Papers by Tong Chen
Fast Prototyping a Dialogue Comprehension System for Nurse-Patient Conversations on Symptom Monitoring (N19-2)
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Zhengyuan Liu, Hazel Lim, Nur Farah Ain Suhaimi, Shao Chuen Tong, Sharon Ong, Angela Ng, Sheldon Lee, Michael R. Macdonald, Savitha Ramasamy, Pavitra Krishnaswamy, Wai Leng Chow, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | a limited amount of data exists for human-human spoken dialogues for research and development . a dialogue comprehension system that extracts clinical information from spoken conversations is clinically useful . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework inspired by nurse-initiated clinical symptom monitoring conversations to construct a simulated human-human dialogue dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves more than 80% F1 on held-out test set from nurse-to-patient conversations. |
UAQFact: Evaluating Factual Knowledge Utilization of LLMs on Unanswerable Questions (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets to assess LLMs' performance on unanswerable questions lack factual knowledge support. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual unanswerable question dataset with auxiliary factual knowledge created from a Knowledge Graph and two new tasks to measure LLMs' ability to utilize internal and external factual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that LLMs do not consistently perform well even when they have factual knowledge stored. |
Word Segmentation by Separation Inference for East Asian Languages (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is a sequence labeling task that divides sentences into words . despite diverse tagging schemas, they all carry implicit position information. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the separation state of every two consecutive characters by tagging them as two tags. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art on Japanese and Korean Word Segmentation datasets. |
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Ping Gong, Jiawei Yi, Shengnan Wang, Juncheng Zhang, Zewen Jin, Ouxiang Zhou, Ruibo Liu, Guanbin Xu, Youhui Bai, Bowen Ye, Kun Yuan, Tong Yang, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Feng Wu, Cheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
ALRPHFS: Adversarially Learned Risk Patterns with Hierarchical Fast & Slow Reasoning for Robust Agent Defense (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety checks fail to capture complex semantic risks posed by harmful user inputs or unsafe agent behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to bridge the semantic gap between safety checks and real-world risks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior overall performance compared to existing baselines. |
LadaBERT: Lightweight Adaptation of BERT through Hybrid Model Compression (2020.coling-main)
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Yihuan Mao, Yujing Wang, Chufan Wu, Chen Zhang, Yang Wang, Quanlu Zhang, Yaming Yang, Yunhai Tong, Jing Bai
| Challenge: | Existing models that use knowledge distillation are memory-intensive and latency-prohibitive . Existing solutions that use this knowledge distilling framework are expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a solution that uses weight pruning, matrix factorization and knowledge distillation to learn a smaller model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the training overheads by an order of magnitude on public datasets while preserving state-of-the-art accuracy. |
Modality Adaption or Regularization? A Case Study on End-to-End Speech Translation (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation models have limited training data and are often inefficient due to the inconsistency of length and representation between speech and text. |
| Approach: | They find that the "modality gap" between speech and text data is not a major problem in E2E ST . they decouple the encoder to speech encoder and text encoder, and they find that there is a 'capacity gap' |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 29.0 for en-de and 40.3 for fr on the MuST-C dataset. |
Doc-React: Multi-page Heterogeneous Document Question-answering (2025.acl-short)
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Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Sai Sree Harsha, Akash V Maharaj, Ruiyi Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Yunyao Li, Ritwik Sinha
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating information across multiple modalities are suboptimal for multi-page, multimodal documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive iterative framework that balances information gain and uncertainty reduction at each step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures relevant multimodal content and achieves strong performance on complex QA tasks. |
Think Wider, Detect Sharper: Reinforced Reference Coverage for Document-Level Self-Contradiction Detection (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to document-level contradiction detection (DSCD) only gain marginal improvement and often introduce inconsistencies across repeated responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enhance document-level contradiction detection (DSCD) they propose to use a task-specific reward function to expand the model’s reasoning scope, boosting both accuracy and consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly boosts Llama 3.1-8B-Instruct’s accuracy from 38.5% to 51.1%, and consistency from 59.6% to76.2%. |
Generate-on-Graph: Treat LLM as both Agent and KG for Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yao Xu, Shizhu He, Jiabei Chen, Zihao Wang, Yangqiu Song, Hanghang Tong, Guang Liu, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) however, these methods are often incomplete to cover all the knowledge required to answer questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to address insufficient knowledge and hallucination issues in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two datasets. |
From Lists to Emojis: How Format Bias Affects Model Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Format biases in reinforcement learning from human feedback are underexplored . despite its effectiveness, RLHF faces challenges, including policy and regulatory constraints . |
| Approach: | They extend the study of preference biases beyond verbosity bias to a wider range of format biase . they show that with a small amount of biased data, they can inject significant bias into the reward model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be easily exploited by large language models to achieve higher rankings on popular benchmarks like AlpacaEval and LMSYS Chatbot Arena. |
Explainable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: An Empirical Analysis on State-Aware Reasoning Dynamics (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Sheldon Yu, Yuxin Xiong, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Ritwik Sinha, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Recent advances in chain-of-thought prompting have demonstrated the ability of large language models to perform multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze latent dynamics of CoT trajectories for interpretability . they segment generated CoT into discrete reasoning steps and abstract each step into a spectral embedding based on token-level Gram matrices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework segments generated CoT steps into discrete reasoning steps, abstracts each step into a spectral embedding based on token-level Gram matrices, and clusters these embeddements into semantically meaningful latent states. |
MED-COREASONER: Reducing Language Disparities in Medical Reasoning via Language-Informed Co-Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Fan Gao, Sherry T. Tong, Jiwoong Sohn, Jiahao Huang, Junfeng Jiang, Ding Xia, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Hyunjae Kim, Qingyu Chen, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Kazuma Kobayashi, Akiko Aizawa, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing models that use English and local languages have a multilingual gap . a language-informed co-reasoning framework can be used to improve multilingual reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a language-informed co-reasoning framework that elicits parallel English and local-language reasoning and abstracts them into structured concepts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Med-CoReasoner improves multilingual reasoning performance by 5% . the framework produces clinically sound and culturally grounded reasoning traces . |
Incongruity-aware Tension Field Network for Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal sarcasm detection (MSD) identifies sarcasm and accurately understands users’ real attitudes from text-image pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use incongruity-aware tension field network to extract effective text-image feature pairs in fact and sentiment perspectives and construct a fact/sentiment tension field with discrepancy metrics to capture contextual tone and polarized inconcongruities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance surpassing LLaVA1.5-7B with only 17.3M trainable parameters, demonstrating its optimal performance-efficiency in multi-modal sarcasm detection tasks. |
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
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Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
Granular Entity Mapper: Advancing Fine-grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained content extraction are limited by long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and performance of object detectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity entity recognition module and a reranking module to integrate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the fine-grained content extraction task. |
Sub-Sentence Encoder: Contrastive Learning of Propositional Semantic Representations (2024.naacl-long)
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Sihao Chen, Hongming Zhang, Tong Chen, Ben Zhou, Wenhao Yu, Dian Yu, Baolin Peng, Hongwei Wang, Dan Roth, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Sentence embeddings are typically learned to recognize the semantic relation between two text inputs. |
| Approach: | They introduce a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to produce contextual embeddings corresponding to different atomic propositions, i.e. semantic equivalence between propositions across different text sequences. |
MultiCAT: Multimodal Communication Annotations for Teams (2025.findings-naacl)
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Adarsh Pyarelal, John M Culnan, Ayesha Qamar, Meghavarshini Krishnaswamy, Yuwei Wang, Cheonkam Jeong, Chen Chen, Md Messal Monem Miah, Shahriar Hormozi, Jonathan Tong, Ruihong Huang
| Challenge: | Recent flagship models from OpenAI and Google are only capable of 1-on-1 interactions with humans, limiting the potential for integration into human-machine teams of the future. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that allows team members to make multiple types of predictions on the same dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset builds upon data from teams working collaboratively to save victims in a simulated search and rescue mission. |
Improving Knowledge Graph Embedding Using Affine Transformations of Entities Corresponding to Each Relation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods use k-dimensional vectors to represent each entity in a knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose to use affine transformations to embed knowledge graphs using previous methods . they propose to add k additional variables to the existing methods to perform embedding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms RotatE, Distmult and ComplEx on various data sets. |
A Parameter-Efficient and Fine-Grained Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current vision-language models extract semantic information from large-scale cross-modal associations, limiting performance and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a detail-oriented prompt learning method to implement fine-grained multi-modal semantic alignment with merely 0.25M trainable parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method implements fine-grained multi-modal semantic alignment with merely 0.25M trainable parameters. |
SELECting over Tokens: Curating Pre-training Data at Scale via Token Classification (2026.acl-long)
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Xin Tong, Weidong Zhang, Jiaang Li, Haibin Chen, Shilei Liu, Langming Liu, Kangtao Lv, Yujin Yuan, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing pipelines rely on expert-crafted heuristic rules, which lack content-aware, fine-grained noise detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes data refinement as a highly efficient token classification task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing pipelines on benchmarks and is 2.5x faster at inference. |
CogToM: A Comprehensive Theory of Mind Benchmark inspired by Human Cognition for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Haibo Tong, Zeyang Yue, Feifei Zhao, Erliang Lin, Lu Jia, Ruolin Chen, Yinqian Sun, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited to false belief tasks, highlighting bottlenecks in specific dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' Theory of Mind capabilities . they evaluate 8000 bilingual instances across 46 paradigms and validated by 49 human annotators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals performance heterogeneities and bottlenecks in 22 representative models. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
dLLM: Simple Diffusion Language Modeling (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | diffusion language models (DLMs) are evolving rapidly but many lack transparent implementations or are scattered across codebases. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source framework that unifies diffusion language modeling components while remaining flexible enough to support new methods and architectures. |
| Outcome: | dLLM unifies the core components of diffusion language modeling and makes them easy to customize for new designs. |
Evolutionary Guided Decoding: Iterative Value Refinement for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for directing language model outputs are limited in their accuracy due to a distributional gap . existing methods train static value functions on trajectories sampled exclusively from the base policy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to bridge a distributional gap in the accuracy of value functions . they propose RLHF to align language models with human values and task requirements . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces computational costs and improves value function accuracy by leveraging principled value function optimization. |
MuSe: Multi-Stage Graph Reasoning via Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and graph transformers are inadequate for tasks with limited generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage graph reasoning framework based on vision-language models that incrementally samples and visualizes task-relevant subgraphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks in Graph-related tasks. |
Towards Order Fairness: Mitigating LLMs Order Sensitivity through Dual Group Advantage Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies attempt to obtain optimal or suboptimal arrangements based on statistical results or using dataset-based search, but these methods increase inference overhead while leaving the model’s inherent order bias unresolved. |
| Approach: | They propose Dual Group Advantage Optimization (DGAO) which aims to improve model accuracy and order stability simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model accuracy and order stability while penalizing order-sensitive or incorrect responses. |
Improving Relation Extraction with Relational Paraphrase Sentences (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing annotated data is expensive and non-scalable, limiting performance of relation extraction models. |
| Approach: | They propose to enrich relation expressions by relational paraphrase sentences by annotating human-annotated data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance even on a strong baseline. |
Transparentize the Internal and External Knowledge Utilization in LLMs with Trustworthy Citation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | citation generation and retrieval-augmented generation are still lacking in large language models due to hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented citation generation task that requires models to generate citations considering both external and internal knowledge while providing trustworthy references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance across scenarios compared to baselines . retrieval quality, question types, and model knowledge influence trustworthiness . |
CaMML: Context-Aware Multimodal Learner for Large Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a lightweight module for tuning large multimodal models is introduced . CaMML integrates contextual samples into large models, enabling them to make inferences . |
| Approach: | They introduce a lightweight module for tuning large multimodal models . they have developed two models that have shown exceptional performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LLaVA-1.5 on ten widely recognized datasets with a noticeable margin. |
EMRs2CSP : Mining Clinical Status Pathway from Electronic Medical Records (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current studies focus on extracting tests or treatments when constructing clinical pathways, neglecting the patient's symptoms and diagnosis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel clinical pathway representation: the clinical status pathway and a pipeline framework for extracting clinical status from electronic medical records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves extraction accuracy by modeling diagnostic and treatment processes and demonstrates significant improvements on medical question-answering and decision-support tasks. |
FedGUI: Benchmarking Federated GUI Agents across Heterogeneous Platforms, Devices, and Operating Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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WenHao Wang, Haoting Shi, Mengying Yuan, Yiquan Lin, Panrong Tong, Hanzhang Zhou, Guangyi Liu, Pengxiang Zhao, Yue Wang, Siheng Chen
| Challenge: | a lack of benchmarks capture real-world, cross-platform heterogeneity in GUI training . traditional methods to train GUI agents rely on centralized data collection and manual labeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for developing and evaluating federated GUI agents across mobile, web and desktop platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that cross-platform collaboration improves performance and identify platform and OS as the most influential factors. |
Mitigating Hallucinations of Large Language Models in Medical Information Extraction via Contrastive Decoding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhihong Zhu, Zhenxi Lin, Qidong Liu, Xian Wu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Medical Information Extraction (MIE) tasks are a fundamental component of medical NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative adaptive constraint strategy to adjust the scale and scope of contrastive tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach selectively enhances the identification and classification capabilities while minimizing the influence of other inherent abilities in LLMs. |
Revisiting Interpolation Augmentation for Speech-to-Text Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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Chen Xu, Jie Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qian Dong, Chunliang Zhang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Dapeng Man, Wu Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to speech-to-text generation tasks are limited by the lack of extensive labeled datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use interpolation augmentation to construct virtual training samples by transforming inputs and labels to enhance generalization in other domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves performance across diverse tasks, architectures, and data scales, offering a promising avenue for more robust S2T systems in resource-constrained settings. |
In-Context Former: Lightning-fast Compressing Context for Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce inference costs of transformer-based large language models entail quadratic complexity . et al., 2017): transformer-derived large language model performance is a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that compresses long contexts into short soft prompts . they use the self-attention mechanism of the large model to extract and condense information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces compression costs by 68 to 112 times while achieving 90% of baseline performance. |
VIGIL: Defending LLM Agents Against Tool-Stream Injection via Verify-Before-Commit (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses for indirect prompt injection are limited by static protection mechanisms . existing models prioritize injected rules due to strict alignment, whereas static protections sever the feedback loop required for adaptive reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the paradigm from restrictive isolation to a verify-before-commit protocol. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic defenses by reducing the attack success rate by over 22% while more thandoubling utility under attack compared to static baselines. |
Bridging the Granularity Gap for Acoustic Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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Chen Xu, Yuhao Zhang, Chengbo Jiao, Xiaoqian Liu, Chi Hu, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Huizhen Wang, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Despite the success of speech recognition, how to encode the speech features effectively remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a Progressive Down-Sampling technique which compresses acoustic features into coarser-grained units containing more complete semantic information, like text-level representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields comparable or better results on the speech recognition task and inference speedups ranging from 1.20x to 1.47x. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
Syntax-BERT: Improving Pre-trained Transformers with Syntax Trees (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models like BERT achieve superior performances in various NLP tasks without explicit consideration of syntactic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that incorporates syntax trees into pre-trained Transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on pre-trained models on natural language understanding datasets and shows that it can be used to train pre-structured neural networks. |
Unlocking Multilingual Reasoning Capability of LLMs and LVLMs through Representation Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Qiming Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Yixuan Ma, Ruihan Chen, Zihe Tong, Zekai Ye, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Haoyu Ren, Kun Chen, Yunfei Lu, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance multilingual reasoning capabilities rely on costly multilingual training or employ prompting with external translation tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference-time method to enhance multilingual reasoning capabilities via Representation Engineering without additional training data or tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on four reasoning benchmarks in English and Thai and Swahili. |
AFMRL: Attribute-Enhanced Fine-Grained Multi-Modal Representation Learning in E-commerce (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal representation is crucial for E-commerce tasks such as identical product retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach which leverages the generative power of Multimodal Large Language Models to extract key attributes from product images and text and enhances representation learning through a two-stage training framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple downstream retrieval tasks, validating the effectiveness of harnessing generative models to advance fine-grained representation learning. |
MotivGraph-SoIQ: Integrating Motivational Knowledge Graphs and Socratic Dialogue for Enhanced LLM Ideation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have limitations in grounding ideas and mitigating confirmation bias during refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a Motivational Knowledge Graph with a Q-Driven Socratic Ideator to enhance LLM ideation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances LLM ideation by integrating a Motivational Knowledge Graph with a Q-Driven Socratic Ideator. |
Streamlining the Collaborative Chain of Models into A Single Forward Pass in Generation-Based Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in "Chain of Models" approach increase resource demands as each model must be deployed separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-tuning method that enables models to share hidden states . they modify input and attention masks during training to eliminate redundant forward passes . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that FTHSS matches the performance of traditional model chains while improving inference efficiency. |
Mind Reader: Latent User Demand-Guided Content Optimization for Generative Search Engine (2026.acl-long)
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Tong Chen, JiaWei Guo, Yuxi Li, Baiming Chen, Houxing Ren, Zhang Zhiwei, Yunxiang Zhang, Hanyang Xia, Kun Liang, Zhaoran Fan
| Challenge: | Generative Search Engines (GSEs) have reshaped information retrieval and Generating Engine Optimization (GEO) emerges to improve the content visibility in GSEs’ responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize content to cover latent semantic information of GSEs by decomposing query into diverse perspectives and capturing underlying semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and effectively improves content visibility (with up to 2.44x objective metrics and 1.23x subjective metrics on average). |
TRACE: Two-Phase RL for Causal Graph Exploration and Deeper Psychological Intervention in Dynamic Counseling Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models lack the ability to actively explore the underlying causes of psychological distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase reinforcement learning framework that implements a causal-graph-driven reward scheme across two phases: an exploration phase that rewards the causal graph reconstruction following a surface-to-deep path, and an intervention phase that supports targeted restructuring of irrational beliefs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that TRACE outperforms existing models, enabling causal-chain-aware psychological intervention beyond surface-level empathy. |
Knowledge Graph Embedding by Adaptive Limit Scoring Loss Using Dynamic Weighting Strategy (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding models use a loss framework to distinguish between correct and incorrect triplets. |
| Approach: | They propose a loss framework that reweights each triplet to highlight the less-optimized triplets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs on several knowledge graph embedding models, including TransE, TransH and ComplEx. |
Multi-level Association Refinement Network for Dialogue Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying quadruples rely on predefined dialogue structure and word semantics to achieve accurate and comprehensive sentiment associations between utterances and words. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level association refinement network to achieve more accurate sentiment associations between utterances and words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance under low-resource conditions. |
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks. |
A Multi-Task Approach for Improving Biomedical Named Entity Recognition by Incorporating Multi-Granularity information (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural named entity recognition (BioNER) methods require large amount of annotated data, while the annotating BioNER datasets are often difficult to obtain and small in scale due to the limitations of privacy, ethics and high degree of specialization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes latent multi-granularity information in annotated bioNER datasets to alleviate the lack of training samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over the BioBERT baseline and can get more than 3% improvement of F1score in low-resource scenarios. |
Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, the generalization issues hinder the applicability of neural table-to-text models due to the limited source tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-structureaware text generation model with pretrained language model and propose TASD to bridge the gap between the structured table and text input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between the structured table and text input and generates accurate and fluent descriptive texts on two public datasets. |
When Generative Adversarial Networks Meet Sequence Labeling Challenges (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for sequence labeling use a feature extractor and sequence tagger . a recent study shows that SLGAN is versatile and highly effective . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harnesses the capabilities of Generative Adversarial Networks to address sequence labeling challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exhibits strong adaptability to various sequence labeling tasks. |
Learning How and What to Memorize: Cognition-Inspired Two-Stage Optimization for Evolving Memory (2026.acl-long)
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Derong Xu, Shuochen Liu, Pengfei Luo, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Yi Wen, Yimin Deng, Wenlin Zhang, Enhong Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems rely on static, hand-crafted update rules for personalization, but sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstable long-horizon optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory guideline optimization framework that learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning abilities when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize Chain-of-X methods by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks, and then categorise them by taxanomies and discuss potential future directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorised by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks. |
Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on neural machine translation (NMT) has demonstrated impressive performance improvements and became the de-facto standard. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic curriculum learning method to reorder training samples in training using a Transformer-based system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three low-resource machine translation benchmarks and different sized data of WMT’16 En-De. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
Bypassing Neural Evaluations for Fast Audio Editing via Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaoqian Liu, Zhengkun Ge, Jianjin Wang, Haoran Zhang, Yuan Ge, Kaiyan Chang, Chen Xu, Tong Xiao, Zhengtao Yu, Linfeng Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-audio editing via inversion techniques, but these models typically rely on dense, fixed-step sampling trajectories to maintain structural integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation framework that accelerates inversion-based editing process by dynamically evaluating only the most critical generative phases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a 3.9 speedup with negligible loss in fidelity. |
Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Non-collaborative dialogue agents are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, and this poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) the inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning; 2) the difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm into a non-collaborative dialogue agent for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to achieve a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives. |
CiteLab: Developing and Diagnosing LLM Citation Generation Workflows via the Human-LLM Interaction (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for enabling Large Language Models to generate citations are lacking . however, they can still produce hallucinated responses that are non-factual or irrelevant to the input. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source and modular framework for enabling LLMs to generate citations in Question-Answering tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is extensible and paired with a visual interface, Citefix, facilitating case study and modification of existing citation generation methods. |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Xiaoqian Liu, Xiaowen Liu, Qingxuan Sun, Yuhao Zhang, Murun Yang, Qianqian Dong, Tom Ko, Mingxuan Wang, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (E2E ST) and non-autoregressive (NAR) generation are promising in language and speech processing for their advantages of less error propagation and low latency. |
| Approach: | They develop a model that uses connectionist temporal classification to predict the source and target texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average BLEU score of 29.5 with a speed-up of 5.67. |
OMIBench: Benchmarking Olympiad-Level Multi-Image Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Qiguang Chen, Chengyu Luan, Jiajun Wu, Qiming Yu, Yi Yang, Yizhuo Li, Jingqi Tong, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal reasoning benchmarks for large vision-language models emphasize single-image analysis and fail to exploit contextual information across multiple images. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Olympiad-level reasoning when evidence is distributed over multiple images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on bi-image Olympiads and Gemini-3-Pro on multimodal Olympiad-level reasoning tasks. |
FGraDA: A Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation (2022.lrec-1)
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Wenhao Zhu, Shujian Huang, Tong Pu, Pingxuan Huang, Xu Zhang, Jian Yu, Wei Chen, Yanfeng Wang, Jiajun Chen
| Challenge: | Recent research on domain adaptation neglects diversity in translation within a domain . current research on NMT models considers very broad target domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained domain adaptation task for autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is compared with a dataset of Chinese-English translation tasks for four sub-domains of information technology: autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. |
PAPERMIND: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yanjun Zhao, Tianxin Wei, Jiaru Zou, Xuying Ning, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Simmi Rana, Wendy H. Yang, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning in isolation . Existing systems assess integrated reasoning in isolated tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over research papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over scientific papers. |
CLAMBER: A Benchmark of Identifying and Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Tong Zhang, Peixin Qin, Yang Deng, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei, Junhong Liu, Dingnan Jin, Hongru Liang, Tat-Seng Chua
| Challenge: | Large language models are used to meet user information needs, but their effectiveness in dealing with user queries that contain various types of ambiguity remains unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating large language models using a well-organized taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a well-organized taxonomy and compares it with other models. |
BPO: Towards Balanced Preference Optimization between Knowledge Breadth and Depth in Alignment (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is the key to the success of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to balance the number of prompts and responses to improve knowledge breadth and knowledge depth by introducing gradient-based clustering to estimate the knowledge informativeness and usefulness of each augmented sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods while maintaining training efficiency. |
Landmark Embedding: A Chunking-Free Embedding Method For Retrieval Augmented Long-Context Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmentation work with chunked contexts, which leads to poor quality of semantic representation and incomplete retrieval of useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for retrieval augmentation of long-context language modeling using landmark embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing retrieval methods with a notable advantage. |
Multi-Scale Prompt Memory-Augmented Model for Black-Box Scenarios (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot text classification require numerous LMs’ calls to search optimal prompts, thus resulting in overfitting performance and increasing computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale knowledge prompt-based memory model that extracts instance-level and class-level knowledge and stores them in memory banks during training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on different benchmarks and parameter analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MuSKPrompt in black-box few-shot text classification tasks. |
Rethinking Multiple-Choice Questions for RLVR: Unlocking Potential via Distractor Design (2026.findings-acl)
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Xu Guo, Qiming Ge, Jian Tong, Kedi Chen, Jin Zhang, Xiaogui Yang, Xuan Gao, Haijun Lv, Zhihui Lu, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RLVR use multiple-choice questions as verifiable rewards . however, not all tasks provide reliable verification . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that actively constructs high-quality distractors to block elimination shortcuts and promote deep reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. |
UniGeo: Unifying Geometry Logical Reasoning via Reformulating Mathematical Expression (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on geometry problem solving treats calculation and proving as two specific tasks hindering a deep model to unify reasoning ability on multiple math tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Unified Geometry problem benchmark to unify geometry on multiple math tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing model with 5.6% and 3.2% accuracies on calculation and proving problems. |
From Long Videos to Engaging Clips: A Human-Inspired Video Editing Framework with Multimodal Narrative Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Xiao Li, Yadong Wei, null Songxueyu, Yang Song, null Xiaxiaoqiang, Fangrui Zeng, Zaiyi Chen, null Liuliu, Gu Xu, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video editing rely on textual cues from ASR transcripts and segment selection, often neglecting rich visual context. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-inspired automatic video editing framework that leverages multimodal narrative understanding to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines across general and advertisement-oriented editing tasks. |
SMEC:Rethinking Matryoshka Representation Learning for Retrieval Embedding Compression (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate high-dimensional embeddings that capture rich semantic and syntactic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework to reduce dimensionality and complexity of large language models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on image, text, and multimodal datasets show that the proposed training framework reduces dimensionality while maintaining performance. |
Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) encoders lack global context representation, whereas MT encoder lacks it. |
| Approach: | They propose a Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding method for speech translation . they propose an adaptor module to alleviate representation inconsistency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 18.3 and 25.2 on two ST tasks. |
Multimodal Pragmatic Jailbreak on Text-to-image Models (2025.acl-long)
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Tong Liu, Zhixin Lai, Jiawen Wang, Gengyuan Zhang, Shuo Chen, Philip Torr, Vera Demberg, Volker Tresp, Jindong Gu
| Challenge: | Existing jailbreaks for diffusion-based text-to-image models generate unsafe content . experimental results show that all tested models suffer from unsafe generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak that triggers diffusion-based text-to-image models to generate the image with visual text, resulting in unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates image with visual text, but the model is unsafe under such jailbreak. |
AMoPO: Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization without Reward Models and Reference Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Qi Liu, Jingqing Ruan, Hao Li, Haodong Zhao, Desheng Wang, Jiansong Chen, Wan Guanglu, Xunliang Cai, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models face limitations such as auxiliary reward/reference models and computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions by using dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 28.5% . |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
Visualization Recommendation with Prompt-based Reprogramming of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Traditional visualization recommendations require extensive manual maintenance and yet fail to fully comprehend tabular data. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical table prompt-based reprogramming framework that integrates tabular data into LLMs through a strategically crafted prompt learning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and will be made publicly available upon acceptance. |
MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Xiang Yue, Tianyu Zheng, Yuansheng Ni, Yubo Wang, Kai Zhang, Shengbang Tong, Yuxuan Sun, Botao Yu, Ge Zhang, Huan Sun, Yu Su, Wenhu Chen, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models have led to progress in tackling complex reasoning tasks that combine textual and visual information. |
| Approach: | They introduce a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs lower on MMMU-Pro than on the previous benchmark, ranging from 16.8% to 26.9%. |
R-Tuning: Instructing Large Language Models to Say ‘I Don’t Know’ (2024.naacl-long)
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Hanning Zhang, Shizhe Diao, Yong Lin, Yi Fung, Qing Lian, Xingyao Wang, Yangyi Chen, Heng Ji, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning force the model to complete a sentence no matter whether it knows the knowledge or not. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to tuning large language models to refrain from answering questions beyond its parametric knowledge by identifying the disparity in parametric and parametric information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves a model’s ability to answer known questions and refrain from answering unknown questions. |
Unexpected Phenomenon: LLMs’ Spurious Associations in Information Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Weiyan Zhang, Wanpeng Lu, Jiacheng Wang, Yating Wang, Lihan Chen, Haiyun Jiang, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Information extraction (IE) tasks require a limited number of example instructions to achieve effective performance. |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies to find spurious associations in large language models (LLMs) they use forward label extension and backward label validation to leverage extended labels to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on Chinese and English datasets and 9.55%, 11.42%, and 21.27% in F1 scores on SciERC, ACE05, and DuEE datasets. |
An Orthogonal High-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) efficiently adapts LLMs to downstream tasks by decomposing LLM’s weight update into trainable low-rank matrices for fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal high-rank adaptation for parameter-efficient fine-tuning that decomposes LLMs’ pre-trained weight matrices into orthogonals via QR decomposition and splits them into two low-redundancy high-ranked components. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that OHoRA outperforms LoRA and its variants and generates task-tailored representation spaces with 0.0371% trainable parameters. |
Double-Checker: Large Language Model as a Checker for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated remarkable performance on few-shot Named Entity Recognition tasks due to the high cost of obtaining high-quality labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the task into entity span detection and entity type classification using a type-independent entity span detector and then classify the detected spans based on their types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently yields improvements over two baseline approaches. |
TWIST: Text-encoder Weight-editing for Inserting Secret Trojans in Text-to-Image Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Trojan attacks require extensive training data and poor generalization, limiting effectiveness and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for embedding Trojans into plugins using a single edit layer . they find that the method reduces modified parameters by 8-fold and cuts injection time to 25 seconds . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average attack success rate of 91%, a 78% improvement over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method. |
VIRT: Improving Representation-based Text Matching via Virtual Interaction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that representation-based text matching methods suffer from performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual interaction mechanism that enables deep interaction between texts . they propose 'inteRacTion mechanism' that can be integrated into existing methods as plugins . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on six text matching benchmarks. |
Collaborative Policy Learning for Open Knowledge Graph Reasoning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of knowledge graph reasoning suffer from limited performance when working on sparse and incomplete graphs due to the lack of evidential paths that can reach target entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train two collaborative agents to reason for missing facts over a graph augmented by a text corpus. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two public datasets show the proposed approach is effective on a knowledge graph reasoning task. |
CopyBench: Measuring Literal and Non-Literal Reproduction of Copyright-Protected Text in Language Model Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Tong Chen, Akari Asai, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Sewon Min, James Grimmelmann, Yejin Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on literal copying, but current methods reduce literal copy but not non-literal copying. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to measure literal and non-literal copying in LMs . they use copyrighted fiction books as text sources to assess literal copying . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model measures literal and non-literal copying in copyrighted texts . large models show significantly more copying, with literal copying rates increasing . |
Mirror: A Universal Framework for Various Information Extraction Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
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Tong Zhu, Junfei Ren, Zijian Yu, Mengsong Wu, Guoliang Zhang, Xiaoye Qu, Wenliang Chen, Zhefeng Wang, Baoxing Huai, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies often formulate IE tasks as a triplet extraction problem, but this paradigm does not support multi-span and n-ary extraction, leading to weak versatility. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-span cyclic graph extraction problem and a non-autoregressive graph decoding algorithm to extract all spans in a single step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or reaches competitive performance with SOTA systems under few-shot and zero-shot settings and it is compatible with 57 datasets. |
CogMG: Collaborative Augmentation Between Large Language Model and Knowledge Graph (2024.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to generating hallucinated content and often encompass factually inaccurate information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages knowledge graphs to address the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) they identify and decompose required knowledge triples that are not present in the KG, enriching them and aligning updates with real-world demands. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucinations and increases factual accuracy in QA scenarios while retaining the same quality of knowledge. |
Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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Paiheng Xu, Gang Wu, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Chang Xiao, Franck Dernoncourt, Tianyi Zhou, Wei Ai, Viswanathan Swaminathan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, but runtime code generation is limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset by exploiting large language models and publicly available scripting guides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. |
PAMN: Multi-phase Correlation Modeling for Contrast-Enhanced 3D Medical Image Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current 3D medical imaging models focus on spatial features, neglecting phase-specific progression detailed in clinical reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fuses imaging phases with clinical text to enhance 3D medical image retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on a phase-series dataset of 12,230 hospital CT scans. |
DocEE: A Large-Scale and Fine-grained Benchmark for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets focus on sentence-level event extraction, but document-level EE is limited due to the lack of large-scale and practical training and evaluation datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event extraction dataset with 27,000+ events and 180,000+ arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 27,000+ events, 180,000+ arguments and large-scale manual annotations, fine-grained argument types and application-oriented settings. |
Adaptive Simultaneous Sign Language Translation with Confident Translation Length Estimation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-simultaneous sign language translation methods suffer from inherent inference delays in real-time scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive policy for simultaneous sign language translation that progressively converts incrementally received sign video into its corresponding natural sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed policy excels in situations requiring extremely low latency. |
Non-Autoregressive Translation by Learning Target Categorical Codes (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive text generation models still fall behind in translation quality . authors propose a model that learns implicitly categorical codes as latent variables . |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive Transformer model that implicitly categorizes latent variables into decoding . they find it improves translation quality by introducing more informative decoder inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or better performance in machine translation tasks than strong baselines. |
MixGR: Enhancing Retriever Generalization for Scientific Domain through Complementary Granularity (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show the importance of document retrieval in the scientific domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach to measure query-document similarity using atomic components in queries and documents to combine them into a united score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous document retrieval methods by 24.7%, 9.8%, and 6.9% on nDCG@5 with unsupervised, supervised, and LLM-based retrievers. |
Retrieve-Plan-Generation: An Iterative Planning and Answering Framework for Knowledge-Intensive LLM Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often produce factual errors due to limited internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that generates plan tokens to guide subsequent generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of large language models with external knowledge sources. |
Learning to Refuse: Towards Mitigating Privacy Risks in LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating natural languages, but can inadvertently memorize private information, posing significant privacy risks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to evaluate machine unlearning methods for protecting personal data in a realistic scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods by 5.65 points and protects target individuals’ personal data while maintaining general capabilities. |
On the Vulnerability of Text Sanitization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reconstruction attacks on text sanitization are not able to accurately assess their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ASR to measure the effectiveness of reconstruction attacks to evaluate sanitization performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reconstruction attacks achieve a 46.4% improvement in ASR over the state-of-the-art baseline with a privacy budget of =4.0 on the SST-2 dataset. |
MoPE: Mixture of Prefix Experts for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot dialogue state tracking models suffer from domain transferring and partial prediction problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to establish connections between similar slots in different domains to improve model transfer performance in unseen domains. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model achieves the goal accuracy of 57.13% on MultiWOZ2.1 and 55.4. |
DynamicNER: A Dynamic, Multilingual, and Fine-Grained Dataset for LLM-based Named Entity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hanjun Luo, Yingbin Jin, Yiran Wang, Xinfeng Li, Tong Shang, Xuecheng Liu, Ruizhe Chen, Kun Wang, Hanan Salam, Qingsong Wen, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets designed for Named Entity Recognition methods are inadequate for LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that is multilingual and multi-granular and enables LLMs to be applied to Named Entity Recognition methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is multilingual and multi-granular, covering 8 languages and 155 entity types, with corpora spanning a diverse range of domains. |
Learning Hierarchy-Aware Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings with Representing Relations as 3D Rotations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding models fail to model semantic hierarchies . Existing methods fail to understand the semantic hierarchies of knowledge graphs . |
| Approach: | They propose a model which embeds entities as pure quaternions and constrains the modulus of entities to make them have hierarchical distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, composition, multiple relation patterns and learn semantic hierarchies simultaneously. |
Diversity Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: Structural Coupling and Collective Failure in Open-Ended Idea Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used for open-ended idea generation . when and why collective interaction expands the solution space remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to study diversity in multi-agent systems across three bottom-up levels: model intelligence, agent cognition, and system dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields diminishing diversity despite higher quality . the proposed model fails to expand diversity and causes it to collapse . |
CoMeT: Collaborative Memory Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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Runsong Zhao, Shilei Liu, Jiwei Tang, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yujin Yuan, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity is a major barrier to long-context processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
CANDY: Benchmarking LLMs’ Limitations and Assistive Potential in Chinese Misinformation Fact-Checking (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | CANDY is a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs) for fact-checking misinformation. |
| Approach: | a team of researchers develop a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of large language models in fact-checking misinformation in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | CANDY is a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of large language models in fact-checking misinformation in China. |
KGA: A General Machine Unlearning Framework Based on Knowledge Gap Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent legislation of the "right to be forgotten" has led to the interest in machine unlearning . MU can be used to forget specific training instances as if they have never existed . |
| Approach: | They propose a general unlearning framework called KGA to induce forgetfulness . they propose several unlearning evaluation metrics with pertinence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on large-scale datasets and provides insight into unlearning for NLP tasks. |
Following Occam’s Razor: Dynamic Combination of Structured Knowledge for Multi-Hop Question Answering using LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering is a challenging task that requires capturing information from multiple positions in multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for integrating text-based and triple-based paradigms that incorporates structured knowledge into large-scale question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multi-hop question answering by incorporating structured knowledge into the models. |
FCGCL: Fine- and Coarse-Granularity Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform implicit knowledge transfer from machine translation to ST model are difficult because of the task complexity and data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They recommend a method which conducts explicit knowledge transfer from MT to ST model by fine and coarse granularity contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the end-to-end speech translation model on all 8 languages. |
MobileWorld: Benchmarking Autonomous Mobile Agents in Agent-User Interactive and MCP-Augmented Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Quyu Kong, Xu Zhang, Zhenyu Yang, Nolan Gao, Chen Liu, Panrong Tong, Chenglin Cai, Hanzhang Zhou, Jianan Zhang, Liangyu Chen, Zhidan Liu, Steven Hoi, Yue Wang
| Challenge: | AndroidWorld is the dominant mobile GUI agent evaluation benchmark, but its success rates are low . despite reproducible emulator environment, it lacks key application categories such as e-commerce and enterprise communication. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for mobile GUI agents that reflects real-world usage through long-horizon, cross-application workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves over 90% success rates, while AndroidWorld is the dominant benchmark. |
Think and Recall: Layer-Level Prompting for Lifelong Model Editing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for lifelong model editing suffer from limitations in usability, such as requiring additional training corpora or lacking support for reversible and detachable edits. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method for knowledge retrieval and storage, i.e., Layer-Level Prompting, which enables seamless and efficient lifelong model editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on question answering and hallucination benchmarks across different LLMs. |
AlignDistil: Token-Level Language Model Alignment as Adaptive Policy Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for LLM alignment optimize tokens using a sparse, response-level reward or preference annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose an RLHF-equivalent distillation method for token-level reward optimization that incorporates the reward learned by DPO into the RLHG objective and builds a token-based teacher distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the accuracy gap between the reward from the DPO model and the pure reward model by building a contrastive DPO reward with a normal and a reverse DPO. |
Empirical Analysis of Decoding Biases in Masked Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Pengcheng Huang, Tianming Liu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Tong Xiao, Zulong Chen, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing MDMs employ uncertainty-based decoding strategies that limit their reasoning ability and ultimately degrade generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that regularizes uncertainty-based decoding by incorporating two complementary priors to shape global decoding trajectories and promote content informativeness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing decoding strategies by more than 7% while achieving comparable performance to autoregressive models of similar parameter scales. |
To Paraphrase or Not: Efficient Comment Detoxification with Unsupervised Detoxifiability Discrimination (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detoxification of toxic comments are limited by overcorrection and data scarcity . experimental results show that DID outperforms existing methods on academic data and an industrial platform . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that adaptively conducts filtering or paraphrasing for each toxic comment based on its detoxifiability . they propose 'detoxifiabilities-aware detoxification' that can be trained to filter or paraphrase toxic comments based upon their detoxifikatability based only on detoxificable comments . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that DID outperforms existing methods on academic and industrial data. |
NesTools: A Dataset for Evaluating Nested Tool Learning Abilities of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on nested tool learning are lacking relevant data instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct large-scale nested tool calls with different nesting structures using a large-quality dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to evaluate the nested tool learning abilities of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. |
CoMMIT: Coordinated Multimodal Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xintong Li, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Jiuxiang Gu, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang
| Challenge: | et al., 2024) show that multimodal instruction tuning is more effective than baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal balance coefficient that enables quantitative measurement of the balance of learning . they propose auxiliary regularization on the gradient to promote updating with larger step sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more effective than baselines in MLLM instruction tuning. |
MedFact: A Large-scale Chinese Dataset for Evidence-based Medical Fact-checking of LLM Responses (2025.emnlp-main)
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Tong Chen, Zimu Wang, Yiyi Miao, Haoran Luo, Sun Yuanfei, Wei Wang, Zhengyong Jiang, Procheta Sen, Jionglong Su
| Challenge: | Existing medical fact-checking datasets focus on human-generated content, leaving the verification of content generated by large language models (LLMs) relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese medical fact-checking datasets to verify LLM-generated medical content by combining in-context learning and fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The first evidence-based Chinese medical fact-checking dataset of LLM-generated medical content consists of 1,321 questions and 7,409 claims . |
ELABORATION: A Comprehensive Benchmark on Human-LLM Competitive Programming (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on human-LLM competitive programming use scattered, application-specific human feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of human feedback consolidating the entire programming process, which promotes fine-grained evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark pinpoints strengths and weaknesses of existing methods and will be openly released. |
PretrainRL: Alleviating Factuality Hallucination of Large Language Models at the Beginning (2026.findings-acl)
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Langming Liu, Kangtao Lv, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yejing Wang, Shilei Liu, Xin Tong, Yujin Yuan, Yongwei Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from factual hallucinations where they generate verifiable falsehoods. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning into the pretraining phase to consolidate factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly alleviates factual hallucinations and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. |
Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are constrained by their fixed model capacities when the number of tasks grows in instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine all training tasks and apply fixed sampling weights without considering the importance of different tasks as the model training state changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used on knowledge & reasoning tasks and open-ended queries with limited training budget. |
Automatic ICD Coding via Interactive Shared Representation Networks with Self-distillation Mechanism (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ICD coding ignore the long-tail of code frequency or noisy clinical notes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an interactive shared representation network to model code co-occurrences while focusing on the clinical note's noteworthy part and extract valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism to solve the long-tail problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the long-tail of code frequency and noise in clinical notes and extracts valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism. |
MemRec: Collaborative Memory-Augmented Agentic Recommender System (2026.acl-long)
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Weixin Chen, Yuhan Zhao, Jingyuan Huang, Zihe Ye, Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Li Chen, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing recommender systems rely on semantic user and item memories to make predictions, but these memories are kept in isolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that architecturally decouples memory management from reasoning to decouple memory management and reasoning from the user and item memories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples memory management from reasoning and achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks. |
MolSafeEval: A Benchmark for Uncovering Safety Risks in AI-Generated Molecules (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | generative models may produce molecules with toxic, reactive, or otherwise hazardous characteristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate and analyze the safety risks of molecular generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to evaluate and analyze the safety risks of molecular generation. |
Towards Effective Automatic Debt Collection with Persona Awareness (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing debt collection agents fail to tailor strategies to debtor personas, leading to ineffective collection. |
| Approach: | They present a commercial practice on debt collection agents that organizes debtor personas into a taxonomy and constructs a persona-aware conversation dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent increases recovery rate by 3.31% and collects additional 100K RMB after two months of testing. |
Entity Resolution in Open-domain Conversations (2021.naacl-industry)
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Mingyue Shang, Tong Wang, Mihail Eric, Jiangning Chen, Jiyang Wang, Matthew Welch, Tiantong Deng, Akshay Grewal, Han Wang, Yue Liu, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Recent work on incorporating external knowledge into the response generation models has attracted great interest. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural entity linking approach to incorporate external knowledge into the response generation models to improve the relevancy of retrieved knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model by 62.8% relative to the baseline. |
Optimizing NLU Reranking Using Entity Resolution Signals in Multi-domain Dialog Systems (2021.naacl-industry)
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Tong Wang, Jiangning Chen, Mohsen Malmir, Shuyan Dong, Xin He, Han Wang, Chengwei Su, Yue Liu, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | In dialog systems, the Natural Language Understanding component makes the interpretation decision before the mentioned entities are resolved. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage Entity Resolution (ER) features in NLU reranking to learn model weights . they propose a score distribution matching method to ensure the models are calibrated . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model on multiple domain evaluations. |
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
| Challenge: | Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing timeline summarizations lack flexibility to meet diverse granularity needs . a fine-grained timeline showing the technical details is preferred for news topics . |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm to construct adaptive timelines based on user instructions or requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed timelines are informative and granularly consistent, but they struggle to generate consistent timelines. |
Non-Parametric Domain Adaptation for End-to-End Speech Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (E2E-ST) systems have received increasing attention due to its less error propagation, lower latency and fewer parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric method that leverages in-domain text translation corpus to achieve domain adaptation for E2E-ST systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing in-domain fine-tuning strategies on the Europarl-ST benchmark. |
Towards Explainable Diagnosis: A Self-learned Explanatory Knowledge Base Approach (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have great potential to facilitate explainable diagnosis, but their effectiveness is often constrained by insufficient diagnostic expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified LLM-based framework for faithful and explainable diagnosis that builds a high-quality diagnostic knowledge base through a record-driven explanation learning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the DiReCT and JAMA benchmarks and improves the explanation completeness metric from 64.5% to 76.9% over the best existing methods. |
Unlocking the Effectiveness of LoRA-FP for Seamless Transfer Implantation of Fingerprints in Downstream Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | lightweight plug-and-play framework that encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters . |
| Approach: | proposed framework encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters via constrained fine-tuning . enables seamless fingerprint transplantation through parameter fusion, eliminating full-parameter updates while maintaining integrity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior robustness against various scenarios while reducing computational overhead compared to traditional approaches. |
Prune as You Generate: Online Rollout Pruning for Faster and Better RLVR (2026.acl-long)
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Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Yuchen Yan, Chen Luo, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an online pruning method that prunes rollouts while steering correct ones to enhance learning signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves average accuracy by +2.30 to +2.99 across GRPO and DAPO on Qwen-3 and LLaMA-3.2 models. |
On the Limited Generalization Capability of the Implicit Reward Model Induced by Direct Preference Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yong Lin, Skyler Seto, Maartje Ter Hoeve, Katherine Metcalf, Barry-John Theobald, Xuan Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Chen Huang, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. |
| Approach: | They compare the accuracy of DPORM and EXRM with a reward function for scoring human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can approximate an EXRM on the limit infinite samples, but it is unclear how effective they are in practice. |
MRT: Multi-modal Short- and Long-range Temporal Convolutional Network for Time-sync Comment Video Behavior Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Using time-sync comments, it is difficult to understand user behavior due to complexity of interactions between users, videos, and comments. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel time-sync comment behavior prediction model that takes historical behavior into account and optimizes it on the basis of user preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of time-sync comments on visual frames and textual comments on two cats playing simultaneously. |
A Document-Level Neural Machine Translation Model with Dynamic Caching Guided by Theme-Rheme Information (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that inter-sentence information is helpful for improving the performance of document-level Neural Machine Translation models, but what information should be regarded as context remains ambiguous. |
| Approach: | They propose a cache-based document-level NMT model which conducts dynamic caching guided by theme-rheme information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art models on NIST evaluation sets. |
Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a learned dense retrieval model is often overlooked when using a corpus for inference, resulting in a design choice of retrieval unit . granularity of retrievals is important for both retrieval and downstream tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval unit for dense retrieval that uses propositions to index corpus . propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid . |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval unit outperforms passage-level units on retrieval and downstream tasks. |
GuiLoMo: Allocating Experts and Ranks for LoRA-MoE via Bilevel Optimization with GuidedSelection Vectors (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xinrong Chen, Hengyuan Zhang, Yingmin Qiu, Xiao Liang, Ziyue Li, Guanyu Wang, Weiping Li, Tong Mo, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) methods are efficient for a large language model with reduced computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise expert numbers and ranks allocation strategy with GuidedSelection Vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior or comparable performance to all baselines on three backbone models. |
DeCoT: Debiasing Chain-of-Thought for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks in Large Language Models via Causal Intervention (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In large language models, external knowledge is required to augment their internal knowledge through prompts, but this does not guarantee that LLMs can identify and use relevant information in the prompts to conduct chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a structural causal model to formally explain the internal knowledge bias of large language models (LLMs) they review the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting from a causal perspective and find that biased information from pretrained models can impair LLMs’ reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables more accurate CoT reasoning and enhances LLM generation on knowledge-intensive tasks. |
iPET: An Interactive Emotional Companion Dialogue System with LLM-Powered Virtual Pet World Simulation (2025.acl-demo)
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Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Zuozhu Liu, Zheyu Ye, Zihan Niu, Chonggang Lu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen, Zhe Xu, Yao Hu, Wei Lu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing emotional companion products lack sustained personalization and contextual adaptability, limiting their effectiveness in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual pet agent that can enhance user engagement through rich, dynamic pet behaviors and interactions tailored to individual preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has been deployed in a real-world, non-commercial product for 200 days and has demonstrated its effectiveness in practical applications. |
SciFlow-Bench: Evaluating Structure-Aware Scientific Diagram Generation via Inverse Parsing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for scientific diagram generation rely on image-centric metrics or evaluation of intermediate symbolic representations rather than final rendered images. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-first benchmark for evaluating scientific diagram generation from pixel-level outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates scientific diagram generation directly from pixel-level outputs. |
Rethinking and Improving Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | auxiliary tasks are highly consistent with end-to-end speech translation (ST) but their effectiveness has not been thoroughly studied. |
| Approach: | They propose an improved multi-task learning approach for the ST task that bridges the modal gap by mitigating the difference in length and representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the MuST-C dataset with 20.8% of training time required by the current SOTA method. |
Pre-training CLIP against Data Poisoning with Optimal Transport-based Matching and Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are vulnerable to data poisoning and backdoor attacks due to massive training image-caption pairs crawled from the Internet. |
| Approach: | They propose an Optimal Transport-based framework to reconstruct image-caption pairs and propose an optimal transport-based distance measure to re-assign new captions based on the proposed optimal transport distance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the attack success rates of poisoning attacks to 0% in most cases. |
BadActs: A Universal Backdoor Defense in the Activation Space (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks pose an increasingly severe security threat to Deep Neural Networks . existing methods focused on the word space are ineffective against feature-space triggers - a recent study has shown . |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor defense that purifies backdoor samples in the activation space . they aim to eliminate backdoor triggers while preserving the integrity of clean data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art against backdoor attacks on clean data. |
Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automated feature generation rely on predefined operator libraries and do not incorporate feature semantics, limiting their ability to produce high-quality features. |
| Approach: | They propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MALMAS) that decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. |
Securing Multi-turn Conversational Language Models From Distributed Backdoor Attacks (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have acquired the ability to handle longer context lengths and understand nuances in text, expanding their dialogue capabilities beyond a single utterance. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding time defense that scales linearly with the input sequence length and reduces the backdoor to as low as 0.35%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is generalizable, compatible with any trigger in an adversary’s toolbox in a plug-and-play manner. |
Probing Language Models for Pre-training Data Detection (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, while raising concerns about the data contamination due to privacy issues and leakage of benchmark datasets in the pre-training phase. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize the probing technique to examine the model’s internal activations to detect pre-training data contamination by examining the model's internal activates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both WikiMIA and ArxivMIA, with additional experiments confirming its efficacy. |
Privacy-Preserving Reasoning with Knowledge-Distilled Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG systems require uploading local documents to the cloud, resulting in inference latency and poor generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable knowledge-distilled parametric RAG model aligned with standard RAG in document structure and parameter activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in accuracy and generalizes well on out-of-distribution (OOD) data. |
Multi-perspective Improvement of Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhenxi Lin, Xian Wu, Zhihong Zhu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Knowledge graph completion (KGC) is a widely used method to tackle incompleteness in knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework to compensate for the deficiency of contextualized knowledge by querying large language models from various perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves knowledge graph completion (KGC) by querying large language models from various perspectives. |
Towards Accurate and Consistent Evaluation: A Dataset for Distantly-Supervised Relation Extraction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Distant Supervision (DS) generates large-scale annotated data but has wrong labels that result in incorrect evaluation scores during testing. |
| Approach: | They build a dataset using DS-generated data as training data and hire annotators to label test data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset NYTH has a much larger test set and performs more accurate and consistent evaluation. |
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Jian Yang, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |