Papers by Wei Dai
LECO: Improving Early Exiting via Learned Exits and Comparison-based Exiting Mechanism (2023.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on dynamic early exiting has neglected the intermediate exits’ architectural designs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for learning exits and COmparison-based early exiting to improve PTMs’ early exit performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the SOTA performance on multi-exit BERT training and dynamic early exiting on pre-trained models. |
VGA: Vision GUI Assistant - Minimizing Hallucinations through Image-Centric Fine-Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often overly rely on internal text-based knowledge while neglecting visual inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that balances attention image and text to enhance interpretation and reduce hallucinations by using a visual input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves interpretation and reduces hallucinations by balancing attention image and text to enhance interpretation and reduction of hallucinosity. |
Omni-RewardBench: Toward a Comprehensive Evaluation of Generative Reward Models Across Modalities (2026.acl-long)
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Chi-Min Chan, Yujin Zhou, Pengcheng Wen, Boqin Yin, Jiaming Ji, Juntao Dai, Wei Xue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for ORMs are largely text-centric or limited to bimodal tasks . a new study examines the effectiveness of Omni-RewardBench for ORms across modalities . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid automatic-annotation and human-verification pipeline to construct high-quality evaluation data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is the first benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of ORMs across modalities. |
Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Shuyue Guo, Linzheng Chai, Wei Zhang, Aishan Liu, Chuan Hao, Zhoujun Li, Xin Zhao, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development. |
| Approach: | They propose a proportion-dependent scaling law that prioritizes high-utility languages . they propose PLs to have varying effects during pre-training that affect model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling law is based on 1000+ experiments across multiple languages and models. |
PricingLogic: Evaluating LLMs Reasoning on Complex Tourism Pricing Tasks (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yunuo Liu, Dawei Zhu, Zena Al-Khalili, Dai Cheng, Yanjun Chen, Dietrich Klakow, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, such as code generation, mathematical problem-solving, and general-purpose human instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to process questions expressed in natural language to automate tourism-booking prices when multiple, overlapping farerules apply. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can automate tourism-booking prices when multiple, overlapping farerules apply. |
Empowering Math Problem Generation and Reasoning for Large Language Model via Synthetic Data based Continual Learning Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing learning frameworks for large language models (LLMs) for math problem generation are limited and lack quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data based continual learning framework to improve LLMs ability for MPG and math reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on large language models and math reasoning using supervised fine-tuning, data synthesis and direct preference optimization. |
Learning In-context Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jie Lou, Wei Jia, Dai Dai, Hua Wu, Boxi Cao, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods to recognize entities in text are limited by the diversity of entity types and the lack of high-quality annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context learning-based NER approach that can inject in-const NER ability into PLMs and recognize entities of novel types on-the-fly using only a few demonstrative instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the PLMs+fine-tuning counterparts on 4 few-shot NER datasets and significantly outperformed the Plms+initialized extractors. |
Emergent Relational Order in LLM Agent Societies: From Collective Affect to Authority Stratification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Fei Xiaotong’s Differential Order Pattern characterizes rural society as egocentric and relationally graded, with cooperation attenuating over social distance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework grounded in Affect Control Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Durkheimian collective affect. |
| Outcome: | Extensive simulations support interpreting Differential Order as a structure-sensitive emergent outcome of general social mechanisms. |
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueyang Feng, Jingsen Zhang, Jiakai Tang, Wei Li, Guohao Cai, Xu Chen, Quanyu Dai, Yue Zhu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Shuyue Guo, Yizhi LI, Linzheng Chai, Zhengmao Ye, Shukai Liu, Yuyang Song, Jiajun Wu, Che Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Siwei Wu, Leo L, Xudong Ma, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Yan Xing, Jianzhou Wang, Mingjie Tang, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters. |
GraphSynth: Resolving the Diversity-Reliability Trade-off with Probabilistic Factor Graphs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are a scaleable solution for the generation of synthetic data . however, the utility of such data is capped by a critical tension between diversity and factual reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which leverages a probabilistic factor graph modeling the universe of attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models with a high structural integrity and a boost in performance on downstream tasks. |
DocumentNet: Bridging the Data Gap in Document Pre-training (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Document understanding tasks are a tedious task that requires extensive training and privacy constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to collect weakly labeled data from the web to benefit VDER training . the collected dataset does not depend on specific document types or entity sets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method does not depend on specific document types or entity sets, making it universally applicable to all VDER tasks. |
MeaeQ: Mount Model Extraction Attacks with Efficient Queries (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on limited-query budget settings and adopt random sampling or active learning-based sampling strategies on publicly available, unannotated data sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a model extraction attack with efficient Queries that uses a zero-shot sequence inference classifier to filter task-relevant data from a public text corpus instead of a problem domain-specific dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher similarity to the victim model than baselines while requiring fewer queries. |
SEAD: Self-Evolving Agent for Multi-Turn Service Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in open-domain dialogues, but their performance in service dialogues remains suboptimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables agents to learn effective strategies without large-scale human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples user modeling into two components that provide adaptive training scenarios rather than acting as an unfair adversary. |
Improve Student’s Reasoning Generalizability through Cascading Decomposed CoTs Distillation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have tried to distill these capabilities into smaller language models (SLMs) however, these capabilities are often associated with more parameters, which is not practical to emergent in smaller models. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the traditional single-step learning process into two cascaded learning steps by restructuring the training objectives and concatenating the question with the rationale as input. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves reasoning generalizability and diversity of the model. |
On Weaponization-Resistant Large Language Models with Prospect Theoretic Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing safeguards for large language models are inadequate for open-weight models as minimal fine-tuning can bypass them. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that prioritizes maximizing generative utility rather than a singular optimization metric and integrates prospect theory into LLM training to strengthen LLMs against misuse and weaponization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework strengthens LLMs against misuse and weaponization while maintaining high performance even after extensive fine-tuning. |
Knowledge Neurons in Pretrained Transformers (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that pretrained language models are good at recalling factual knowledge without fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify neurons that express factual knowledge in pretrained Transformers by filling-in-the-blank cloze queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to edit, erase, and update factual knowledge without fine-tuning. |
CoIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Information Retrieval Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and benchmarks for information retrieval are inadequately representing the diversity of code in various domains and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to assess code retrieval capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to invigorate research in the code retrieval domain . it shares the same data schema as other popular benchmarks like MTEB and BEIR . |
Capture the Key in Reasoning to Enhance CoT Distillation Generalization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing distillation methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on fine-tuning student SLMs on correct data, resulting in students struggling to learn the key instead of analyzing mistakes according to correct solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that exposes key reasoning steps rather than simple fine-tuning students' CoTs data by using a set of prompts with similar reasoning paths but divergent conclusions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves student SLMs' ability to learn key reasoning steps rather than fine-tuning them on teacher data. |
A Reinforced Generation of Adversarial Examples for Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation systems fail on less decent inputs, which may harm the credibility of these systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that generates adversarial examples using reinforcement learning to expose pitfalls for a given performance metric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm produces stable attacks with meaning-preserving adversarial examples. |
Encoding and Fusing Semantic Connection and Linguistic Evidence for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies use one attention mechanism to improve contextual semantic representation learning for implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR). |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-Attentive Neural Fusion model to fuse linguistic evidence and semantic connection for IDRR by using a Dual Attention Network and an Offset Matrix Network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the PDTB 3.0 corpus. |
IRRGN: An Implicit Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Multi-turn Response Selection (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on matching between candidate options and historical dialogues while ignoring the reasoning ability of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose an Implicit Relational Reasoning Graph Network to address these issues . they propose to implicitly extract dependencies between utterances and options . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human models on two multi-turn dialogue reasoning benchmark datasets. |
SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training text and speech are based on unlabeled audio data. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model that connects speech encoders and text decoders with a shared unit encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on automatic speech recognition and speech translation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the LibriSpeech ASR and MuST-C ST tasks. |
Pretraining Context Compressor for Large Language Models with Embedding-Based Memory (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Efficient processing of long contexts in large language models is essential for real-world applications such as retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled compressor-LLM framework that preserves contextual information within condensed embedding representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in three domains and across eight datasets while adapting to different downstream LLMs. |
Natural-Language Policies to Executable Decisions: An Interpretable Large Language Model Framework (2026.acl-industry)
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Ziqiang Zhang, Jing Ma, Zilong Wang, Jiayuan Chen, Yi Qiao, Yu He, Wei Zhang, Dai Cheng, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | a production-grade pricing system for tourism is challenging due to unstructured nature of travel orders and ever-evolving pricing policies. |
| Approach: | They propose a production-grade pricing system with a strict decision boundary . they propose to combine structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection with interpretable condition trees . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system processed 3,960 orders in six months and reduced the order management team from 15-20 to 3 . the system reduced the per-order handling time from 10 minutes to 2 minutes. |
Task-oriented Dialogue System for Automatic Diagnosis (P18-2)
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Zhongyu Wei, Qianlong Liu, Baolin Peng, Huaixiao Tou, Ting Chen, Xuanjing Huang, Kam-fai Wong, Xiangying Dai
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify phenotypes using electronic health records (EHRs) are expensive and difficult to transfer models from one disease to another. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-oriented dialogue system framework to make diagnosis for patients automatically, which can converse with patients to collect additional symptoms beyond their self-reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can collect additional symptoms from conversation and improve disease identification accuracy. |
Towards Automatic Evaluation of Dialog Systems: A Model-Free Off-Policy Evaluation Approach (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluation of dialog systems are expensive and not scalable . a framework for estimating human evaluation scores is proposed to bridge this gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for estimating human evaluation scores based on off-policy evaluation . they use language quality metrics for single-turn response generation given a fixed context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in terms of correlation with human evaluation scores. |
RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qingyao Li, Wei Xia, Xinyi Dai, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing tree search methods neglect the underlying reasoning process, resulting in poor search quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that systematically explores and refines the reasoning process for code generation by using a tree search engine and a reflection mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in the code generation domain. |
Local Interpretation of Transformer Based on Linear Decomposition (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on local explanation generation attempts to understand model dynamics on word-level or phraselevel by assigning importance scores on input features. |
| Approach: | They propose to interpret neural networks by linear decomposition by a Transformer model on a single input and a linear decomposing of the output to generate local explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance in sentiment classification and machine translation, and fidelity of explanation. |
A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihao Ding, Siwen Luo, Yue Dai, Yanbei Jiang, Zechuan Li, Qiang Sun, Geoffrey Martin, Wei Liu, Yifan Peng
| Challenge: | Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) frameworks are a key area of research . early approaches to VRDU relied on manually crafted rules and domain-specific heuristics . conventional deep learning approaches do not integrate the diverse modalities in documents . |
| Approach: | They review recent advances in MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are scalable, reliable, and adaptable, the authors argue . their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
CT-GAT: Cross-Task Generative Adversarial Attack based on Transferability (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural network models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, and current methods based on adversarially transferable models rely on substitute models, which can be impractical and costly in real-world scenarios due to the unavailability of training data and the victim model’s structural details. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that directly constructs adversarial examples by extracting transferable features across various tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior attack performance with small cost on ten datasets and demonstrates that it is a novel approach. |
Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large pretrained language models have shown surprising in-context learning ability . despite the great success in performance, its working mechanism remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They explain language models as meta-optimizers and understand in-context learning as implicit finetuning . they find that Transformer attention has a dual form of gradient descent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict labels for unseen inputs without parameter updates . the proposed model outperforms smaller models with a single parameter update . |
CircuitSynth: Reliable Synthetic Data Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack mechanisms to balance linguistic expressivity with formal guarantees regarding validity and coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic framework that decouples semantic reasoning from surface realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 100% Schema Validity even in complex logic puzzles where unconstrained baselines fail (12.4%) while outperforming state-of-the-art methods in rare-combination coverage. |
MPPO: Multi Pair-wise Preference Optimization for LLMs with Arbitrary Negative Samples (2025.coling-main)
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Shuo Xie, Fangzhi Zhu, Jiahui Wang, Lulu Wen, Wei Dai, Xiaowei Chen, Junxiong Zhu, Kai Zhou, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing preference optimization methods such as DPO and KTO are inherently derived from PPO, requiring a reference model that adds GPU memory resources and relies heavily on abundant preference data. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that leverages the average likelihood of model responses to fit the reward function and maximizes the utilization of preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms DPO, ORPO, and SimPO on MT-Bench and Arena-Hard. |
Benchmarking Fine-Grained Error Detection in Multimodal Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Process Reward Models (MPRMs) have emerged as a pivotal framework for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MPRMs’ proficiency in detecting erroneous reasoning steps across diverse error categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves up to 4.8% performance improvement through test-time scaling. |
StableMoE: Stable Routing Strategy for Mixture of Experts (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing learning-to-route methods suffer from the routing fluctuation issue . with the model scale growing, training speed will go slower and memory requirements are heavy . |
| Approach: | They propose a Mixture-of-Experts technique that can scale up the model size of Transformers with an affordable computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing learning-to-route methods on language modeling and multilingual machine translation. |
ViDove: A Translation Agent System with Multimodal Context and Memory-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Yichen Lu, Wei Dai, Jiaen Liu, Ching Wing Kwok, Zongheng Wu, Xudong Xiao, Ao Sun, Sheng Fu, Jianyuan Zhan, Yian Wang, Takatomo Saito, Sicheng Lai
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in Machine Translation (MT) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation agent system designed for multimodal input that leverages visual and contextual background information to enhance the translation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed translation agent achieves significantly higher translation quality in subtitle generation and general translation tasks compared to previous state-of-the-art systems. |
Online Distilling from Checkpoints for Neural Machine Translation (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural machine translation models have a deep structure with large amounts of parameters, making them hard to train. |
| Approach: | They propose an online method to generate a teacher model from checkpoints . they show steady improvement over a strong self-attention-based baseline system . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on-the-fly on several datasets and language pairs. |
RAGLAB: A Modular and Research-Oriented Unified Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Xuanwang Zhang, Yun-Ze Song, Yidong Wang, Shuyun Tang, Xinfeng Li, Zhengran Zeng, Zhen Wu, Wei Ye, Wenyuan Xu, Yue Zhang, Xinyu Dai, Shikun Zhang, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing research on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) does not address the problem of hallucinations and real-time updating of knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular open-source library to equip LLMs with external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the need for expensive open-source tools and lacks fair comparisons between novel RAG algorithms. |
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention (2025.acl-long)
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Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Yuxing Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
| Challenge: | Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, but high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a natively trained Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithms with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. |
PyramidCodec: Hierarchical Codec for Long-form Music Generation in Audio Domain (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate long music are inefficient and lack of structured representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical discrete representation of audio for long audio-domain music generation using residual vector quantization on different levels of features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance in terms of reconstruction quality and token per second (TPS) the proposed method facilitates training a language model that can generate well-structured long-form music for up to 3 minutes. |
GeoSQA: A Benchmark for Scenario-based Question Answering in the Geography Domain at High School Level (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | SQA is an emerging application of NLP in the medical, geography, and legal domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in geography domain at high school level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in the geography domain at high school level. |
Charge-Based Prison Term Prediction with Deep Gating Network (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work merely predicts the total prison term, but in reality a defendant is often charged with multiple crimes. |
| Approach: | They propose a charge-based prison term prediction task that better fits real needs and makes it more accurate and interpretable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance for charge-specific feature selection and aggregation. |
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
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Junbo Qi, Yi Zhang, Hanchu Ni, Che Liu, Zhimin Yao, Ruilin Yang, Xiancong Ren, Liangjian Wen, Wei Ge, Yuya Ieiri, Osamu Yoshie, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
| Challenge: | Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack spatial reasoning, despite text-based CoTs . e-ViC reframes spatial intelligence as a verifiable, tool-using capability, argues a new study. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that moves reasoning beyond text into the visual domain . they ground reasoning in pixel-level interactions to enable human-like "look-and-confirm" strategies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing Vision-Language Models with an average gain of 10.1%. |
AirDialogue: An Environment for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Research (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in dialogue generation have inspired a number of studies on dialogue systems . however, current datasets are limited in size and the environment for training agents is relatively unsophisticated. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a context-generator to generate travel and flight restrictions to train agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a score of 0.17 while humans can reach 0.91 . the proposed model is based on a large dataset that contains 301,427 goal-oriented conversations . |
Bi-Directional Iterative Prompt-Tuning for Event Argument Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-tuning methods for event argument extraction lack entity information . eAE is a key step of event extraction, but it requires a pre-trained language model to extract event arguments. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-tuning method that takes advantage of entity information and pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art prompt-tuning methods on an english dataset. |
GUI0: Self-Evolving Foundational GUI Agents in Super App Ecosystems (2026.acl-long)
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Xinyi Wang, Wei Dai, Kyle Qiao, Ke Wang, Peng Chen, Gang Cao, null Kangqin, Zhongpu Wang, Xiaode Zhang, Yanming Liu, Jihao Gu, Jingtao Xu, Gong Zhi
| Challenge: | Automated interaction with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is central to general artificial intelligence, but remains challenging within Super App ecosystems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework synergizing autonomous data synthesis with dual-agent co-evolution . GUI0 establishes a domain-aware foundation model via synthesized corpora and employs curriculum-driven reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-2.5-Pro and Claude-4-Sonnet in the SuperAPP benchmark and has universal efficacy across base models. |
MessToClean: Evidence-Grounded Structure-Preserving Reconstruction for Real-World Degraded Exam Paper Images (2026.acl-long)
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Jiayi Tuo, Cheng Tang, Zihan Wang, Chenyue Zhou, Yao Li, Yanbiao Ma, Chao Wang, Wei Dai, Mingxuan Wang, Shitong Qin, Ziwei Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) fail under RDEI, leading to disrupted structure and evidence-unsupported hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a backbone-agnostic, evidence-driven pipeline that treats off-the-shelf MLLMs as interchangeable components to improve stem consistency and figure consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves stem consistency by 1.01-3.18%, figure consistency by 0.50-49.16%, and refusal F1 by 1.06-10.88% across question types. |
ConnPrompt: Connective-cloze Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) do not exploit linguistic evidence embedded in the pre-training process. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm to detect and classify relation sense between two text segments without an explicit connective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms even with fewer training data. |
ARNOR: Attention Regularization based Noise Reduction for Distant Supervision Relation Classification (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Distant supervision is used for relation classification but it introduces noisy labels . a novel approach to distant supervision relation classification is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for distant supervision relation classification using attention regularization and attention regularizing . they assume that a trustable relation label should be explained by the neural attention model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the NYT data and noise reduction effect over state-of-the-art methods. |
Instruction-Tuning Data Synthesis from Scratch via Web Reconstruction (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Chuhan Wu, Xinyi Dai, Yan Xu, Weinan Gan, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating and curating high-quality instruction-tuning data rely heavily on the quality of seed data or strong assumptions about the structure and content of web documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automated framework for synthesizing high-quality instruction-tuning (IT) data directly from raw web documents with minimal assumptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16.65% across four instruction-following benchmarks. |
Knowledge Association with Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graphs (KGs) depend on high embedding dimensions and hierarchical structures to achieve expressiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a hyperbolic relational graph neural network for KG embedding and capture knowledge associations with a high-dimensional transformation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on entity alignment and type inference show the proposed method is effective and efficient. |
On Task-personalized Multimodal Few-shot Learning for Visually-rich Document Entity Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Visually-rich document entity retrieval (VDER) is an important topic in industrial NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-aware meta-learning framework to tackle the problem of visually-rich document entity retrieval (VDER) they adopt a hierarchical decoder and employ contrastive learning to achieve this goal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the robustness of popular meta-learning baselines. |
LAiW: A Chinese Legal Large Language Models Benchmark (2025.coling-main)
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Yongfu Dai, Duanyu Feng, Jimin Huang, Haochen Jia, Qianqian Xie, Yifang Zhang, Weiguang Han, Wei Tian, Hao Wang
| Challenge: | Xie et al., 2023) show that large language models (LLMs) can generate legal text, but lack the legal syllogism . legal experts are cautious about their practical application due to the opaque nature of the LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese legal LLM benchmark structured around the legal syllogism . they evaluate LLMs across three levels of capability, each reflecting a more complex stage of legal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark identifies that LLMs lack the legal syllogism, which hinders trust and understanding from legal experts. |