Papers by Tong Zhang
Improving Knowledge Graph Completion with Generative Hard Negative Mining (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graph completion (KGC) use generative methods with a self-information-enhanced training strategy to generate high-quality negatives. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage a sequence-to-sequence architecture to generate high-quality hard negatives from the same decoding distributions as the anchor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality negatives with good hardness and diversity on three KGC benchmarks. |
AIDA-SEAT: Towards Reliable AI Doctor Assistant via State-Evaluation-Action Tree Enhanced LLMs in Online Hospital (2026.acl-industry)
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Lianxin Sun, Xiaoying Ying, Guangya Yu, Weiyan Zhang, Chenhao Guan, Hao He, Mingxi Shang, Jianhua Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on large language models or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) but these methods lack the explicit logical pathways essential for multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an AIDA-SEAT framework to provide reliable clinical decision-making support by transforming and modifying medical documents and doctors' state-evaluation-action trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.01% higher than current state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines across five departments, including common RAG-based methods. |
CP-BCS: Binary Code Summarization Guided by Control Flow Graph and Pseudo Code (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work on understanding assembly code is oriented towards generating function names, which involve numerous abbreviations that make them confusing. |
| Approach: | They propose a control flow graph and pseudo code guided binary code summarization framework to learn the comprehensive binary function execution behavior and logic semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of reverse engineering on 3 different binary optimization levels for 3 different computer architectures. |
From Selection to Refinement: Iterative Optimization for Instruction Data (2026.acl-long)
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Hang Hu, Ziyan Liu, Rujie Wen, Ruihui Hou, Xueyan Wu, Mu Zhang, Jianxing Yu, Tong Ruan, Jingping Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize instruction tuning datasets face two main challenges: unreasonable pruning of potentially valuable low-quality data and the persistence of noise or semantic drift during revision. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated iterative framework for instruction data optimization that prunes low-quality data and refines low quality data using feedback-driven iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on seven public benchmark datasets with high data efficiency. |
CodeJudge: Evaluating Code Generation with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in code generation, but how to reliably evaluate code generated by LLMs remains a challenging problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to evaluate the semantic correctness of generated code without the need for test cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four code generation datasets and five programming languages. |
Improving Chinese Word Segmentation with Wordhood Memory Networks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Contextual features are important in Chinese word segmentation (CWS) but it is difficult to integrate wordhood information into existing neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural framework that integrates contextual wordhood information with several popular encoder-decoder combinations for Chinese word segmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmark datasets. |
MLLM-Protector: Ensuring MLLM’s Safety without Hurting Performance (2024.emnlp-main)
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Renjie Pi, Tianyang Han, Jianshu Zhang, Yueqi Xie, Rui Pan, Qing Lian, Hanze Dong, Jipeng Zhang, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | MLLMs are deployed on limited image-text pairs, which makes them more vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting of their original abilities during safety fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play strategy that detects harmful visual inputs and transforms harmful ones into harmless ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates the risks posed by malicious visual inputs without compromising the original performance of MLLMs. |
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. |
Leveraging Unit Language Guidance to Advance Speech Modeling in Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuhao Zhang, Xiangnan Ma, Kaiqi Kou, Peizhuo Liu, Weiqiao Shan, Benyou Wang, Tong Xiao, Yuxin Huang, Zhengtao Yu, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing textless speech-to-speech translation models have two main challenges: 1) learning cross-modal features and 2) learning alignment of difference languages in long sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unit language to overcome two main modeling challenges . they propose task prompt modeling to utilize the unit language in guiding the modeling process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language improves over a strong baseline and achieves comparable performance to models trained with text. |
ZEN: Pre-training Chinese Text Encoder Enhanced by N-gram Representations (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained text encoders can perform many NLP tasks with less resource. |
| Approach: | They propose a BERT-based Chinese text encoder enhanced by n-gram representations . they show reasonable performance when ZEN is trained on a small corpus . |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoder incorporates the comprehensive information of both the character sequence and words or phrases it contains. |
PunMemeCN: A Benchmark to Explore Vision-Language Models’ Understanding of Chinese Pun Memes (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pun memes combine wordplay with visual elements to create humor, irony, or other rhetorical effects. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess Chinese pun memes' processing capabilities across three progressive tasks: pun meme detection, sentiment analysis, and chat-driven meme response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect pun memes, analyze sentiments, and respond to chats, while ignoring homophone wordplay. |
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. |
Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps (2022.naacl-main)
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Jiangang Bai, Yujing Wang, Hong Sun, Ruonan Wu, Tianmeng Yang, Pengfei Tang, Defu Cao, Mingliang Zhang1, Yunhai Tong, Yaming Yang, Jing Bai, Ruofei Zhang, Hao Sun, Wei Shen
| Challenge: | Existing works of knowledge infusion depend on multi-task learning frameworks, which are inefficient and require large-scale retraining when new knowledge is considered. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates knowledge-generated attention maps into the self-attention mechanism and integrates it into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on academic datasets and industry-scale ad relevance applications. |
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. |
How to Train a Real-World Silicon Concierge? Internalizing Complex Business Workflow to Only OneModel (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Traditional industrial agents rely on modular workflows that fracture into a labyrinth of ad-hoc patches, leading to cascading errors and high latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shift from external workflows to internalized knowledge representation that consolidates complex business logic and SOPs directly into the model’s parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model breaks the impossible triangle of latency, accuracy, and complexity. |
CachePrune: Teaching LLMs What Not to Follow via KV-Cache Editing (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models exhibit critical vulnerability to indirect prompt injection attacks, where instructions injected within in the prompt context can override the user's intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural pruning algorithm that prunes neurons associated with instruction-following during KV cache encoding of the prompt context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces the attack success rate while preserving the model's ability to follow user instructions. |
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%. |
TensorOpera Router: A Multi-Model Router for Efficient LLM Inference (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Dimitris Stripelis, Zhaozhuo Xu, Zijian Hu, Alay Shah, Han Jin, Yuhang Yao, Jipeng Zhang, Tong Zhang, Salman Avestimehr, Chaoyang He
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a diverse set of domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-monolithic LLM querying system that seamlessly integrates various LLM experts into a single query interface and dynamically routes incoming queries to the most high-performant expert based on query’s requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves query efficiency by 40% and costs by 30% while maintaining or enhancing model performance by 10%. |
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. |
Disentangle to Decay: Linear Attention with Trainable Decay Factor (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing linear attention models use a decay factor based positional encoding (PE), but the decay factor is manually designed and non-trainable, limiting further optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a PE-based positional encoding that disentangles decay factor into two parts to achieve further optimization and stable training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves stable training of decay factor and improves inference efficiency in normal context and extrapolation scenarios. |
Self-Debiasing Large Language Models: Zero-Shot Recognition and Reduction of Stereotypes (2025.naacl-short)
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Isabel O. Gallegos, Ryan Aponte, Ryan A. Rossi, Joe Barrow, Mehrab Tanjim, Tong Yu, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Deonna Owens, Jiuxiang Gu
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit harmful social biases, but they are often difficult to train and modify. |
| Approach: | They leverage the zero-shot capabilities of large language models to reduce stereotyping . they introduce a technique called zero- shot self-debiasing to reduce bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique reduces stereotyping across nine different social groups while relying on the LLM itself and a simple prompt. |
ExpertIVS: Sociological Expert Driven Individual Value Simulation in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhen Wang, Yuqi Ren, Yuehan Cui, Hongxiang Wang, Jianxiang Peng, Zhaoxia Zhang, Bingkun Zhu, Tongxuan Zhang, Dezhi Tong, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for social simulations mechanically stitch survey responses into prompts, which suffer from semantic fragmentation, failing to capture the internal coherence of human value systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework employing 14 Sociological Expert Agents to interpret World Values Survey responses through structured professional perspectives rather than direct responses concatenation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 480 individuals from 12 countries show that ExpertIVS outperforms baselines in value generalization and significantly outperfies the existing methods. |
One QuantLLM for ALL: Fine-tuning Quantized LLMs Once for Efficient Deployments (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Quantization has shown promise for Large Language Models, but current methods require lengthy training to alleviate quantization loss. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple weights and incorporate Low-Rank adapters to reduce weight sharing . they validate the approach on LLaMA2 families and Mistral on downstream evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows high performance while reducing deployment time faced with multiple scenarios. |
Understanding Demonstration-based Learning from a Causal Perspective (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Demonstration-based learning has shown impressive performance in exploiting pretrained language models under few-shot learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a Structural Causal Model to understand demonstration-based learning from causal perspectives and interpret random demonstrations as interventions on the demonstration variable within the causal model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms hand-crafted demonstrations on public sequence labeling benchmarks. |
Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models for sequence labeling are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive sequence labeling that allows training directly with the user feedback . they identify context and feedback biases by formulating interactive sequence labels via a Structural Causal Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can effectively alleviate the biases and can be learnt with the user feedback. |
DetGPT: Detect What You Need via Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)
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Renjie Pi, Jiahui Gao, Shizhe Diao, Rui Pan, Hanze Dong, Jipeng Zhang, Lewei Yao, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in the field of computer vision have enabled more effective and sophisticated interactions between humans and machines. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-based object detection paradigm that leverages state-of-the-art multi-modal models and open-vocabulary object detectors to perform reasoning within the context of the user’s instructions and the visual scene. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables users to interact with the system using natural language instructions, allowing for a higher level of interactivity. |
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. |
Enhancing Neural Models with Vulnerability via Adversarial Attack (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on adversarial attack to improve performance of NLSM tasks has not been done. |
| Approach: | They propose a general two-stage training framework to enhance neural models with Vulnerability via adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves neural models with Vulnerability via adversarial attack on NLSM datasets. |
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. |
Exploring the Compositional Deficiency of Large Language Models in Mathematical Reasoning Through Trap Problems (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current LLMs lack systematic compositionality, and therefore cannot serve as reliable cognitive models. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce logical traps into the original problems of MATH and GSM8K to investigate the compositionality of large language models in mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate infinite combinations from finite learned components. |
Probing Relative Interaction and Dynamic Calibration in Multi-modal Entity Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for multi-modal entity alignment ignore relative interactions between modalities and the accuracy of weights. |
| Approach: | They propose a relative interaction and calibration framework for multi-modal entity alignment that uses attention mechanisms to perceive the uncertainty of the weight for each modality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across 5 datasets and 23 settings. |
FPE2M2: Approaching Lossless and Efficient Quantization with Native Floating Point (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Yi, Jianwei Zhang, Zhiying Xu, Xinlong Yang, Yang Zhou, Minmin Sun, Zengke Liu, Tong Zhang, Junyang Lin, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Auto-regressive decoding is a memory-bound job, meaning decoding performance is limited by the bandwidth rather than the computational capabilities of the GPU. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that supports lossless weight-only quantization inference and validate it on Qwen and LLaMA Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest efficiency with lossless accuracy on Qwen and LLaMA Models across various modalities. |
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. |
MedOdyssey: A Medical Domain Benchmark for Long Context Evaluation Up to 200K Tokens (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks in the generic domain have evaluated long-context capabilities for LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical long-context benchmark with seven length levels ranging from 4K to 200K tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks have seven length levels ranging from 4K to 200K tokens. |
TILGAN: Transformer-based Implicit Latent GAN for Diverse and Coherent Text Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing autoregressive models suffer from the exposure bias problem due to mismatches between training and generation stages. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformerbased Implicit Latent GAN which combines a transformer autoencoder and GAN in the latent space with a novel design and distribution matching based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves local and global coherence and quality-diversity trade-off on three benchmark datasets. |
The Instinctive Bias: Spurious Images lead to Illusion in MLLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are able to process visual inputs by converting them into visual tokens that share the same latent space as language tokens in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that assesses the visual illusion level given spurious images and a pipeline that converts visual inputs into visual tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that MLLMs suffer from an instinctive bias to varying degrees when presented with spurious images. |
Modeling Localness for Self-Attention Networks (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model locality for self-attention networks have shown great value for capturing global dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to model localness for self-attention networks to capture local context . they cast localness modeling as a learnable Gaussian bias, which indicates the central and scope of the local region to be paid more attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the ability to capture local context and improves accuracy. |
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. |
Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Ritwik Sinha, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate external information into a given table neglect the structured nature of the table. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information into a given table by first building an augmenting table and then generating a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks. |
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. |
Balancing Knowledge Breadth and Task Depth for Effective Domain Adaptation Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a lack of knowledge breadth and task depth can hinder curriculum learning in domains such as medicine and finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-dimensional curriculum learning framework that coordinates model training along two orthogonal axes: the knowledge dimension and the task dimension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy on medical evaluations by 2.49% and on financial evaluations 1.2% compared with the second-best method. |
Diversifying Content Generation for Commonsense Reasoning with Mixture of Knowledge Graph Experts (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen a surge of interest in improving the generation quality of commonsense reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that diversifies the generative reasoning by a mixture of expert strategy on commonsense knowledge graphs to encourage various generation outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves diversity while achieving on par performance on two GCR benchmarks, based on both automatic and human evaluations. |
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. |
Mango: Multi-Agent Web Navigation via Global-View Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents typically begin exploration from the root URL, which is inefficient for complex websites with deep hierarchical structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent web navigation method that leverages the website structure to dynamically determine optimal starting points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 63.6% success rate on WebVoyager, outperforming the best baseline by 7.3%, and 52.5% success rate with open-source and closed-source models. |
VisiPruner: Decoding Discontinuous Cross-Modal Dynamics for Efficient Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from significant computational overhead due to the quadratic growth of attention computations with the number of multimodal tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free pruning framework that prunes multimodal tokens without a trained pruning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms existing token pruning methods and generalizes across diverse MLLMs. |
CTRAP: Embedding Collapse Trap to Safeguard Large Language Models from Harmful Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Fine-tuning-as-a-service exposes models to harmful fine-tuneing attacks . however, inherent general adaptability of LLMs allows them to bypass selective unlearning by rapidly relearning or repurposing their general capabilities for harmful tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shift that inducing model collapse instead of selective removal by relearning or repurposing general capabilities for harmful tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model collapse mechanism neutralizes the very general capabilities that attackers exploit, tackling the core issue unaddressed by selective unlearning. |
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yong Lin, Hangyu Lin, Wei Xiong, Shizhe Diao, Jianmeng Liu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Haoxiang Wang, Wenbin Hu, Hanning Zhang, Hanze Dong, Renjie Pi, Han Zhao, Nan Jiang, Heng Ji, Yuan Yao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods. |
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. |
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. |
An Empirical Study of Instruction-tuning Large Language Models in Chinese (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | emergence of ChatGPT validates the potential of large language models (LLMs) in artificial general intelligence (AGI) however, the closed source of LLMs coupled with the requirement for massive computing resources has deterred researchers from reaching the LLM training stage. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese instruction-tuning LLMs as a cookbook for customizing LLM models that can better respond to Chinese instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM can be used to customize Chinese LLMs that can better respond to Chinese instructions. |
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. |
Beyond Decoder-only: Large Language Models Can be Good Encoders for Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Yingfeng Luo, Tong Zheng, Yongyu Mu, Bei Li, Qinghong Zhang, Yongqi Gao, Ziqiang Xu, Peinan Feng, Xiaoqian Liu, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine translation have focused on a single pre-trained decoder . encoder-decoder architectures have received relatively little attention in NMT . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages LLMs as MT encoders and pairs them with lightweight decoders to develop universal translation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or surpasses baselines in terms of translation quality but achieves 75% reduction in memory footprint of the KV cache. |
OpenGenAlign: A Preference Dataset and Benchmark for Trustworthy Reward Modeling in Open-Ended, Long-Context Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models perform suboptimal on held-out benchmarks, resulting in poor quality outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework and a high-quality dataset to evaluate reward models . they define four key metrics to assess generation quality and develop a pipeline to evaluate outputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and dataset improves hallucination-free, comprehensive, reliable, and efficient open-ended long-context generation. |
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. |
Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought from Labeled Data (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a new approach to prompt large language models (LLMs) but most studies rely on human-annotated rational chains to prompt LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments rational chains from a small labeled dataset and pruning low-quality chains to construct a pool of machine generated rationale chains based on the labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can bypass human engineering of CoT by automatically augmenting rational chains from a small labeled dataset, and pruning low-quality chains to construct a candidate pool of machine generated rationale chains based on the labels. |
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. |
PipeNet: Question Answering with Semantic Pruning over Knowledge Graphs (2024.starsem-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to utilizing explicit knowledge graphs (KGs) are limited by the number of nodes in the subgraph. |
| Approach: | They propose a grounding-pruning-reasoning pipeline to prune noisy nodes in subgraphs to improve the efficiency of graph reasoning with KG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computation cost and memory usage while obtaining decent representation of pruned subgraphs. |
Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit translationese errors and generate unexpected unnatural translations . Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the dominant method in machine translation research . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the prevalence of translationese in LLM-generated translations and investigate its roots during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce translationese while improving translation naturalness . the proposed methods are validated by human evaluations and automatic metrics . |
End-to-End Conversational Search for Online Shopping with Utterance Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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Liqiang Xiao, Jun Ma, Xin Luna Dong, Pascual Martínez-Gómez, Nasser Zalmout, Chenwei Zhang, Tong Zhao, Hao He, Yaohui Jin
| Challenge: | a new study proposes a conversational search system that integrates product attributes and dialog with search . but it faces two real world challenges: imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data . |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end conversational search system that integrates search with text . they propose an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterations from other domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the best tested baseline in a conversational search dataset for online shopping. |
Exploring the Impacts of Feature Fusion Strategy in Multi-modal Entity Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to merge multi-modal knowledge only use one fusion strategy . however, the impact of the fusion on individual entities could be ignored . |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive multi-modal feature fusion strategy for entity alignment that selects the optimal entity-level feature blending strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to models using the same modality on a dataset with multiple inconsistent images and styles. |
Towards Better Generalization in Open-Domain Question Answering by Mitigating Context Memorization (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) aims at answering factual questions using an external large-scale knowledge corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented approach to QA that focuses on retrieving relevant knowledge from an external corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to completely different knowledge domains while adapting to updated versions of the same knowledge corpus and switching to completely new knowledge domain. |
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. |
Towards Hierarchical Multi-Step Reward Models for Enhanced Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Teng Wang, Jiang Zhangyi, Zhenqi He, Hailei Gong, Shenyang Tong, Wenhan Yang, Zeyu Li, Yanan Zheng, Zifan He, Zewen Ye, Shengjie Ma, Jianping Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing Process Reward Models (PRMs) are vulnerable to reward hacking and require expensive, large-scale annotation of reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model approach which evaluates both individual and consecutive reasoning steps from fine-grained and coarse-grounded level. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model performs better than existing PRMs and is more robust than existing models. |
Experience is the Teacher: Reusing Atomic Thoughts from LLMs to Improve Medical Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)
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Guangya Yu, Hui Luo, Qi Ye, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Mingxi Shang, Xuanwu Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Recent large reasoning models (LLMs) lack dynamic and diverse thinking capabilities . reusing atomic thoughts provides a practical pathway toward dynamic reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. |
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. |
RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a main technique for alleviating hallucinations in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate RAG into large language models to analyze word-level hallucinations using a corpus of 18,000 naturally generated responses from diverse LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can fine tune a relatively small LLM and achieve a competitive hallucination detection performance when compared to the existing prompt-based approaches. |
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). |
Prompt-Guided Internal States for Hallucination Detection of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) generate incorrect or logically incorrect responses, which is known as LLM hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for supervised hallucination detection using in-domain data by prompting changes to the structure related to text truthfulness in LLMs’ internal states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the cross-domain generalization of existing hallucination detection methods. |
Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yongyu Mu, Peinan Feng, Zhiquan Cao, Yuzhang Wu, Bei Li, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kai Song, Tongran Liu, Chunliang Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel multilingual input to enhance the model's comprehension of the input and to examine how multilingual processing affects prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input, but previous studies focused on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning. |
MobileNMT: Enabling Translation in 15MB and 30ms (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on NMT models is limited in storage, memory, computation and power consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile machine translation system that can translate in 15MB and 30ms on devices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can translate in 15MB and 30ms on mobile devices. |
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Can Jin, Rui Wu, Tong Che, Qixin Zhang, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Wenqi Wei, Ligong Han, Zhao Zhang, Yuan Cao, Ruixiang Tang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
| Challenge: | OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance safety of its o-series models, but effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs is understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for large language models . they propose to use reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids narrowly enumerated rules and allows broader adaptability. |
Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization via Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer in Prompt Tuning (2024.eacl-long)
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Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Haoliang Wang, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Kanak Mahadik, Ani Nenkova, Mark Riedl
| Challenge: | Existing prompt transfer techniques lack consideration for dialogue-specific information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which leverages skeleton generation as extra supervision that functions as a medium connecting the distinct source and target task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines on two dialogue summarization benchmarks. |
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. |
Generate First, Then Sample: Enhancing Fake News Detection with LLM-Augmented Reinforced Sampling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models have a performance gap of 20% between classifying fake news and real news, making them less suitable for practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to adopt an LLM to generate fake news in three different styles, which are later incorporated into the training set to augment the representation of fake news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets and improves detection accuracy by 24.02% and 11.06% respectively. |
Marco-Bench-MIF: On Multilingual Instruction-Following Capability of Large Language (2025.acl-long)
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Bo Zeng, Chenyang Lyu, Sinuo Liu, Mingyan Zeng, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Tianqi Shi, Yu Zhao, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Ruizhe Li, Jiahui Geng, Qing Li, Yu Tong, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for instruction-following are monolingual and centered on English . existing data are unable to capture linguistic and cultural subtle differences . |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version called Marco-Bench-MIF . their benchmark addresses linguistic constraints and cultural references via translation and verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version covers 30 languages with varying levels of localization. |
GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that provide detailed, constructive feedback on academic papers struggle with review fidelity. |
| Approach: | They explore factors that underlie the development of robust advising systems . large language models have shown remarkable progress in tasks from text generation to code synthesis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms general-purpose language models in acceptance rates for self-ranked top-30% submissions to ICLR 2025. |
Tackling Distractor Documents in Multi-Hop QA with Reinforcement and Curriculum Learning (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on retrieval-augmented generation systems has shown that retrievers exhibit imperfect recall and precision, limiting downstream performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation model that generates answers from larger sets of retrieved contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates answers and cites relevant information from larger sets of retrieved contexts. |
Measuring Bargaining Abilities of LLMs: A Benchmark and A Buyer-Enhancement Method (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Using a novel approach, we can evaluate an agent’s bargaining abilities as an asymmetric incomplete information game. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates a deterministic Offer Generator and an LLM Narrator to create natural language sentences for generated offers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the buyer’s deal rates from 26.67% to 88.88% and brings a ten times multiplication of profits on all baselines, even a model that has not been aligned. |
Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to annotate large language models rely on a fixed set of human-annotated exemplars, which are not always the most effective for different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adapt large language models to different tasks with task-specific example prompts (annotated with human-designed CoT reasoning) they introduce several metrics to characterize uncertainty so as to select the most uncertain questions for annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance on eight complex reasoning tasks. |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream 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. |
LLMEval-Fair: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study on Robust and Fair Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Jingyi Deng, Yuhui Wang, Huayu Sha, Kexin Tan, Qiyuan Peng, Yue Zhang, Junzhe Wang, Shichun Liu, Yueyuan Huang, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Zhihao Zhang, Mingqi Wu, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation of Large Language Models on static benchmarks is vulnerable to data contamination and leaderboard overfitting. |
| Approach: | LLMEval-Fair framework provides a framework for dynamic evaluation of Large Language Models . evaluators use a proprietary bank of 220k graduate-level questions to analyze model data . |
| Outcome: | LLMEval-Fair provides robust and credible evaluation framework for Large Language Models . it provides a strong empirical validation for the dynamic evaluation paradigm . |
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. |
HiFT: A Hierarchical Full Parameter Fine-Tuning Strategy (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine-tuning language models use zeroth-order optimizers to conserve GPU memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a full-parameter fine-tuning strategy which updates a subset of parameters at each training step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the amount of gradients and optimizer state parameters residing in GPU memory at the same time, thereby reducing GPU memory usage. |
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. |
Plum: Prompt Learning using Metaheuristics (2024.findings-acl)
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Rui Pan, Shuo Xing, Shizhe Diao, Wenhe Sun, Xiang Liu, KaShun Shum, Jipeng Zhang, Renjie Pi, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt learning have led to a need for general prompt optimization methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a branch of discrete non-convex optimization methods with over 100 options as a promising approach to prompt learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to discover more human-understandable prompts that were previously unknown in reasoning and image generation tasks. |
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. |
Personalized Federated Learning for Text Classification with Gradient-Free Prompt Tuning (2024.findings-naacl)
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Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Handong Zhao, Junda Wu, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Ricardo Henao
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) are used for personalized federated learning . communication costs are high with large PLMs, and local training is expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for federated learning with pretrained language models . they propose 'discrete local search' and compression mechanism for local training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance compared with baselines. |
Understanding Conflicts in Multi-Objective Alignment through Reward Consistency (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing training pipelines still face alignment conflicts where optimizing for one objective degrades performance on others. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based criterion that approximates alignment conflicts via reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves harmlessness and helpfulness scores by 23.07% over the vanilla dataset. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
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Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer for Multi-session Open-domain Dialogue System (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain dialogue systems conduct one-session conversations, but multi-session MSCs are under-investigated. |
| Approach: | They propose a History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer for multi-session open-domain dialogue . they propose to encode history conversations into a history memory and leverage historical information to generate well-informed responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a large-scale MSC dataset. |
CMQCIC-Bench: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Medical Quality Control Indicator Calculation (2025.findings-acl)
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Guangya Yu, Yanhao Li, Zongying Jiang, Yuxiong Jin, Li Dai, Yupian Lin, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Yongqi Fan, Qi Ye, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Medical quality control indicators are essential to assess the qualifications of healthcare institutions for medical services. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese electronic medical records-based dataset for MQCIC and propose CF-IR method that disentangles clinical fact verification and inferential rule reasoning actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Chain-of-Thought methods on 20 representative LLMs, covering general and medical models. |
Thinking with Reasoning Skills: Fewer Tokens, More Accuracy (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning LLMs often spend tokens on long intermediate reasoning traces when solving new problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to store reusable reasoning skills distilled from extensive deliberation and trial-and-error exploration and retrieve these skills at inference time to guide future reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces reasoning tokens while improving overall performance on coding and mathematical reasoning tasks. |
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. |
Exploiting Target Language Data for Neural Machine Translation Beyond Back Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) encounters challenges when translating in new domains and low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a variant of k-nearest neighbor machine translation that utilizes target language data by constructing a pseudo datastore. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits strong domain adaptation capability in both high-resource and low-resourced machine translation. |
EverMemOS: A Self-Organizing Memory Operating System for Structured Long-Horizon Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Chuanrui Hu, Xingze Gao, Zuyi Zhou, Dannong Xu, Yi Bai, Xintong Li, Hui Zhang, Tong Li, Chong Zhang, Lidong Bing, Yafeng Deng
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems for LLMs store isolated records and retrieve fragments . Existing systems store isolated data and fragments, limiting their ability to consolidate evolving experience and resolve conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose an engram-inspired memory operating system that implements an 'engram'-inspired lifecycle for computational memory. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LoCoMo, LongMemEval, and PersonaMeM-v2 show that EverMemeOS outperforms state-of-the-art methods on memory-augmented reasoning tasks. |
MEPT: Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning as a Manifold Mapper (2025.emnlp-main)
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Runjia Zeng, Guangyan Sun, Qifan Wang, Tong Geng, Sohail Dianat, Xiaotian Han, Raghuveer Rao, Xueling Zhang, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations show that Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning outperforms state-of-the-art parameter efficient baselines on SuperGLUE. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm for manifold mapping using multiple prompt experts. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on SuperGLUE while reducing activated prompts by 79.25%. |
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). |
| Approach: | They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency. |
Enhancing Dialogue State Tracking Models through LLM-backed User-Agents Simulation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the model can be used to generate dialogues in new domains quickly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to generate dialogue data to reduce dialogue collection and annotation costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than the baseline model trained on real data. |
Let’s Reason Formally: Natural-Formal Hybrid Reasoning Enhances LLM’s Math Capability (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has focused on improving the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework to integrate FL into NL math reasoning . they propose a problem alignment method that reformulates QA and existence problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 89.80% and 84.34% accuracy rates on the MATH-500 and the AMC benchmarks. |
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. |
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. |
PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Hangyu Guo, Yanlin Lai, Mitt Huang, Liang Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Yinmin Zhang, Qi Han, null Xiaoxiaoren, Chun Yuan, Tong Xu, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Current outcome-centric verification paradigms neglect potential errors in the derivation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via **PRIME**. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline verification paradigm on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME models. |
HEAL: A Hypothesis-Based Preference-Aware Analysis Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yifu Huo, Chenglong Wang, Qiren Zhu, Shunjie Xing, Tong Xiao, Chunliang Zhang, Tongran Liu, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Preference optimization methods like DPO are often evaluated on a single response, overlooking other outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hypothesis-based PrEference-aware AnaLysis Framework that formulates preference alignment as a re-ranking process within hypothesis spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm re-ranks preference alignment as a reranking process within hypothesis spaces. |
Understanding and Mitigating Overrefusal in LLMs from an Unveiling Perspective of Safety Decision Boundary (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often refuse to answer legitimate queries, causing models to treat many reasonable prompts as potentially risky. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically generates and selects overrefusal prompts near the safety boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and curates boundary-aligned prompts, enabling more effective and targeted mitigation of overrefusal. |
TheoremLlama: Transforming General-Purpose LLMs into Lean4 Experts (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a framework for formal proof writing using formal languages like Lean4 is needed to prove mathematical theorems using formal language. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that trains a general-purpose LLM to be a Lean4 expert. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves cumulative accuracies of 36.48% and 33.61% on MiniF2F-Valid and Test datasets. |
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. |
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. |
LMFlow: An Extensible Toolkit for Finetuning and Inference of Large Foundation Models (2024.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Foundation models have demonstrated a great ability to achieve general human-level intelligence far beyond traditional approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit to simplify the finetuning of general foundation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit simplifies the domain- and task-aware finetuning of general foundation models with limited computing resources. |
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. |
SurveyGen: Quality-Aware Scientific Survey Generation with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Automated survey generation is a key task in scientific document processing due to lack of standardized evaluation datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey-based framework that integrates quality indicators into literature retrieval to assess higher-quality sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline and enables human-guided writing. |
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. |
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)
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Xiao Cui, Yulei Qin, Yuting Gao, Enwei Zhang, Zihan Xu, Tong Wu, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods investigate divergence measures but fail to deliver effective supervision when few distribution overlap exists between teacher and student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation method that exploits the Sinkhorn distance to ensure a nuanced assessment of the disparity between teacher and student distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all kinds of LLMs with encoder-only, encoder decoder, and decoded architectures. |
Arithmetic Control of LLMs for Diverse User Preferences: Directional Preference Alignment with Multi-Objective Rewards (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on scalar rewards to capture user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multi-objective reward modeling to represent diverse preference profiles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across reward objectives and targets. |
From Individual Excellence to Collective Sustainability: Seeking Strategic Equilibrium in Proactive Multi-Agent Teams (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a team of proactive agents suffer from a greedy optimization for immediate task accuracy . a new approach to improve team collaboration is based on the opportunity cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic proactive multi-agent reinforcement learning framework to solve this imbalance . they use a Positive-Unlabeled scorer to anchor intervention quality under sparse supervision . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maintains high performance while preventing experts from over-developing. |
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. |
EventKE: Event-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Embedding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that events can greatly improve the quality of KG embeddings on multiple downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an event-enhanced KG embedding model that incorporates events into KGs . they first incorporate event nodes by building a heterogeneous network with event argument links . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates event nodes into the original knowledge graphs . it can be used to fuse event information into the KG embeddings on multiple tasks . |
MedKInstruct: A Multimodal Knowledge Graph Based Framework for Multi-Hop and Hard-Negative Instruction Data Synthesis in MedVQA (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for medical visual question answering focus on image–caption pairs, limiting the model’s ability to learn relevant medical knowledge during training. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize instruction data from image–caption pairs and incorporate a multimodal medical knowledge graph to assist LVLMs in synthesizing knowledge-intensive instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on the public datasets Slake and VQA-RAD by 4.16% and 4.50%. |
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. |
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. |
Rare and Zero-shot Word Sense Disambiguation using Z-Reweighting (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a problem in the natural language processing community. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adjust training on imbalanced word sense dataset . they propose to achieve performance gain on standard English all words benchmark . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves performance gain on the standard English all words benchmark. |
Bridge-Coder: Transferring Model Capabilities from High-Resource to Low-Resource Programming Language (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating code for high-resource programming languages (HRPLs) however, they struggle significantly with low-resourced programming languages such as D, exacerbating the digital divide. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate LRPL data using LLM's general knowledge, HRPL proficiency, and in-context learning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on R, D, Racket, and Bash, while maintaining the same quality. |
Tram: A Token-level Retrieval-augmented Mechanism for Source Code Summarization (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate source code summaries are coarse-grained and noise-filled . however, they do not capture contextual code semantics and are often outdated in continuous software iteration. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained Token-level retrieval-augmented mechanism on the decoder side to enhance performance of neural models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces more low-frequency tokens and is interpretable. |
An LLM-based Framework for Biomedical Terminology Normalization in Social Media via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results indicate that our approach exhibits competitive performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free approach to normalize non-standard terms using large language models . they use a search engine and a domain knowledge base to expand the short texts into accurate descriptions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on the "Recall and Re-rank" framework . it can be used to identify the standard term in a specified termbase for non-standardized mentions . |
TriPlay-RL: Tri-Role Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for LLM Safety Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Zhewen Tan, Wenhan Yu, Jianfeng Si, Tongxin Liu, Kaiqi Guan, Huiyan Jin, Jiawen Tao, Xiaokun Yuan, Xiangzheng Zhang, Duohe Ma, Tong Yang, Lin Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to safety alignment of large language models rely on costly manual annotations or human review. |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop reinforcement learning framework called TriPlay-RL that enables iterative collaboration among three roles with near-zero manual annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 20%–50% improvement in adversarial effectiveness while preserving high output diversity while achieving 10%–30% gains in safety performance without degrading general reasoning capability. |
TAGCOS: Task-agnostic Gradient Clustered Coreset Selection for Instruction Tuning Data (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning are limited due to the increasing volume of instruction datasets and the increased computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract a small and highly informative subset of training samples from a large dataset that achieves comparable performance to the full dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms other unsupervised methods and achieves comparable performance to the full dataset. |
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. |
How to Make LMs Strong Node Classifiers? (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zhe Xu, Kaveh Hassani, Si Zhang, Hanqing Zeng, Michihiro Yasunaga, Limei Wang, Dongqi Fu, Ning Yao, Bo Long, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Language Models (LMs) are increasingly challenging the dominance of domain-specific models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers (GTs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that empowers off-the-shelf LMs to achieve performance comparable to state-of-the art (SOTA) GNNs on node classification tasks without requiring any architectural modifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing GNNs on node classification tasks and is open-source upon publication. |
Improving Constituency Parsing with Span Attention (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Constituency parsing is a fundamental task for natural language understanding . n-grams are a conventional type of feature for contextual information . experimental results show that neural parsers with no grammar rules outperform statistical ones . |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate n-grams into span representations by weighting them according to their contributions to the parsing process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing statistical grammar-based models on Arabic, Chinese, and English datasets. |
Interpretable Preferences via Multi-Objective Reward Modeling and Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the primary method for aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to train an Absolute-Rating Multi-Objective Reward Model with multi-dimensional absolute-rating data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the LLM-as-a-judge method on RewardBench . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark . |
Contextual Relevance and Adaptive Sampling for LLM-Based Document Reranking (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | identifying relevant documents for Reasoning-intensive queries remains a challenge . large language models have shown strong performance in zero-shot document reranking . |
| Approach: | They propose a reranking algorithm that estimates contextual relevance by aggregating LLMs' relevance judgments across batches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves nDCG@10 over retrieval and reranking baselines by 15% and 6–21% respectively. |
Multi-Head Attention with Disagreement Regularization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encourage diversity among multi-head attention are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a disagreement regularization term to encourage diversity among attention heads . they validated their approach on EnglishGerman and ChineseEnglish translation tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation performance across language pairs on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks. |
Speeding up Transformer Decoding via an Attention Refinement Network (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on ten WMT machine translation tasks show that the proposed model yields an average of 1.35x faster (with almost no decrease in BLEU) |
| Approach: | They propose a weighted residual network which reconstructs attention by reusing the features across layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 1.35x faster than the state-of-the-art inference model on translation tasks compared to AAN and SAN models with fewer parameter numbers . |
Self-Cleaning: Improving a Named Entity Recognizer Trained on Noisy Data with a Few Clean Instances (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train named entity recognition models on noisy data are expensive and time-intensive to accumulate. |
| Approach: | They propose to denoise noisy NER data with guidance from a small set of clean instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve on large-scale datasets with a small guidance set. |
Living in the Moment: Can Large Language Models Grasp Co-Temporal Reasoning? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current temporal reasoning datasets are limited to questions about single or isolated events, falling short in mirroring the realistic temporal characteristics involving concurrent nature and intricate temporal interconnections. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-temporal Question Answering benchmark that contains four co-time scenarios with 4,748 samples for evaluating the co-timing abilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that current LLMs struggle on CoTempQA tasks even when enhanced with Chain of Thought methodologies. |
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. |
From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing definitions of streaming LLMs are fragmented and lack a systematic taxonomy . large language models are pre-trained on static and full-context corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming Large Language Models and propose underlying methodologies for streaming LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities. |
FANS: Formal Answer Selection for LLM Natural Language Math Reasoning Using Lean4 (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that use Lean4 to enhance LLMs' NL reasoning abilities have been controversial in the field of math reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Lean4 to enhance LLMs’ NL math reasoning ability by generating a Lean 4 theorem statement and a proof-generating LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLMs' NL math reasoning ability by 2% across several math benchmarks and higher further based on reward models or in subfields such as algebra and number theory. |
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. |
GRAPHIA: Harnessing Social Graph Data to Enhance LLM-Based Social Simulation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Social graphs provide high-quality supervision signals that encode local interactions and global network structure, yet they remain underutilized for LLM training. |
| Approach: | They propose a general LLM-based social graph simulation framework that leverages graph data as supervision for LLM training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves micro-level alignment by 6.1% on three real-world networks compared to the strongest baseline. |
Exploiting Hybrid Semantics of Relation Paths for Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer natural language questions on knowledge graphs (KGQA) use large-scale entity-related text corpus or knowledge graph embeddings as auxiliary information to facilitate answer selection. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate explicit textual information and implicit KG structural features of relation paths into a novel rotate-and-scale entity link prediction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on three KGQA datasets and shows that it can be used to identify answer entities. |
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. |
Supportiveness-based Knowledge Rewriting for Retrieval-augmented Language Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and pluggable knowledge rewriter that is optimized for LLM generation by supporting the model's supportiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to rewrite knowledge in a supervised manner. |
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. |
Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Yuming Yang, Mingyoung Lai, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Mingqi Wu, Chiyue Huang, Jun Zhao, Haijun Lv, Jian Tong, Yunhua Zhou, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model’s current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rank–Surprisal Ratio metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
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. |
VeraCT Scan: Retrieval-Augmented Fake News Detection with Justifiable Reasoning (2024.acl-demos)
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Cheng Niu, Yang Guan, Yuanhao Wu, Juno Zhu, Juntong Song, Randy Zhong, Kaihua Zhu, Siliang Xu, Shizhe Diao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | generative artificial intelligence has exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented system that extracts the core facts from a given piece of news and conducts an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection. |
LCDS: A Logic-Controlled Discharge Summary Generation System Supporting Source Attribution and Expert Review (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating inaccurate discharge summary content or fabricating information without valid sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool for empowering LLMs with Logic-Controlled Discharge Summary generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool identifies the writing logic of discharge summaries and integrates it with EMRs to generate silver discharge summararies. |
MICO: A Multi-alternative Contrastive Learning Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Representation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to commonsense reasoning include fine-tuning large pre-trained language models or injecting the entire knowledge base for CKGC. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn commonsense knowledge representation by using a multi-alternative contrastive learning framework on COmmonsense Knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework is effective in commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Learning Architectures from an Extended Search Space for Language Modeling (2020.acl-main)
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Yinqiao Li, Chi Hu, Yuhao Zhang, Nuo Xu, Yufan Jiang, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu, Tongran Liu, Changliang Li
| Challenge: | Neural architecture search (NAS) has advanced in recent years but most NAS systems restrict search to learning architectures of a recurrent or convolutional cell. |
| Approach: | They propose a general approach to learn both intra-cell and inter-cell architectures . they implement their approach in a differentiable architecture search system . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline on PTB and WikiText data and shows good transferability to other systems. |
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. |
Reinforced Training Data Selection for Domain Adaptation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn domains with massive data are not easy to implement and require a predefined threshold. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that searches for training instances relevant to the target domain and learns better representations for them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective in data selection and representation, but generalized to accommodate different NLP tasks. |
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. |
LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Zelin Li, Huayu Sha, Binze Hu, Yuhui Wang, Chenhao Huang, Shichun Liu, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current medical benchmarks have limitations in question design, data sources and evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark covering five core medical areas . it includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers five core medical areas and includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records and expert-designed clinical scenarios. |
Multi-Hop Transformer for Document-Level Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to document-level neural machine translation (NMT) simply introduce the representations of context sentences without explicitly characterizing the inter-sentence reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-hop Transformer which explicitly models the human-like draft-editing and reasoning process by attending to multiple antecedent sentences iteratively. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four widely used document translation tasks show that the proposed model significantly improves document-level translation performance and tackles discourse phenomena such as coreference error and the problem of polysemy. |
ScaleBiO: Scalable Bilevel Optimization for LLM Data Reweighting (2025.acl-long)
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Rui Pan, Dylan Zhang, Hanning Zhang, Xingyuan Pan, Minrui Xu, Jipeng Zhang, Renjie Pi, Xiaoyu Wang, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing paradigms for bilevel optimization require second-order information, making it difficult to scale them up. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable instantiation of a bilevel optimization paradigm for large-scale LLMs by using a memory-efficient training technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm scales to 30B-sized LLMs on 8H100 GPUs. |
Can Multimodal Large Language Models Understand Spatial Relations? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Spatial relation reasoning is a crucial task for multimodal large language models to understand the objective world. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-annotated spatial relation reasoning benchmark based on COCO2017 to improve MLLMs' spatial relation thinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark achieves 48.14% accuracy, far below the human-level accuracy of 98.40%. |
Augmenting Large Language Model Translators via Translation Memories (2023.findings-acl)
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Yongyu Mu, Abudurexiti Reheman, Zhiquan Cao, Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Yinqiao Li, Tong Xiao, Chunliang Zhang, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Using translation memories (TMs) as prompts is a promising approach to in-context learning of machine translation models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translation memories (TMs) as prompts to prompt large language models (LLMs) they find that the ability of LLMs to "understand" prompts is helpful . |
| Outcome: | The results are comparable to state-of-the-art NMT systems with bilingual data and are tuned on downstream tasks. |
Grape: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Passage Reader for Open-domain Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering (QA) models employ a retriever-reader pipeline . however, state-of-the-art readers fail to capture complex relationships between entities . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge graph enhanced passage reader that captures entities in questions and retrieved passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed knowledge graph enhanced passage reader improves on open-domain QA benchmarks by up to 2.2 exact match scores. |
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. |
Layer-Wise Multi-View Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural machine translation are limited to the topmost encoder layer’s context representation and cannot perceive the lower encoder layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise multi-view learning approach to solve this problem by incorporating an auxiliary view into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve stable results over multiple strong baselines and is agnostic to network architectures. |
Medical Dialogue System: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges (2024.findings-acl)
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Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Li Du, Yuxuan Wang, Hongru Wang, Yuhang Guo, Tong Ruan, Jie Xu, Xiaofan Zhang, Shaoting Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing medical dialogue systems have significant potential to simplify diagnostic procedure and reduce the cost of collecting information from patients. |
| Approach: | They analyze 325 papers from well-known computer science, natural language processing conferences and journals to find out the major challenges of medical dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems have been surveyed in the medical community but have not been evaluated from a technical perspective. |
Correct after Answer: Enhancing Multi-Span Question Answering with Post-Processing Method (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior work focuses on designing specific methods or applying heuristic strategies to encourage models to predict more correct predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a post-processing strategy to handle incorrect predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the Exact Match scores on multiple MSQA datasets. |
KiPT: Knowledge-injected Prompt Tuning for Event Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based methods may suffer from low precision because they lack event-related semantic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-injected Prompt Tuning model to improve prompt tuning . event detection aims to detect events from text by identifying and classifying event triggers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in few-shot scenarios. |
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. |
Bringing Structure into Summaries: a Faceted Summarization Dataset for Long Scientific Documents (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Faceted summarization provides briefings of a document from different perspectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a faceted summarization benchmark built on Emerald journal articles . they propose faceted models that bring structure into faceted documents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on Emerald journal articles and covers a diverse range of domains. |
Increasing Visual Awareness in Multimodal Neural Machine Translation from an Information Theoretic Perspective (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on extracting multi-granularity visual features for integration or designing model architectures for better message passing across various modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the informative visual signals into two parts: source-specific information and target-specific info. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enhance the visual awareness of MMT models against strong baselines. |
Submodular-based In-context Example Selection for LLMs-based Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on the role of well-chosen examples in in-context learning . |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple translational factors for in-context example selection by using monotone submodular function maximization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms random selection and robust single-factor baselines across various NLP tasks. |
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. |
SEOE: A Scalable and Reliable Semantic Evaluation Framework for Open Domain Event Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for Open Domain Event Detection (ODED) lack representative representations of the real world, making it difficult to accurately reflect performance of various ODED methods in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable and reliable Semantic-level Evaluation framework for Open domain event detection by constructing a more representative evaluation benchmark and introducing a semantic evaluation metric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework first constructs a more representative evaluation benchmark that currently includes 564 event types covering 7 major domains, with a cost-effective supplementary annotation strategy to ensure the benchmark’s representativeness. |
Doolittle: Benchmarks and Corpora for Academic Writing Formalization (2023.emnlp-main)
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Shizhe Diao, Yongyu Lei, Liangming Pan, Tianqing Fang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Sedrick Keh, Min-Yen Kan, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods of language refinement focus on narrow, specific linguistic features within isolated sentences, such as grammatical errors and improper word use. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to improve the overall quality of academic writing at paragraph level by integrating automatic feedback into the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves the overall quality of formal academic writing at the paragraph level. |
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. |
WISCA: A Lightweight Model Transition Method to Improve LLM Training via Weight Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiacheng Li, Jianchao Tan, Zhidong Yang, Pingwei Sun, Feiye Huo, Jiayu Qin, Xiangyu Zhang, Maoxin He, Guangming Tan, Weile Jia, Xunliang Cai, Tong Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in training optimization for Transformer-based large language models lack systematic optimization of weight patterns during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Weight Scaling method that rescales weights while preserving model outputs to improve model training efficiency and model quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves convergence quality and loss reduction in LLMs with Grouped Query Attention architectures and LoRA fine-tuning tasks. |
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. |
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of Named Entity Recognition (NER) are trained on large datasets with predefined entity classes, but data of new classes arrives constantly. Existing work on NER relies on the assumption that there exists abundance of labeled data for the training of new class. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot class-incremental learning problem where NER model is trained with only few labeled samples of the new classes without forgetting knowledge of the old ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over existing baselines by reconstructing training data of old classes and real data from the training set. |
MCLE-Mol: Empowering LLM with Molecular Comprehension and Low-Cost Continual Evolution for Interpretable Property Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhili Pu, Lantian Zhang, Hao Duan, Zhixing Zhang, Keyun Zhu, Yongqi Fan, Ruihui Hou, Tong Ruan, Yun Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) offer a new paradigm for molecular property prediction (MPP), yet a semantic gap between natural language and molecul representations limits their ability to capture structure–activity relationships (SAR). |
| Approach: | They propose an ML–LLM–Rule collaborative framework for MPP that injects ML-derived substructure attribution values into LLMs and calibrates them under specific chemical contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple benchmark datasets and is highly interpretable. |
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. |
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. |
Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation with Unified Sense Representation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing researches on word sense disambiguation focus on English only. |
| Approach: | They propose to build knowledge and supervised based multilingual word sense disambiguation systems on a multilingual lexicon describing the same set of concepts across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand the fine-grained semantics of words under specific contexts. |
ReAL: How Can LLMs Simulate the Real Teacher? Retrieval-enhanced Agent for Adaptive Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior methods model learner-item interactions based only on ID sequences, leading to insufficient use of both learner and item information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-enhanced Agent for Adaptive Learning powered by large language models to simulate teacher decision-making with extensive prior knowledge and teaching experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three real-world datasets in both internal and external perspectives. |
Exploiting Deep Representations for Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models typically implement encoder and decoder as multiple layers, but only the top layers are leveraged in the subsequent process, which misses the opportunity to exploit useful information embedded in other layers. |
| Approach: | They propose to expose all of these signals with layer aggregation and multi-layer attention mechanisms and introduce an auxiliary regularization term to encourage different layers to capture diverse information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach exposes all of these signals with layer aggregation and multi-layer attention mechanisms on widely-used translation datasets. |
LLaMA-Berry: Pairwise Optimization for Olympiad-level Mathematical Reasoning via O1-like Monte Carlo Tree Search (2025.naacl-long)
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Di Zhang, Jianbo Wu, Jingdi Lei, Tong Che, Jiatong Li, Tong Xie, Xiaoshui Huang, Shufei Zhang, Marco Pavone, Yuqiang Li, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou
| Challenge: | LLaMA-Berry is an advanced mathematical reasoning framework to enhance the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search and Self-Refine framework to optimize reasoning paths and a pairwise reward model to evaluate different paths globally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes inefficiencies and limitations of step-wise and greedy search algorithms, enabling more efficient exploration of solution spaces. |
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. |
Learning Adaptive Axis Attentions in Fine-tuning: Beyond Fixed Sparse Attention Patterns (2022.findings-acl)
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Zihan Wang, Jiuxiang Gu, Jason Kuen, Handong Zhao, Vlad Morariu, Ruiyi Zhang, Ani Nenkova, Tong Sun, Jingbo Shang
| Challenge: | Adaptive Axis Attention learns different attention patterns for each task and model layer . sparse attention patterns do not improve the run time of the models but they reduce model memory requirements . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns different attention patterns for each Transformer layer . they propose 'adaptive axis attention' method that identifies important tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method does not require pre-training to accommodate sparse attention patterns. |
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. |
ATIR: Towards Audio-Text Interleaved Contextual Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent multimodal information retrieval research has focused on images, largely overlooking audio. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-text interleaved contextual retrieval task where queries can alternate between audio and text modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves over baselines. |
A Critical Analysis of Document Out-of-Distribution Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiuxiang Gu, Yifei Ming, Yi Zhou, Jason Kuen, Vlad Morariu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Nikolaos Barmpalios, Anqi Liu, Yixuan Li, Tong Sun, Ani Nenkova
| Challenge: | Existing document understanding models focus on single-modal inputs such as images or texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a spatial-aware adapter to adapt transformer-based language models to document domain to exploit multi-modal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the OOD detection performance compared to using a standard language model and to competitive baselines. |
Point, Disambiguate and Copy: Incorporating Bilingual Dictionaries for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have been criticized for lack of integration of bilingual lexical information into the neural architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation models by introducing three new components: Pointer, Disambiguator, and Copier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the following merits inherently compared with previous efforts: (1) Pointer leverages the semantic information from bilingual dictionaries, for the first time, to better locate source words whose translation in dictionary can potentially be used; (2) Disambiguator synthesizes contextual information from source view and target view, both of which contribute to distinguishing translation of a specific source word from multiple candidates in dicaries; (3) Copier systematically connects Pointer and Disambiguators based on a hierarchical |
Self-Supervised Detection of Contextual Synonyms in a Multi-Class Setting: Phenotype Annotation Use Case (2021.emnlp-main)
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Jingqing Zhang, Luis Bolanos Trujillo, Tong Li, Ashwani Tanwar, Guilherme Freire, Xian Yang, Julia Ive, Vibhor Gupta, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Contextualised word embeddings are powerful tool to detect contextual synonyms, but most of the current SOTA methods are supervised and underexploit the potential of the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised approach which detects contextual synonyms of concepts being trained on the data created by shallow matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the previous SOTA with gains of up to 4.5 and 4.0 absolute points after fine-tuning with as little as 20% of the labelled data. |
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. |
Mixture-of-Domain-Adapters: Decoupling and Injecting Domain Knowledge to Pre-trained Language Models’ Memories (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models demonstrate excellent abilities to understand texts in the generic domain while struggling in a specific domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple the feed-forward networks of the Transformer architecture into two parts to maintain old-domain knowledge and a mixture-of-adapters gate to inject domain-specific knowledge in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance on in-domain, out-of-domain and knowledge-intensive tasks. |
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. |
Taming Pre-trained Language Models with N-gram Representations for Low-Resource Domain Adaptation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train pre-trained models require domain-specific data and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-aware N-gram Adaptor to incorporate unseen and domain-specific words into a generic pretrained model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can improve on eight low-resource tasks using limited data with lower computational costs. |
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. |
Improved Differentiable Architecture Search for Language Modeling and Named Entity Recognition (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural architecture search (NAS) is a popular approach for finding new models and freeing researchers from the hard work of designing network architectures. |
| Approach: | They propose differentiable neural architecture search methods for natural language processing . they remove the softmax-local constraint and apply it to named entity recognition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines on the language modeling task. |
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. |
Federated Domain Adaptation for Named Entity Recognition via Distilling with Heterogeneous Tag Sets (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a federated domain adaptation approach is used to learn with NER datasets from multiple platforms while not violating data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a distillation approach to facilitate knowledge transfer across platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in the clinic domain. |
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. |
CLIP-MoE: Towards Building Mixture of Experts for CLIP with Diversified Multiplet Upcycling (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies found that CLIP can only encode one aspect of the feature space, leading to substantial information loss and indistinctive features. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach that fine-tunes complementary CLIP models and transforms them into a CLIP-MoE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework fine-tunes a series of complementary CLIP models and transforms them into a CLIP-MoE. |
QuaSE: Sequence Editing under Quantifiable Guidance (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Quantifiable Sequence Editing (QuaSE) require editing an input sequence to generate an output that satisfies a numerical outcome value measuring a certain property of the sequence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Quantifiable Sequence Editing that allows editing an input sequence to change an outcome and keep the content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles outcome factor and content factor from the input sentence to allow editing to change the outcome and keep the content. |
Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual machine translation models face an imbalance problem due to the different learning competencies of different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose Competence-based Curriculum Learning for Multilingual Machine Translation, named CCL-M, to help schedule the high resource languages and low resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a steady and significant performance gain compared to the previous state-of-the-art approach on the TED talks dataset. |
SecCoder: Towards Generalizable and Robust Secure Code Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing secure code generation methods have limited generalizability to unseen test cases and poor robustness against the attacked model, leading to safety failures in code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable and robust secure code generation method SecCoder by using in-context learning and the safe demonstration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a significant security improvement of 7.20% on unseen test cases and better robustness against the attacked model. |
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. |
Beyond Scaling: Measuring and Predicting the Upper Bound of Knowledge Retention in Language Model Pre-Training (2026.acl-long)
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Changhao Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yifei Cao, Junjie Ye, Xiaoran Fan, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Jiajun Sun, Yi Dong, Yujiong Shen, Jingqi Tong, Baoyu Fan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict performance of large language models are lacking . authors propose a size-dependent mutual information predictor for closed-book question answering accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a size-dependent mutual information predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models and achieves R2 > 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy without additional training. |
Joint Chinese Word Segmentation and Part-of-speech Tagging via Two-way Attentions of Auto-analyzed Knowledge (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging are important fundamental tasks in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model for Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging . they incorporate context features and syntactic knowledge for each input character . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn and benefit from existing tools, but its quality may be poor. |
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. |
Unlocking the Black Box of Latent Reasoning: An Interpretability-Guided Approach to Intervention (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) lack a coherent representation of reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of latent reasoning interventions that enable latent thinking and decode-time interventions that refine the latent process by imposing the identified geometric and semantic priors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models unlock latent capabilities and improve reasoning accuracy without any parameter updates. |
RLShield: Dynamic Jailbreak Detection for LLMs via Reinforced Adaptive Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect jailbreak prompts rely on static model components or fixed decision thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic jailbreak detection framework that employs reinforcement learning for adaptive threshold selection. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the framework outperforms baselines in detection performance while maintaining high computational efficiency. |