenly translating complex concepts . |
| Approach: | They propose a translation process that aligns the translation-specific understanding with the general understanding to improve translation quality and reduce translation literalness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed translation process improves translation quality and reduces translation literalness by -25% -51%. |
Multi-Agent Simulator Drives Language Models for Legal Intensive Interaction (2025.findings-naacl)
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ShengbinYue ShengbinYue, Ting Huang, Zheng Jia, Siyuan Wang, Shujun Liu, Yun Song, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced legal intelligence, but the scarcity of scenario data impedes the progress toward interactive legal scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-agent Legal Simulation Driver to generate synthetic data by simulating interactive legal scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures consistency of legal attributes between participants and introduces a supervisory mechanism to align participants’ characters and behaviors as well as addressing distractions. |
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages. |
Sentence Ordering with a Coherence Verifier (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent sentence ordering studies can be classified into 2 categories: pair-wise ranking-based and sequence generation-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence ordering method by plugging a coherence verifier into ranking-based and sequence generation-based methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on topological sorting-based and pointer network-based methods with topological and point-based models. |
IFlyLegal: A Chinese Legal System for Consultation, Law Searching, and Document Analysis (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Legal Tech is a system that performs legal consulting, multi-way law searching, and legal document analysis using deep contextual representations and various attention mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese legal system that performs legal consulting, multi-way law searching, and legal document analysis using deep contextual representations and various attention mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs legal consulting, multi-way law searching, and legal document analysis by exploiting techniques such as deep contextual representations and various attention mechanisms. |
CMHG: A Dataset and Benchmark for Headline Generation of Minority Languages in China (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Minority languages in China face significant challenges due to their unique writing systems, which differ from international standards. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset specifically curated for headline generation tasks for minority languages in China . they propose 50,000 entries each for Uyghur and Mongolian, and a test set annotated by native speakers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset will help improve headline generation in minority languages . it includes 100,000 entries for Tibetan, 50,000 entries each for Uyghur and Mongolian . |
Dataset for the First Evaluation on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English . |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese reading comprehension dataset to add diversity to existing reading comprehension data . proposed dataset contains cloze-style reading comprehension and user query reading comprehension . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is based on a Chinese reading comprehension dataset . it includes two types of cloze-style and user query reading comprehension . the proposed dataset hosted the 1st Evaluation on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (CMRC-2017) |
Neural Multitask Learning for Simile Recognition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Simile is a special type of metaphor, where comparators such as like and as are used to compare two objects. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network framework for simile sentence classification, simile component extraction and language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms rule-based and feature-based approaches in simile sentence classification and simile component extraction tasks. |
e-CARE: a New Dataset for Exploring Explainable Causal Reasoning (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing causal reasoning models only learn to induce empirical causal patterns that are predictive to the label, while human beings seek for deep and conceptual understanding of the causality to explain the observed causal facts. |
| Approach: | They present a human-annotated CAusal REasoning dataset with conceptual explanations of the causality. |
| Outcome: | The presented dataset shows that human-annotated explanations can be useful for promoting the accuracy and stability of causal reasoning models. |
Dynamic Fusion Network for Multi-Domain End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show remarkable success in end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems . however, most models rely on large training data, which is difficult to scalable for new domains with limited labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a shared-private network which exploits the relevance between the target domain and each domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on multi-domain dialogue by 13.9% on average. |
Toward Secure Tuning: Mitigating Security Risks from Instruction Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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Yanrui Du, Fenglei Fan, Sendong Zhao, Jiawei Cao, Ming Ma, Danyang Zhao, Shuren Qi, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) has emerged as a critical technique for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) however, recent studies have revealed that IFT can compromise the built-in security mechanisms of LLMs, posing significant security risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that shifts learning burden onto security-robust parameters and propose 'warm-up' phase that preferentially trains Mods_Rob to learn low-level features with minimal security risk. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces security risks without sacrificing performance gains across knowledge-intensive datasets. |
A Sentence Cloze Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Using cloze-style reading comprehension, Chinese machine reading comprehension datasets are becoming more and more popular . a new task is proposed to fill the right candidate sentence into the passage with several blanks . |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese task to fill the right candidate sentence into a passage with blanks . they build a dataset to evaluate the difficulty of the task and make fake candidates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task fills the right candidate sentence into the passage with blanks . the proposed dataset contains over 100K blanks within over 10K passages based on Chinese narrative stories . |
TextBrewer: An Open-Source Knowledge Distillation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2020.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models have hundreds of millions of parameters and take several gigabytes of memory to train and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source knowledge distillation toolkit designed for natural language processing that provides a set of predefined distillation methods and can be extended with custom code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is comparable with or even higher than the public distilled BERT models with similar numbers of parameters. |
Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training for Neural Response Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to dialogue systems are labor-intensive and difficult to scale up. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training method for neural response generation that leverages an adversarial training paradigm while taking advantage of N-best response candidates from a retrieval-based system to construct the discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the vanilla Seq2Seq model and conventional adversarial training approach on a large scale dataset. |
FAER: Benchmarking VLMs for Failure-Aware Embodied Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual-language models (VLMs) are the core component of embodied agents in perceiving the environment and making decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-aware benchmark to evaluate the performance of visual language models (VLMs) in long-horizon tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of 16 widely utilized VLMs and 4 LLMs for FAER tasks. |
BoB: BERT Over BERT for Training Persona-based Dialogue Models from Limited Personalized Data (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing persona-based dialogue models use crowd-sourced data, such as the PersonaChat . however, the cost of such datasets is limited, and the model is not robust. |
| Approach: | They propose to disentangle persona-based dialogue generation into two sub-tasks by using a BERT-over-BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in response quality and persona consistency under different limited data settings. |
What Did You Refer to? Evaluating Co-References in Dialogue (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural end-to-end dialogue models have limitations on exactly interpreting the linguistic structures in dialogue history context. |
| Approach: | They propose to directly measure the capability of neural end-to-end dialogue models on understanding the entity-oriented structures via question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand large-scale English and Chinese human human dialogues using a large-format dataset. |
N-LTP: An Open-source Neural Language Technology Platform for Chinese (2021.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools that teach an independent model for each task are not supported in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source neural language platform supporting six Chinese NLP tasks . source code, documentation, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/hit-SCIR/ltp . |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform supports six Chinese NLP tasks. |
Task-oriented Dialogue System for Automatic Diagnosis (P18-2)
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Zhongyu Wei, Qianlong Liu, Baolin Peng, Huaixiao Tou, Ting Chen, Xuanjing Huang, Kam-fai Wong, Xiangying Dai
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify phenotypes using electronic health records (EHRs) are expensive and difficult to transfer models from one disease to another. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-oriented dialogue system framework to make diagnosis for patients automatically, which can converse with patients to collect additional symptoms beyond their self-reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can collect additional symptoms from conversation and improve disease identification accuracy. |
All Information is Valuable: Question Matching over Full Information Transmission Network (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question matching only transmit one kind of information while failing to utilize both kinds of information simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a question matching network that can transmit both representation and interactive information together in a simultaneous fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baseline models on two standard benchmarks. |
SHIELD: Evaluation and Defense Strategies for Copyright Compliance in LLM Text Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed machine learning but have raised significant legal concerns due to their potential to produce text that infringes on copyrights. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight, real-time defense mechanism to prevent the generation of copyrighted text by evaluating methods and testing attack strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense significantly reduces the volume of copyrighted text generated by LLMs by effectively refusing malicious requests. |
RU22Fact: Optimizing Evidence for Multilingual Explainable Fact-Checking on Russia-Ukraine Conflict (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to verify factuality of claims do not provide sufficient evidence for explainable fact-checking systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and a novel multilingual explainable fact-checking dataset on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web and generate explanations in 16 languages. |
Prove Your Point!: Bringing Proof-Enhancement Principles to Argumentative Essay Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing arguments generation methods often overlook connections between opinions . Existing methods struggle with providing compelling proof . |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework for argumentative essay generation with a focus on logical enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates argumentative essays with better logical validity and persuasiveness than baseline models. |
One for All: Update Parameterized Knowledge Across Multiple Models with Once Edit (2025.acl-long)
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Weitao Ma, Xiyuan Du, Xiaocheng Feng, Lei Huang, Yichong Huang, Huiyi Zhang, Xiaoliang Yang, Baohang Li, Xiachong Feng, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for modifying large language models focus on individual models, resulting in errors and hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose an ensemble-based approach that employs a plug-in model as the editing module and a dynamic weight mechanism to enhance its effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods while achieving superior editing efficiency. |
Question Tells You Where the Answer Is: Intention-aware Long-Context KV Cache Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Liang Zhao, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Lei Huang, Kun Zhu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Recent methods to reduce the KV cache size fail to identify crucial KVs for generation while excluding others accurately, resulting in severe information loss. |
| Approach: | They propose an intention-aware KV cache eviction method that identifies and retains crucial KVs according to the attention distribution of intention, which semantically reflects the user’s goal and determines which part of the context is relevant. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can maintain the model performance while reducing the KV cache size from 128K to 2K, leading to a 6.3x increase in decoding speed and 7.8x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to the default setting. |
Shadow-Activated Backdoor Attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Ziyi Yin, Muchao Ye, Yuanpu Cao, Jiaqi Wang, Aofei Chang, Han Liu, Jinghui Chen, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma
| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks on Multimodal Large Language Models are less applicable to open-ended conversations with users. |
| Approach: | They propose a shadow-activated backdoor attack scenario where attackers inject malicious content into the responses of MLLMs when the responses explicitly relate to the shadowed object. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the desired behaviors by constructing a poisoned dataset and implementing an attention-regularized tuning strategy. |
A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English . MRC is a new field of research that aims to comprehend the context of articles and answer the questions based on them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities to existing reading comprehension datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is composed of 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. |
A Closer Look into the Robustness of Neural Dependency Parsers Using Better Adversarial Examples (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural network-based models have been successful in a wide range of NLP tasks, but their performance is undermined by adversarial examples that would pose no confusion for humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate high-quality adversarial examples with a higher number of candidate generators and stricter filters and then verify their quality using automatic and human evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the robustness of English parsing models by relying on adversarial training and model ensembling. |
Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the work of conversational recommendation due to the rise of voice-based bots. |
| Approach: | They use a Chinese dialog dataset DuRecDial to study conversational recommendation in the context of multi-type dialogs where bots can proactively lead a conversation from a non-recommendation dialog to a recommendation dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset allows to investigate different parts of the overall problem, e.g., how to naturally lead a dialog, how interact with users for recommendation. |
Enabling Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Word-level Visual Representations (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised neural machine translation methods have been observed to make particular errors in comparison to supervised machine translation, such as confusing nouns that pertain to the same semantic category. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates images at the word level to augment lexical mappings. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a multi-lingual dataset show that the proposed method generates more accurate translations with only monolingual data. |
Context-Sensitive Generation of Open-Domain Conversational Responses (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on single-turn conversation generation focus on coherence and context-sensitive generation of open-domain conversational responses. |
| Approach: | They propose static and dynamic attention based approaches for context-sensitive generation of open-domain conversational responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all baselines on automatic and human evaluation on two public datasets. |
Is Graph Structure Necessary for Multi-hop Question Answering? (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on multi-hop question answering across multiple documents or paragraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural network to deal with graph structure in textual multi-hop reasoning . they propose 'self-attention' and propose removing entire graph structure may not hurt the final results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that graph-attention or the entire graph structure can be replaced by self-attention . hotpotQA is a widely used benchmark for multi-hop question answering . |
Beyond Uniform SVD: Dual-Level Optimization across Columns and Modules for LLM Compression (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for low-rank decomposition overlook decomposing errors and suboptimal approximation. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank decomposition framework that integrates low-level optimization at column and module levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and baselines in SVD and pruning. |
Profile Consistency Identification for Open-domain Dialogue Agents (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on improving attribute consistency focus on incorporating attribute information in responses, but few efforts have identified the consistency relations between response and attribute profile. |
| Approach: | They propose a key-value structure information enriched BERT model to identify the profile consistency . they propose to incorporate attribute information into the generated responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over strong baselines on downstream tasks. |
An AMR Aligner Tuned by Transition-based Parser (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our AMR aligner outperforms the rule-based aligner by achieving higher alignment F1 score and consistently improving two open-source AMR parsers. |
| Approach: | They propose a rich resource enhanced AMR aligner which produces multiple alignments and a new transition system for AMR parsing along with its oracle parser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed AMR aligner outperforms the current state-of-the-art parser by achieving higher alignment F1 score and consistently improving two open-source AMR parsers. |
Revisiting Pre-Trained Models for Chinese Natural Language Processing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models have shown tremendous improvements across various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to revisit Chinese pre-trained language models to examine their effectiveness in a non-English language and release the Chinese pretrained model series to the community. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on RoBERTa in several ways, especially the masking strategy that adopts MLM as correction (Mac). |
Table-to-Text Generation with Effective Hierarchical Encoder on Three Dimensions (Row, Column and Time) (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Seq2Seq models for table-to-text generation have achieved remarkable progress, but modeling table representation in one dimension is inadequate. |
| Approach: | They propose to model each table cell considering other records in the same row and to enrich table’s representation by modeling each cell in context of other cells in the similar column or with historical data respectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art models on ROTOWIRE, a benchmark dataset of NBA basketball games. |
Causal-Debias: Unifying Debiasing in Pretrained Language Models and Fine-tuning via Causal Invariant Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to remove unwanted stereotypical associations from pretrained language models (PLMs) are often focused on removing unwanted stereotypes from PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to remove unwanted stereotypical associations in pretrained language models . they propose bias-relevant factors are causal, while labelrelevant factors causal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces stereotypical associations after PLMs are fine-tuned . the proposed framework mitigates bias from a causal invariant perspective . |
Chain of Strategy Optimization Makes Large Language Models Better Emotional Supporter (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weixiang Zhao, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yang Deng, Yulin Hu, Jiahe Guo, Libo Qin, Qianyun Du, Shijin Wang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) fails to address these issues, as it trains models on single gold-standard responses without modeling nuanced strategy trade-offs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that optimizes strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn. |
Chase: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Dataset for Cross-Database Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | XDTS is a cross-database context-dependent text-to-sql problem with wide range of applications. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese dataset for cross-database context-dependent Text-to-SQL . they find that only 35% of questions are context-independent and 28% of SQL queries are easy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an exact match accuracy of 40% over all questions and 16% over all question sequences. |
Molweni: A Challenge Multiparty Dialogues-based Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset with Discourse Structure (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Multiparty dialog applications such as discourse parsing and meeting summarization are now mainstream research. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a machine reading comprehension dataset with discourse structure built over multiparty dialog using a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) style. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contributes large-scale discourse dependency annotations in a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) style for all of its multiparty dialogs, and achieves only 67.7% F1 on Molweni’s questions, a 20+% significant drop as compared against its SQuAD 2.0 performance. |
CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languages (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Zhangyin Feng, Daya Guo, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Xiaocheng Feng, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Daxin Jiang, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained models have improved performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They develop a bimodal pre-trained model for programming language (PL) and natural language (NL) it incorporates a hybrid objective function that detects replaced tokens from generators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on two NL-PL applications by fine-tuning model parameters. |
Semantic Parsing with Syntax- and Table-Aware SQL Generation (P18-1)
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Yibo Sun, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Jianshu Ji, Guihong Cao, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Ming Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches generate a SQL query word-by-word but results are incorrect or not executable due to mismatch between question words and table contents. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model to map natural language questions into SQL queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves state-of-the-art execution accuracy from 69.0% to 74.4% on a large question- SQL dataset. |
Natural Logic at the Core: Dynamic Rewards for Entailment Tree Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating entailment trees lack logical consistency . static reward structures or intricate dependencies within multi-step reasoning are often ignored . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates natural logic principles into reinforcement learning to guide entailment tree generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on EntailmentBank show that the proposed method improves interpretability and generalization. |
Length Extrapolation of Transformers: A Survey from the Perspective of Positional Encoding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Liang Zhao, Xiachong Feng, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance length extrapolation of large language models have been developed, but a systematic survey is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the effects of positional encoding on length extrapolation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the extrapolation of large language models, but they are still lacking a systematic survey. |
LLMs May Perform MCQA by Selecting the Least Incorrect Option (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is a fundamental format for various tasks in NLP, such as commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to increase the number of correct options in a dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of multiple choice question answering (MCQA) and improves its accuracy. |
MDC-Bench: A Multidisciplinary Causal Benchmark Based on Causal Structures for Evaluating Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Peng Wang, Yuxiong Yan, Xiao Ding, Kai Xiong, Bibo Cai, Chao Peng, Yutai Hou, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing causal datasets focus on the commonsense domain, but LLMs perform poorly when answering complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multidisciplinary causal evaluation benchmark to assess LLMs' knowledge and skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in domain specialization, structural diversity, and task complexity. |
Length Controlled Generation for Black-box LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Gu, Wenjie Wang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Kun Zhu, Lei Huang, Ting Liu, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua
| Challenge: | Existing length control methods involve fine-tuning the parameters of LLMs, which is inefficient and suboptimal for practical use. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative sampling framework that regulates LLMs to generate length-constrained text without modifying the underlying parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 100% success rates on Llama3.1 tasks with minimal additional computational overhead. |
Distilling Knowledge for Search-based Structured Prediction (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the performance of structured prediction models, but they are often limited by the ambiguities of the reference policy. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill an ensemble of multiple models trained with different initializations into a single model and use it to explore the search space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the greedy models on two typical search-based structured prediction tasks and achieves 1.32 in LAS and 2.65 in BLEU over strong baselines. |
Exploring Large Language Models for Effective Rumor Detection on Social Media (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale contexts hinder LLMs’ reasoning abilities while moderate contexts perform better for LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-propagation collaboration-base framework that integrates small language models with LLMs for effective rumor detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between LLMs and LLM in facing long, structured data and offers a novel solution for rumor detection on social media. |
Self-Evolving GPT: A Lifelong Autonomous Experiential Learner (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to provide LLMs with textual task-solving experience rely on manual efforts to acquire and apply such experience for each task. |
| Approach: | They propose a lifelong autonomous experiential learning framework based on LLMs that learns and accumulates experience through experience transfer and induction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs reliably in each intermediate step and improves GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on widely used NLP datasets. |
Weakly Supervised Semantic Parsing by Learning from Mistakes (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Weakly supervised semantic parsing requires searching consistent logical forms in a huge space and dealing with spurious logical form. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning framework that trains parsers via utterance-denotation pairs . they use utterrance-logical form pairs created from mistakes to bootstrap parser . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on WikiSQL, TabFact and other datasets. |
Generate, Delete and Rewrite: A Three-Stage Framework for Improving Persona Consistency of Dialogue Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing persona-based dialogue models generate human-like responses but can hardly avoid the generation of inconsistent persona words. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that deletes inconsistent words from a generated response prototype and further rewrites it to a personality-consistent one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves good performance on the persona-chat dataset. |
Counterfactual Off-Policy Training for Neural Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for open-domain dialogue generation suffer from data insufficiency . a potential response inferred in hindsight is called a counterfactual reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose to explore potential responses by counterfactual reasoning . given an observed response, the model automatically infers the outcome of an alternative policy that could have been taken . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the HRED model and conventional learning frameworks on the DailyDialog dataset. |
AdaSteer: Your Aligned LLM is Inherently an Adaptive Jailbreak Defender (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weixiang Zhao, Jiahe Guo, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, An Zhang, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Activation steering offers training-free defense but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal protection and increased false rejections of benign inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive activation steering method that dynamically adjusts model behavior based on input characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods across multiple jailbreak attacks with minimal impact on utility. |
Neural Natural Logic Inference for Interpretable Question Answering (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering models are based on textual entailment tasks . prior work has focused on QA on premise-based questions . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic QA approach that integrates natural logic reasoning within deep learning architectures towards developing effective question answering models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous work on multiple-choice science questions . it integrates natural logic reasoning within deep learning architectures to build proof paths . |
Language Model as an Annotator: Exploring DialoGPT for Dialogue Summarization (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialogue summarization systems encode text with a number of general semantic features, but these are often not available in open-domain tools. |
| Approach: | They propose to use DialoGPT to label three types of features on two datasets . they propose to employ pre-trained and non-pre-tried models as dialogue annotators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two dialogue summarization datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
GL-GIN: Fast and Accurate Non-Autoregressive Model for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing joint models for multi-intent SLU only consider intent detection while ignoring slot filling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive model for joint multiple intent detection and slot filling . their framework is 11.5 times faster than existing joint models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 11.5 times faster than existing models and is faster than current models. |
Neural Stylistic Response Generation with Disentangled Latent Variables (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing parallel datasets for creating stylistic responses are not stylistically consistent. |
| Approach: | They propose to disentangle the content and style in latent space by diluting sentence-level information in style representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a higher BERT-based style intensity score and comparable BLEU scores, compared with baselines. |
Recall and Learn: Fine-tuning Deep Pretrained Language Models with Less Forgetting (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune deep pretrained language models face catastrophic forgetting problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a recall and learn mechanism which integrates pretraining and downstream tasks into a single mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE benchmark and better average performance than directly fine-tuning of BERT-large. |
Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Hierarchical Pretraining and Topic Segment (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for meeting summary have limited the ability to deal with long-term dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical transformer encoder-decoder network with multi-task pre-training to capture key sentences at word level and generate them at word-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior to the previous methods in meeting summary datasets AMI and ICSI. |
Learning Target-Specific Representations of Financial News Documents For Cumulative Abnormal Return Prediction (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work considers learning dense representations for news titles and abstracts . text representations can address the sparsity of discrete indicators in statistical models . |
| Approach: | They propose to use news abstracts to combine the most informative sentences in news content to learn dense representations for text elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to estimate abnormal returns of companies when compared to titles and abstracts. |
Multi-Input Multi-Output Sequence Labeling for Joint Extraction of Fact and Condition Tuples from Scientific Text (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract factual tuples from scientific text do not consider conditions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new sequence labeling framework to jointly extract fact and condition tuples from scientific sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves F1 score relative to existing methods by 4.2% and 6.2% on bioNLP2013. |
Deciphering the Impact of Pretraining Data on Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that the composition of the pretraining corpus exerts a significant impact upon the performance of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze the impact of 48 datasets from 5 major categories of pretraining data of Large Language Models and measure their impacts on LLMs using benchmarks about nine major categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis provides insights into the organization of data to support more efficient pretraining of Large Language Models. |
Discourse Self-Attention for Discourse Element Identification in Argumentative Student Essays (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite its importance, discourse element identification is challenging due to the ambiguity of sentences . the number of elaboration sentences could be 10 times more than the number edna sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sentence positional encodings to explicitly represent sentence positions and inter-sentence attentions to capture sentence interactions and enhance sentence representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a Chinese and English dataset. |
Analyzing the Rapid Generalization of SFT via the Perspective of Attention Head Activation Patterns (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, LLMs learn in a data-driven schema while the instructions about complex tasks are both scarce and hard to collect or construct. |
| Approach: | They employ a gradient-based method to dissect the process that the Supervised Fine-tuning Process (SFT) adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method dissects the process that the SFT process adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. |
Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate ChatGPT's causal reasoning abilities are based on pre-trained language models, but they rely on supervised training. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of ChatGPT’s causal reasoning capabilities using four state-of-the-art (STA) simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is not a good causal reasoner, but a great causal interpreter. |
Towards Stable Natural Language Understanding via Information Entropy Guided Debiasing (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to debiase Natural Language Understanding models use dataset biases instead of learning the intended task. |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing framework that detects and purifies dataset biases using information entropy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the stability of performance on out-of-distribution datasets for a set of widely adopted NLU models. |
Benchmarking Robustness of Machine Reading Comprehension Models (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks only evaluate models' robustness under test-time perturbations or adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic benchmark to evaluate models' robustness under adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic benchmark evaluates models under four different types of adversarial attacks. |
Logic-level Evidence Retrieval and Graph-based Verification Network for Table-based Fact Verification (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods leverage programs that contain rich logical information to enhance the verification process. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based fact verification task as an evidence retrieval framework . they retrieve logic-level program-like evidence from the given table and a statement as supplementary evidence for the table . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to retrieve logic-level program-like evidence from a table and a statement as supplementary evidence for the table. |
Path Spuriousness-aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop reasoning is a common approach for query answering, but can be biased to spurious paths which coincidentally lead to the correct answer with poor explanation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that quantitatively estimates to what extent a path is spurious by a metric called Path Spuriousness (PS) they propose KG reasoning, which infers new facts along existing paths in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the agent’s ability to prevent spurious paths while keeping comparable to state-of-the-art performance. |
ExCAR: Event Graph Knowledge Enhanced Explainable Causal Reasoning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work infers the causation between events based on knowledge from annotated causal event pairs, but additional evidence information is unexploited. |
| Approach: | They propose an Event graph knowledge enhanced explainable CAusal Reasoning framework that acquires additional evidence information from a large-scale causal event graph as logical rules for causal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in human evaluation and in animal models. |
Com2 : A Causal-Guided Benchmark for Exploring Complex Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Kai Xiong, Xiao Ding, Yixin Cao, Yuxiong Yan, Li Du, Yufei Zhang, Jinglong Gao, Jiaqian Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing works focus on complex tasks like math and code, while complex commonsense reasoning remains underexplored due to its uncertainty and lack of structure. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a benchmark for large language models based on complex commonsense reasoning based upon causal event graphs and causal theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines a complex commonsense reasoning benchmark with a detective story to achieve a more challenging subset. |
Cross-Lingual BERT Transformation for Zero-Shot Dependency Parsing (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn cross-lingual word embeddings in a contextual space are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate cross-lingual contextualized word embeddings using pre-trained BERT models by learning a linear transformation from contextual word alignments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer parsing and is highly competitive with existing models. |
STGN: an Implicit Regularization Method for Learning with Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work to mitigate the effect of noisy labels is limited to specific tasks or training procedures, making it hard to be widely used. |
| Approach: | They propose a stochastic tailor-made gradient noise to mitigate the effect of noisy labels by introducing benign noise into stochistic gradient descent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to discriminate correct samples from incorrect ones and boost existing training methods. |
AutoVecCoder: Teaching LLMs to Generate Explicitly Vectorized Code (2026.findings-acl)
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ShangZhan Li, Xinyu Yin, Xuanyu Jin, Ye He, Yuxin Zhou, Yuxuan Li, Xu Han, Wanxiang Che, Qi Shi, Ting Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current development practices face a dichotomy between automation and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to empower LLMs with the capability of automated explicit vectorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SSE and AVX subsets of SimdBench. |
Exploring Hybrid Question Answering via Program-based Prompting (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to question answering over heterogeneous data are limited due to large scale of information and organic coupling of heterogenous data. |
| Approach: | They propose a program-based prompting framework for hybrid question answering tasks . it integrates various functions to perform hybrid information-seeking over data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baseline systems and achieves the best performance under the fewshot settings. |
Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future (2024.acl-long)
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Zheng Chu, Jingchang Chen, Qianglong Chen, Weijiang Yu, Tao He, Haotian Wang, Weihua Peng, Ming Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have revealed that chain-of-thought prompting significantly enhances LLM’s reasoning capabilities, which attracts widespread attention from both academics and industry. |
| Approach: | They propose to summarize advanced methods through a taxonomy that offers novel perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method delineates the challenges and future directions, thereby shedding light on future research. |
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Chinese Zero Pronoun Resolution (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent models for zero pronoun resolution in Chinese are short-sighted and do not capture semantic information for zeros and candidate antecedents. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a deep reinforcement learning approach to Chinese zero pronoun resolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in three experimental settings. |
NoisywikiHow: A Benchmark for Learning with Real-world Noisy Labels in Natural Language Processing (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale datasets in the real world often contain label noise, which can cause model overfitting and degrade generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use label noise to imitate human errors in annotations . they use a noisy label noise benchmark to evaluate their methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are different from data with heterogeneous label noises in the real world. |
Modeling Event Background for If-Then Commonsense Reasoning Using Context-aware Variational Autoencoder (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Understanding event and event-centered commonsense reasoning is crucial for natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a If-Then commonsense reasoning dataset Atomic and an RNN-based Seq2Seq model to facilitate this. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the accuracy and diversity of inferences compared with baseline methods. |
Consistency Regularization for Cross-Lingual Fine-Tuning (2021.acl-long)
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Bo Zheng, Li Dong, Shaohan Huang, Wenhui Wang, Zewen Chi, Saksham Singhal, Wanxiang Che, Ting Liu, Xia Song, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that consistency regularization improves cross-lingual fine-tuning . pre-trained cross-linguistic models can transfer task-specific supervision from one language to the other . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve cross-lingual fine-tuning with consistency regularization . they use example consistency regularized to penalize prediction sensitivity to four types of data augmentations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves cross-lingual fine-tuning across tasks . it can be generalized to other target languages without additional training . |
SemRegex: A Semantics-Based Approach for Generating Regular Expressions from Natural Language Specifications (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate programs from natural language do not address program aliasing . semantically equivalent programs may have many syntactically different forms . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-based approach to generate regular expressions from natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on three public datasets. |
Few-shot Slot Tagging with Collapsed Dependency Transfer and Label-enhanced Task-adaptive Projection Network (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot learning methods for slot tagging are based on similarity-based methods, but they are difficult to apply to an unseen domain due to the discrepancy of label sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a label-enhanced task-adaptive projection network to transfer abstract label dependency patterns as transition scores into the conditional random field (CRF) Experimental results show that their model significantly outperforms the strongest few-shot learning baseline by 14.64 F1 scores in the one-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the strongest few-shot learning baseline by 14.64 F1 scores in the one-shot setting. |
Document Modeling with Graph Attention Networks for Multi-grained Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to machine reading comprehension treat documents at their hierarchical nature, ignoring their dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a machine reading comprehension benchmark with two-grained answers . they use graph attention networks to model documents at their hierarchical nature . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing systems at long and short answer criteria. |
Conversational Word Embedding for Retrieval-Based Dialog System (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embedding methods for retrieval-based dialog systems are based on co-occurrence statistics and train them based upon the same co-existence statistics. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational word embedding method which uses the conversation pairs post, reply, and 'reply' they introduce a word alignment model from statistical machine translation and train it on word-level and sentence-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the quality of the selected response on retrieval-based dialog systems. |
Large Language Models Are Still Misled by Simple Bias Ensembles (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models are constrained to datasets where each sample is manually injected with only one type of bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-bias benchmark where each sample contains multiple types of biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing LLMs and debiasing methods perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the challenge of eliminating compounded biases. |
Nullspace Disentanglement for Red Teaming Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work mainly leverages crowd workers to construct test cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box approach that exploits the unique properties of the nullspace to disentangle and regulate the crucial success information within test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods regarding the attack success rate and excels in aspects of diversity and fluency. |
Exploring and Distilling Multi-Dimensional Clues for Interpretable Social Bot Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on social bot detection results directly without corresponding supportive explanations, making it difficult to assess the extent to which such predictions are trustworthy. |
| Approach: | They propose a four-dimensional clue framework that uses outcome-reward reinforcement learning to train inspectors to generate faithful, grounded clues from user information, semantic features, interactive situation, and behavioral pattern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in detection performance and significantly improves the performance of large language models. |
iTool: Reinforced Fine-Tuning with Dynamic Deficiency Calibration for Advanced Tool Use (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yirong Zeng, Xiao Ding, Yuxian Wang, Weiwen Liu, Yutai Hou, Wu Ning, Xu Huang, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Synthesizing tool-use data through real-world simulations is effective for enhancing large language models (LLMs) however, training gains decay as synthetic data increases, and the model struggles to benefit from more synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative reinforced fine-tuning strategy to improve LLMs with external tools to augment their capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 13.11% better performance than the same-size base model and outperforms larger open-source and closed-source models. |
Prompt Refinement with Image Pivot for Text-to-Image Generation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text-to-image generation have markedly expanded the boundaries of digital artistry, enabling the creation of visually compelling images with unprecedented ease. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the prompt refinement process into two tasks: inferring user-preferred images from user languages and translating them into system languages. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that PRIP outperforms baselines and transfers to unseen systems in a zero-shot manner. |
A Compare Aggregate Transformer for Understanding Document-grounded Dialogue (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on KS in unstructured documents, but dialogue history that is not related to the current dialogue may introduce noise in the KS processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Compare Aggregate Transformer to jointly denoise the dialogue context and aggregate the document information for response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach and strong baselines on a CMU_DoG dataset. |
AGIF: An Adaptive Graph-Interactive Framework for Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on the single intent scenario, ignoring the fine-grained multiple intents information integration for token-level slot prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Graph-Interactive Framework for joint multiple intent detection and slot filling . they propose an intent-slot graph interaction layer to model the strong correlation between the slot and intents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three multi-intent datasets and new state-of-the-art performance on single-intention datasets. |
Generating Reasonable and Diversified Story Ending Using Sequence to Sequence Model with Adversarial Training (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Story generation is a challenging problem in artificial intelligence (AI) . previous work focused on learning statistical models of event sequences from large-scale text corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial training to generate reasonable story endings . their model includes a generator that defines the policy of generating a story ending . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance on the task of Story Cloze Test with an accuracy of 62.6% compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods. |
A Graph Enhanced BERT Model for Event Prediction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict subsequent events use sparsity of event graph to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically build event graph using a BERT model by adding a structured variable to the model to learn to predict event connections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two event prediction tasks. |
Learn to Combine Linguistic and Symbolic Information for Table-based Fact Verification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact verification lack attention to combine linguistic and symbolic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based reasoning approach that learns to combine linguistic and symbolic information effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can combine linguistic and symbolic information effectively. |
BIPEFT: Budget-Guided Iterative Search for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Pretrained Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning are limited by computational and storage requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a budget-guided iterative search strategy to disentangle binary module and rank dimension search spaces and early selection strategies based on parameter budgets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves search efficiency on public benchmarks. |
Knowledge Transfer in Incremental Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on overcoming catastrophic forgetting on original language pairs while lacking encouragement to learn new knowledge from incremental learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge transfer method that can adapt original MNMT models to diverse incremental language pairs by flexibly introducing knowledge from external models into original models, which encourages the models to learn new language pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on multiple languages while maintaining performance on original language pairs. |
Enhancing Content Planning for Table-to-Text Generation with Data Understanding and Verification (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Table-to-text models that select and order salient data and verbalize them fluently are lacking in content planning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance neural content planning by understanding data values with contextual numerical value representations that bring the sense of value comparison into content planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems with respect to content planning metrics on ROTOWIRE and MLB datasets. |
Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words (2022.coling-1)
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Haochun Wang, Chi Liu, Nuwa Xi, Sendong Zhao, Meizhi Ju, Shiwei Zhang, Ziheng Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Pre-trained models perform poorly with limited data and rare biomedical words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompt to fine-tune pre-trained models for biomedical domain tuning with a simple approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings. |
I run as fast as a rabbit, can you? A Multilingual Simile Dialogues Datasets (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | A simile is a figure of speech that compares two different things via shared properties. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual simile dialogue dataset that can be used to study similes in real-life scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest manually annotated simile dataset and contains both English and Chinese data. |
FroM: Frobenius Norm-Based Data-Free Adaptive Model Merging (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new adaptive merging method is proposed to improve fine-tuning performance . traditional methods often encounter task interference when merging full fine-uning models . |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive merging method that directly measures model parameters using the Frobenius norm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods in various fine-tuning scenarios. |
TinyJudge: Unverifiable Constraint Alignment via Lightweight Specialist Ensembles (2026.acl-long)
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Yirong Zeng, Yufei Liu, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Wu Ning, Haonan Song, Dandan Tu, Qixun Zhang, Yuxiang He, Bibo Cai, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Instruction Following (IF) is a core capability of LLMs, requiring strict adherence to diverse constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses tiny language models to evaluate instruction following . they propose to use a set of specialized tiny language model to provide rewards for soft constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models by 12% and speeds up training time by 3. |
Dynamic Connected Networks for Chinese Spelling Check (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese spelling check (CSC) is a task to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese text. |
| Approach: | They propose a new architecture which generates Chinese characters via a Pinyin Enhanced Candidate Generator and then utilizes an attention-based network to model the dependencies between two adjacent Chinese characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three human-annotated datasets. |
Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | IRNet synthesizes SQL queries in an end-to-end manner, but it yields unsatisfactory performance on public benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach called IRNet for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL. |
| Outcome: | IRNet achieves 46.7% accuracy on the Spider benchmark, a 19.5% improvement over state-of-the-art approaches. |
Benchmarking Meaning Representations in Neural Semantic Parsing (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on meaning representations is not comprehensively evaluated due to the lack of readily-available execution engines. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified benchmark on meaning representations by integrating existing semantic parsing datasets, completing the missing logical forms, and implementing the missing execution engines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines existing parsing datasets, completes missing logical forms, and implements missing execution engines. |