Papers by Wei Lu
Implicit n-grams Induced by Recurrence (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that self-attention based models have limitations on modeling sequential transformations. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract some explainable features from trained RNNs that are reminiscent of classical n-grams features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can model interesting linguistic phenomena such as negation and intensification. |
Enhance Robustness of Language Models against Variation Attack through Graph Integration (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are used in many NLP applications but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks can lead to false or misleading information being distributed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate a Chinese character variation graph into pre-trained language models to increase their robustness against character variation attacks in Chinese content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing language models in combating adversarial attacks in Chinese content. |
From Isolated Scoring to Collaborative Ranking: A Comparison-Native Framework for LLM-Based Paper Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Pujun Zheng, Jiacheng Yao, Jinquan Zheng, Chenyang Gu, Guoxiu He, Jiawei Liu, Yong Huang, Tianrui Guo, Wei Lu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are currently used to evaluate scientific papers by assigning an absolute score to each paper independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a comparison-native framework for paper evaluation that integrates comparison into both data construction and model learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average relative improvement of 21.8% over the strong baseline DeepReview-14B, while exhibiting robust generalization to five previously unseen datasets. |
MusicAgent: An AI Agent for Music Understanding and Generation with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | MusicAgent integrates numerous music-related tools and an autonomous workflow to address user requirements. |
| Approach: | a new system is built to integrate music-related tools and an autonomous workflow . the system is based on large language models (LLMs) that can be used to organize and decompose requests . |
| Outcome: | the proposed system integrates numerous music-related tools and an autonomous workflow to address user requirements. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jerry Wei, Le Hou, Andrew Lampinen, Xiangning Chen, Da Huang, Yi Tay, Xinyun Chen, Yifeng Lu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma, Quoc Le
| Challenge: | Language models are sensitive to the way that prompts are given, indicating that they are not reasoning in a robust manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels are replaced with arbitrary symbols. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is much stronger at reasoning tasks and more robust to underspecified prompts than the standard model. |
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. |
HalluAudio: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Hallucination Detection in Large Audio-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on hallucination focus on text or vision, while few audio-oriented studies are limited in scale, modality coverage, and diagnostic depth. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark for evaluating hallucinations across speech, sound, and music. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves hallucination rate, yes/no bias, error-type analysis, and refusal rate. |
Unsupervised Non-transferable Text Classification (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a good deep learning model require labeled data for the target domain which can be difficult to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised non-transferable learning method that does not require annotated target domain data and introduce a secret key component for recovering the model’s access to the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model generalization ability in specific target domains while still recovering access to the target domain. |
Immediate Inference: The Missing Foundation in Large Language Model Logical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on LLMs has focused on fine-grained skill decomposition and consistency probing at the propositional level. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark evaluating immediate inference that evaluates elemental operations over categorical propositions and proposes a model that uses immediate inferential reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that models lack robust operator grounding, oscillating between structural reasoning and surface pattern matching, inconsistent handling of quantifiers and negation. |
Lightweight, Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks for AMR-to-Text Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | AMR-to-text generation is used to transduce Abstract Meaning Representation structures (AMRs) Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) are not able to capture non-local information and follow a local (first-order) information aggregation scheme. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic fusion mechanism that captures richer non-local interactions . they propose weight tied convolutions and group graph convolution to reduce memory usage . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets with significantly fewer parameters while maintaining the model capacity. |
Learning Cross-lingual Distributed Logical Representations for Semantic Parsing (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Recent research efforts have looked into the problem of learning semantic parsers in a multilingual setup, but how to improve the performance of a monolingual semantic parsed system remains a research question that is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data annotated in different languages to learn distributed representations of logical forms for improving a monolingual semantic parser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the standard multilingual GeoQuery dataset. |
MergeME: Model Merging Techniques for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous MoEs (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuhang Zhou, Giannis Karamanolakis, Victor Soto, Anna Rumshisky, Mayank Kulkarni, Furong Huang, Wei Ai, Jianhua Lu
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art methods for merging expert models with different architectures do not address parameter interference and require extensive fine-tuning to restore performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for merging experts with different architectures into a unified Mixture-of-Experts model with a goal of enhancing performance in each domain while retaining effectiveness on general tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across multiple domains show that the proposed methods reduce fine-tuning costs and improve performance over state-of-the-art methods. |
Pre-training for Abstractive Document Summarization by Reinstating Source Text (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive document summarization models are often trained on limited supervised data . authors present three objectives for pretraining abstractive summarizing models . |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train a SEQ2SEQ based abstractive summarization model on unlabeled text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on two benchmark summarization datasets with 19GB of text . the goal is sentence reordering, next sentence generation and masked document generation . |
Neo-Classic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning in Classical Chinese Poetry (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high accuracy on established Classical Chinese Poetry benchmarks, but it remains challenging to distinguish transferable Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning from reliance on familiar pre-training patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that combines a constructionist Out-of-Sample dataset with reverse understanding probes to evaluate large-scale large-format models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on classical Chinese poetry benchmarks, but a performance gap persists . the model can complete famous couplets and can be used to understand a variety of texts. |
MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Wang, Junting Pan, Linda Wei, Aojun Zhou, Weikang Shi, Zimu Lu, Han Xiao, Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LMMs) struggle with simple tasks such as geometry, e.g., arithmetic, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage code as supervision for cross-modal alignment . they propose to use FigCodifier and ImgCode-8.6M to synthesize novel mathematical figures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the geometry problem-solving subset of MathVista, achieving improvements of 8.9% and 9.2%. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
Demystifying Small Language Models for Edge Deployment (2025.acl-long)
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Zhenyan Lu, Xiang Li, Dongqi Cai, Rongjie Yi, Fangming Liu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Xiwen Zhang, Nicholas D. Lane, Mengwei Xu
| Challenge: | Small language models (SLMs) are a promising solution for resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and the Web of Things. |
| Approach: | They propose to use SLMs to build and optimize a set of small language models that are publicly accessible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform 7B models in general tasks, while their in-context learning capabilities remain limited and their efficiency has significant optimization potential. |
Interpretable Composition Attribution Enhancement for Visio-linguistic Compositional Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite promising progress, vision-language models still exhibit significant challenges in understanding visio-linguistic concepts beyond object terms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encourages the model to pay greater attention to composition words denoting relationships and attributes within the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the ability to discern intricate details and construct more sophisticated interpretations of combined visual and linguistic elements. |
Revamping Multilingual Agreement Bidirectionally via Switched Back-translation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Current multilingual agreement (MA) methods require parallel data between multiple language pairs, which is not always realistic and optimize the agreement in an ambiguous direction, which hampers the translation performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multilingual agreement framework that optimizes agreement bidirectionally with the Kullback-Leibler Divergence loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves strong baselines on the task of multilingual neural machine translation with three benchmarks: TED Talks, News, and Europarl. |
A Neural Transition-based Model for Nested Mention Recognition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to recognize nested mentions are based on Stack-LSTM . nesting mentions can be used for downstream tasks like question answering and relation extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable transition-based method to model the nested structure of mentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method gets the state-of-the-art performance in ACE datasets showing its effectiveness in detecting nested mentions. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
TransBench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environments (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuheng Lu, Qian Yu, Hongru Wang, Zeming Liu, Wei Su, Yanping Liu, Yuhang Guo, Maocheng Liang, Yunhong Wang, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents struggle to adapt to dynamic and interconnected nature of real-world digital environments, authors show . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the transferability of GUI agents across three key dimensions . transBench includes 15 app categories with diverse functionalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing GUI agents struggle to adapt to dynamic, interconnected environments. |
Visual Evidence Prompting Mitigates Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LVLMs have shown impressive progress by integrating visual perception with linguistic understanding to produce contextually grounded outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual evidence prompting method to mitigate hallucinations in large vision-language models by using small visual models to complement them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations by reducing false activation and enhancing correct ones. |
Learning Multi-Step Reasoning by Solving Arithmetic Tasks (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated large LMs’ impressive performance in solving math problems, but such ability seems only to emerge from models with abundant parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to continuously pre-train LMs with the capabilities of multi-step reasoning by continuously pretraining them on a synthetic dataset MsAT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LMs' multi-step reasoning abilities on four math word problem datasets. |
Structured Pruning for Efficient Generative Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale generative Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are limited in their deployment in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to prune the feed-forward networks of generative pre-trained language models to smaller widths without designing extra operators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.51x/6.96x inference speedup on GPU/CPU with 67% size reduction. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion with Self-Supervised Adaptive Graph Alignment (2022.acl-long)
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Zijie Huang, Zheng Li, Haoming Jiang, Tianyu Cao, Hanqing Lu, Bing Yin, Karthik Subbian, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict missing facts in knowledge graphs are limited in language alignment . SS-AGA uses seed alignment as an edge type to fuses all KGs as a whole graph . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised adaptive graph alignment method that fuses all KGs as a whole graph by regarding alignment as 'a new edge type' they propose SS-AGA method that uses relation-aware attention weights to capture potential alignment pairs in a new paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict missing facts in a knowledge graph (KG) but language alignment is scarce and new alignment identification is noisy. |
From Model-centered to Human-Centered: Revision Distance as a Metric for Text Evaluation in LLMs-based Applications (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for large language models yield numerical scores that ignore user experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric that suggests revision edits that mimic the human writing process . their results show that the metric offers more insightful feedback and distinguishes between texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric can provide a self-explained text evaluation result in a human-understandable manner beyond the context-independent score. |
Text2Math: End-to-end Parsing Text into Math Expressions (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for semantically parsing text into math expressions and propose 'text2math' which aims to predict the complete math expression as a tree structure, with minimal manual efforts. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model. |
Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Conversation via Multi-view Feature Alignment and Memorization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is an advanced capability of conversational AI systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-parametric paradigm for Emotion Recognition in conversation that uses supervised contrastive learning to align semantic-view and context-view features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on four widely used benchmarks. |
Understanding Attention for Text Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on whether local attention weights reflect the importance of input representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze for each word token the following two quantities: its polarity score and its attention score, where the latter is a global assessment on the token’s significance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be improved under conditions where the interplay between the two quantities can contribute towards model performance. |
MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Jingqun Tang, Qi Liu, Yongjie Ye, Jinghui Lu, Shu Wei, An-Lan Wang, Chunhui Lin, Hao Feng, Zhen Zhao, Yanjie Wang, Yuliang Liu, Hao Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) is a text-centric visual task understanding tool. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark that features human expert annotations across 9 languages . they prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images. |
WN-Salience: A Corpus of News Articles with Entity Salience Annotations (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on entity salience does not distinguish between salient and non-salient entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to measure entity salience using WikiNews dataset . WN-Salience is built on top of Wikinews, a Wikimedia project . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to benchmark tasks such as entity salience detection and salient entity linking. |
Compression of Generative Pre-trained Language Models via Quantization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress generative pre-trained language models fail on generative tasks due to homogeneous word embeddings and limited memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level contrastive distillation method to learn distinguishable word embeddings and a module-wise dynamic scaling method to make quantizers adaptive to different modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art compression methods on generative PLMs by a clear margin. |
Deeply Coupled Cross-Modal Prompt Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-tuning methods focus on language branch or learn vision-language interaction in a shallow mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a Deeply coupled Cross-modal Prompt learning method based on CLIP to facilitate the interplay between vision and language with a Cross-Modal Prompting Attention mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables the interplay between vision and language with a Cross-Modal Prompt Attention mechanism. |
Self-Training with Direct Preference Optimization Improves Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on enhancing large-scale language models' reasoning abilities, but the research question of how to GSM8K Performance vs. computational cost remains. |
| Approach: | They propose to train small-scale language models with their own outputs to avoid relying on large models' outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models with comparable sizes while minimizing the required compute. |
DialogGen: Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System with Multi-turn Text-Image Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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Minbin Huang, Yanxin Long, Xinchi Deng, Ruihang Chu, Jiangfeng Xiong, Xiaodan Liang, Hong Cheng, Qinglin Lu, Wei Liu
| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have advanced in recent years, but effective interaction with these models is challenging for average users due to the need for specialized prompt engineering knowledge and the inability to perform multi-turn image generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf MLLMs and T2I models to build a multi-modal interactive dialogue system (MIDS) that can generate correct output modalities and coherence of output images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can generate correct output modalities and coherent multi-modal outputs compared with other state-of-the-art models. |
A Rigorous Study on Named Entity Recognition: Can Fine-tuning Pretrained Model Lead to the Promised Land? (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task of information extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform randomization tests on standard NER benchmarks to examine name regularity, mention coverage and context diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on standard NER benchmarks than other models on open datasets. |
Through the Valley: Path to Effective Long CoT Training for Small Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision is effective for large language models . but small models trained on limited long CoT data experience performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They identify a phenomenon called Long CoT Degradation in small language models . long CoT data can be used to generate long chain-of-thought (CoT) responses . |
| Outcome: | The results show that models trained on 8k long CoT examples lose up to 75% of their original performance before fine-tuning. |
AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs. |
| Approach: | They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI. |
Twitter Homophily: Network Based Prediction of User’s Occupation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to predicting Twitter users' demographic attributes exploit, select, and combine various features generated from text and network to achieve the best performance. |
| Approach: | They extend existing Twitter occupational class prediction data set and exploit social network homophily to achieve competitive performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance on a dataset with a small fraction of the training data. |
Learning to Refine: Self-Refinement of Parallel Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Qibin Wang, Pu Zhao, Shaohan Huang, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Furu Wei, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to test-time scaling are limited due to the quality of candidate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to quantify the relative improvement of self-refinement beyond majority voting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmarks over other methods. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
Tuna: Instruction Tuning using Feedback from Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | LLms like LLaMA have shown to be cost-effective for generating better responses . however, the instruction-tuned model has only seen one response per instruction . |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune an instruction-tuned LLM using probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking approaches to increase the likelihood of generating better responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Super Natural Instructions, LMentry and Vicuna QA. |
CLEAN–EVAL: Clean Evaluation on Contaminated Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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Wenhong Zhu, Hongkun Hao, Zhiwei He, Yun-Ze Song, Jiao Yueyang, Yumeng Zhang, Hanxu Hu, Yiran Wei, Rui Wang, Hongyuan Lu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate large language models are prone to data contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which parses contaminated data and back-translates it into a candidate set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces data contamination and evaluates the LLMs more cleanly. |
Self-Harmonized Chain of Thought (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought prompting have limitations . arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks are challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that unifies diverse solution paths into a consistent reasoning pattern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 2.8% on reasoning tasks. |
Insert or Attach: Taxonomy Completion via Box Embedding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing taxonomy expansion methods embed concepts as vectors in Euclidean space, causing incorrectly model asymmetric relations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use box containment and center closeness to create geometric scorers that capture intrinsic relationships between concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four real-world datasets. |
Mitigating Boundary Ambiguity and Inherent Bias for Text Classification in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new text classification framework for large language models addresses the problem of boundary ambiguity and inherent biases in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage classification framework for large language models to mitigate bottlenecks . their approach uses pairwise comparisons to efficiently narrow down options . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the number of options and improves on four datasets. |
SARA: Salience-Aware Reinforced Adaptive Decoding for Large Language Models in Abstractive Summarization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing decoding strategies neglect the explicit use of salient contextual information and rely on static hyperparameters to fix the balance between contextual and prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a salience-aware reinforced adaptive decoding (SARA) which incorporates salient contextual information and allows the model to determine reliance on source document's context, salient context, and model's prior knowledge based on pointwise mutual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the quality and faithfulness of summaries across LLMs without modifying their weights. |
XFUND: A Benchmark Dataset for Multilingual Visually Rich Form Understanding (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on multimodal pre-training for visually rich document understanding tasks has focused on the English domain while neglecting the importance of multilingual generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal pre-trained model for multilingual document understanding which bridges the language barriers for visually rich document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing cross-lingual pre-trained models on the XFUND dataset on visual document understanding tasks. |
Contextual Distortion Reveals Constituency: Masked Language Models are Implicit Parsers (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a novel chart-based method for extracting parse trees from masked language models is proposed . a graph-based approach can be used to extract parser trees without training separate parsers . |
| Approach: | They propose a chart-based method for extracting parse trees from masked language models . they use a set of perturbations motivated by the linguistic concept of constituency tests to score each span . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on english with masked LMs and in multilingual settings. |
Where to Attack: A Dynamic Locator Model for Backdoor Attack in Text Classifications (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | BackDoor Attack (BDA) study aims to train a poisoned model with clean data and some trigger-embedded instances to perform normally on normal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a poisoned model with clean and poisonest inputs . they propose to use triggers to predict those poisonets as target labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict P2P dynamically without human intervention. |
Global Eye: Breaking the “Fixed Thinking Pattern” during the Instruction Expansion Process (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on constructing multi-perspective prompts to expand instructions, overlooking the “Fixed Thinking Pattern” issue of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that analyzes the statistical characteristics of newly generated instructions and updates the prompts after a fixed number of instruction expansions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses open-source LLMs and GPT3.5 in several metrics. |
Two are Better than One: Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Table-Sequence Encoders (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition and relation extraction are two important fundamental problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to design two separate encoders to capture two different types of information in the representation learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show significant improvements on standard datasets. |
Anti-Length Shift: Dynamic Outlier Truncation for Training Efficient Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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Wei Wu, Liyi Chen, Congxi Xiao, Tianfu Wang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Hui Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing efficient reasoning methods rely on explicit length penalties for excessive verbosity on simple queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time intervention that selectively suppresses redundant tokens . they find length shift occurs when models generate unnecessary reasoning on trivial inputs - a phenomenon that is often unexplored . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces inference token usage by 78% while increasing accuracy compared to the initial policy and surpasses state-of-the-art efficient reasoning methods. |
FlashAudio: Rectified Flow for Fast and High-Fidelity Text-to-Audio Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in latent diffusion models (LDMs) have markedly enhanced text-to-audio generation, yet their iterative sampling processes impose substantial computational demands, limiting practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn straight flow for fast simulation by using flashAudio with rectified flows and immiscible flow to minimize the total distance of data-noise pairs in a batch vias assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn straight flow for fast simulations and reduce noise distribution. |
TRIP: Accelerating Document-level Multilingual Pre-training via Triangular Document-level Pre-training on Parallel Data Triplets (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongyuan Lu, Haoyang Huang, Shuming Ma, Dongdong Zhang, Wai Lam, Zhaochuan Gao, Anthony Aue, Arul Menezes, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual sequence-to-sequence pre-training rely on monolingual corpora and sometimes synthetic document-level bilingual corporata. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage document-level trilingual parallel corpora to improve sequence-to-sequence multilingual pre-training by using a novel method called Grafting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strong state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores on three multilingual document-level machine translation benchmarks and one cross-lingual abstractive summarization benchmark. |
Threshold Filtering Packing for Supervised Fine-Tuning: Training Related Samples within Packs (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Randomly concatenating data points can lead to cross-contamination due to the significant difference in their subject matter. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that randomly concatenates data of varying lengths until reaching the designed maximum length to optimize context length and reduce padding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance on GSM8K and HumanEval, and also improves fairness and accuracy by 15%. |
Dependency-based Hybrid Trees for Semantic Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for semantic parsing focus on structure-based models, but none deal with dependency information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency-based hybrid tree model which converts natural language utterances into machine interpretable meaning representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across eight languages and is highly tractable inferenceable. |
LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle to process lengthy inputs due to limited length generalization and attention’s quadratic computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that allows each head to attend to important context chunks instead of allowing each head a full sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks multi-head attention's untapped potential by allowing each head to attend to important context chunks instead of the full sentence. |
LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in understanding language and processing text, but their cost prohibits their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent collaboration method that breaks down lengthy documents into smaller, more manageable chunks and organizes the member agents to read their assigned chunks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 16.42% and 1.63% accuracy gains over existing models on single-hop and multi-hop QA settings. |
Wukong-Reader: Multi-modal Pre-training for Fine-grained Visual Document Understanding (2023.acl-long)
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Haoli Bai, Zhiguang Liu, Xiaojun Meng, Li Wentao, Shuang Liu, Yifeng Luo, Nian Xie, Rongfu Zheng, Liangwei Wang, Lu Hou, Jiansheng Wei, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for visual document understanding lack granularity of document textlines. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised pre-training program to leverage structural knowledge nested in document textlines to achieve fine-grained alignment between visual regions and texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs better on various VDU tasks in English and Chinese. |
BinaryBERT: Pushing the Limit of BERT Quantization (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance improvement in various tasks, but the improvement generally comes at the cost of increasing model size and computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a binary quantization technique which initializes binaryBERT by splitting from a ternary network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks while being 24x smaller. |
Position-Aware Tagging for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research efforts focus on extracting the triplets of target entities, their associated sentiment, and opinion spans explaining the reason for the sentiment. |
| Approach: | They propose a position-aware tagging scheme that can extract triplets using a sequence tapping approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on multiple datasets and compares with existing models. |
CL-QR: Cross-Lingual Enhanced Query Reformulation for Multi-lingual Conversational AI Agents (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing QR systems that reformulate defective user queries are limited in English due to the scarcity of non-English QR labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a query reformulation method which reformulates defective user queries to improve non-English QR performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves non-English QR performance by leveraging abundant reformulation resources in English. |
Slot Transferability for Cross-domain Slot Filling (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on slot filling uses labeled data from source domains to train a model for target domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic Slot Transferability Measure (STM) to evaluate the transferability from a source slot to a target slot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on multiple datasets and models. |
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. |
Leveraging Training Data in Few-Shot Prompting for Numerical Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompts can be challenging to design for arithmetic word problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose to use training data to replace CoT with programs as the reasoning step . their results show that leveraging training data can improve generalization ability of prompts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the generalization ability of prompts and the performance of fine-tuned smaller models in arithmetic word problem solving. |
Improving Knowledge Graph Completion with Structure-Aware Supervised Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing contrastive methods focus on individual triples, overlooking the broader structural connectivities and topologies of KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose a new contrastive learning framework that incorporates four tasks specifically tailored to KG data: Vertex-level CL, Neighbor-level Cl, Path-levelCL, and Relation composition level CL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves SOTA performance under standard supervised and low-resource settings. |
Uncovering Main Causalities for Long-tailed Information Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Information Extraction (IE) aims to extract structural information from unstructured texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aims to uncover the main causalities behind data in the view of causal inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect the main causalities behind data in the view of causal inference. |
Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversations (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hao Yang, Hongyuan Lu, Xinhua Zeng, Yang Liu, Xiang Zhang, Haoran Yang, Yumeng Zhang, Shan Huang, Yiran Wei, Wai Lam
| Challenge: | a new paradigm for dialogue systems is being developed to mimic human interactions . the current single-step dialogue paradigm lacks the depth and fluidity of human interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a step-by-step dialogue paradigm that mimics human interactions . they use a dataset to fine-tune existing language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system mimics the dynamic nature of human conversations . it is compared with existing paradigms and will be released later this year . |
Diagnosing Hidden Instabilities in Model Editing via Uncertainty Quantification (2026.acl-long)
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Zihan Gu, TianYi Zhang, Xinyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Wang, Han Zhang, Yuhao Wei, Jiacheng Lu, Tianyi Ma, Xingsheng Zhang, Hua Zhang, Yue Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to update large language models (LLMs) without expensive retraining are fragile under single-edit evaluation protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that characterizes activation-based editing as a constrained intervention on intermediate representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reveals local knowledge conflicts invisible to existing benchmarks. |
Sailor: Open Language Models for South-East Asia (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) rely on English data for training, but are often not comparable across other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a family of open language models for SEA languages . they use BPE dropout, aggressive data cleaning and deduplication to improve model robustness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well across four benchmarks, including commonsense reasoning, question answering, reading comprehension and examination. |
Better Transition-Based AMR Parsing with a Refined Search Space (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsers require a pipeline approach to learn concepts and relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a transition-based search space to conduct a new compact AMR graph and an improved oracle to perform the search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves the state-of-the-art performance on various datasets with minimal additional information. |
Igniting Creative Writing in Small Language Models: LLM-as-a-Judge versus Multi-Agent Refined Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with novelty and Reinforcement Learning from human feedback (RLHF) is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Reward Model (RM) and a principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge to enhance creative output over baselines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly enhances creative output over baselines, but the principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge yields superior generation quality. |
EchoVLM: Dynamic Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Model for Universal Ultrasound Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Ultrasound is the preferred early cancer screening modality due to non-ionizing radiation, cost-effectiveness, and real-time imaging. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ultrasound-tailored vision-language models with a mixture-of-experts architecture to train ultrasound-specific knowledge across seven anatomical systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Qwen2-VL by 7.58 BLEU-1 and 3.45 ROUGE-1 points in report generation. |
Named Entity and Relation Extraction with Multi-Modal Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to name entity recognition and relation extraction are knowledge-based and may not be highly relevant. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal named entity recognition framework that leverages image information to improve the performance of NER and relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve state-of-the-art on four multi-modal named entity recognition datasets and one multi-module relation extraction dataset. |
Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Really Reduce Harmfulness from Jailbreaking? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak attacks fail against reasoning models enhanced by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak method that uses Chain-of-Thought reasoning to reduce harmfulness from jailbreaking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed jailbreak method performs well against open AI models and deepseek-R1 reasoning models. |
Towards Universal Debiasing for Language Models-based Tabular Data Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models have exacerbated fairness issues in tabular data generation . inherent historical biases in tabulated data cause LLMs to exacerbate fairness problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a universal debiasing framework that minimizes group-level dependencies . it leverages the autoregressive structure and analytic sampling distributions of LLM-based tabular data generators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework minimizes group-level dependencies while reducing mutual information between advantaged and protected attributes. |
LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2021.acl-long)
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Yang Xu, Yiheng Xu, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Furu Wei, Guoxin Wang, Yijuan Lu, Dinei Florencio, Cha Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Min Zhang, Lidong Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training tasks for text and layout are effective in visually-rich document understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine pre-training tasks with a multi-modal model to model interaction between text, layout and image in a single multi-module framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LayoutLM by a large margin on visual-rich document understanding tasks. |
DoCIA: An Online Document-Level Context Incorporation Agent for Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinglin Lyu, Wei Tang, Yuang Li, Xiaofeng Zhao, Ming Zhu, Junhui Li, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Daimeng Wei, Hao Yang, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Document-level context is crucial for speech translation due to noise from ASR . incorporating document-level contextual information into ST remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They develop an online framework that integrates document-level context into machine translation . they use document-based modules to integrate document- level context into ST . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in sentence and discourse metrics . it can correct ASR transcription errors and improve translation performance . |
Quantity Tagger: A Latent-Variable Sequence Labeling Approach to Solving Addition-Subtraction Word Problems (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve arithmetic word problems require additional annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically discovers hidden mathematical relations by tagging each quantity with a sign corresponding to one type of mathematical operation. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves 5 and 8 points of accuracy gains on two datasets compared to prior approaches. |
CNNSum: Exploring Long-Context Summarization with Large Language Models in Chinese Novels (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Currently, long-context summarization mainly relies on memory ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale long-context summarization benchmark based on Chinese novels . they use human-driven annotations to analyze long-constituency models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features human-driven annotations across four subsets with lengths ranging from 16k to 128k. |
Reasoning with Latent Structure Refinement for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level relation extraction capture non-local interactions but are not able to capture rich non-linguistic interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that empowers relational reasoning across sentences by automatically inducing the latent document- level graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an F1 score of 59.05 on a large-scale document-level dataset (DocRED), significantly improving over the previous results. |
Entity-Aware Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multidocument summarization do not focus on explicitly modeling the underlying semantic information across documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an entityaware model for abstractive multi-document summarization that augments the classical Transformer-based encoder-decoder framework with a heterogeneous graph consisting of text units and entities as nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can deal with saliency and redundancy issues explicitly and can be used with pre-trained language models, arriving at improved performance. |
Neural Segmental Hypergraphs for Overlapping Mention Recognition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that assume that mentions are non-overlapping spans in text may not perform well in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a segmental hypergraph representation to model overlapping entity mentions that are prevalent in many practical datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representation achieves state-of-the-art performance in three benchmark datasets annotated with overlapping mentions. |
WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhepei Wei, Wenlin Yao, Yao Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Qin Lu, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Puyang Xu, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li
| Challenge: | Existing work on reinforcement learning has focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns directly from online interactions by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, guided by binary rewards depending on task success. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark show that the framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models. |
Sampling Better Negatives for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised named entity recognition approaches rely on human annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to select negative samples with high similarities with positive samples . they propose to use automatically labeled training data instead of human annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent performance improvements on four distantly supervised NER datasets. |
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Binghai Wang, Rui Zheng, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Wei Shen, Yuhao Zhou, Dong Yan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets. |
Discrete Argument Representation Learning for Interactive Argument Pair Identification (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on monological argumentation covers claims generation, argument structure prediction, and essay scoring. |
| Approach: | They propose to identify argument pairs from two posts with opposite stances to a certain topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing models on a large-scale dataset . it also proves that it is useful for analyzing argument pairs from two posts . |
Learning Like Humans: Advancing LLM Reasoning Capabilities via Adaptive Difficulty Curriculum Learning and Expert-Guided Self-Reformulation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that these human-inspired strategies synergistically and significantly enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Adaptive Difficulty Curriculum Learning and Expert-Guided Self-Reformulation to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed strategies synergistically and significantly improve performance over the baseline model. |
Save the Good Prefix: Precise Error Penalization via Process-Supervised RL to Enhance LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods rely on sparse outcome rewards, which fail to credit correct intermediate steps in partially successful solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a process reward model that rewards correct steps only when they detect errors . they propose VPPO, which rewards the correct prefix and an erroneous suffix . |
| Outcome: | a new approach outperforms sparse-reward RL and prior PRM-guided baselines on Pass@1 and Pass@K . a process reward model (PRM) outperformed sparser-rebound RL on multiple reasoning benchmarks . |
DIAG-NRE: A Neural Pattern Diagnosis Framework for Distantly Supervised Neural Relation Extraction (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for labeling relational facts require significant expert labor to write relation-specific patterns, which makes them too sophisticated to generalize quickly. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural pattern diagnosis framework that can summarize and refine relation-specific patterns with human experts in the loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can summarize and refine high-quality relational patterns from noise data with human experts in the loop. |
SeqAR: Jailbreak LLMs with Sequential Auto-Generated Characters (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the potential misuse of large language models (LLMs) however, the ability to align LLMs with human values is still vulnerable to malicious attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a red-teaming strategy to enhance LLM safety by using a framework to design jailbreak prompts automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves attack success rates of 88% and 60% in cold-start scenarios. |
Unraveling Feature Extraction Mechanisms in Neural Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks have become indispensable across a variety of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a theoretical approach based on Neural Tangent Kernels to investigate neural networks' internal mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to analyze language modeling tasks . it shows that the choice of activation function can affect feature extraction . |
STRUX: An LLM for Decision-Making with Structured Explanations (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | a new LLM decision-making framework is designed to help users understand how and why decisions are made. |
| Approach: | They introduce a new LLM decision-making framework called STRUX that provides structured explanations for LLM decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves decision-making by providing structured explanations . it has been evaluated on the task of forecasting stock investment decisions based on earnings call transcripts - superior performance against strong baselines compared with previous frameworks based upon earnings call transcriptions demonstrating superior performance . |
Better Feature Integration for Named Entity Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) focus on stacking the LSTM and graph neural networks (GCNs) however, the exact interaction mechanism between the two types of features is not clear and the performance gain is not significant. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that incorporates both types of features with a Synergized-LSTM which captures how the two types of feature interact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance than previous approaches while requiring fewer parameters. |
Metaphor Reasoning is Meta-reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Qianyu He, Junting Lu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Xiaojun Meng, Jiansheng Wei, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing work on metaphor reasoning's impact on reasoning abilities is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for synthesizing metaphorical riddles that satisfy five quality dimensions: diverse, balanced, reasoning-oriented, challenging, and verifiable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves reasoning abilities across six domains using only thousands of metaphorical riddles. |
Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation as Constrained HMM (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) models have some drawbacks due to slow inference speed and label bias due to local normalization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a left-to-right Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to control label bias in non-autoregressive translation (NAT) They propose a bi-directional HMM, which can regularize each other's biases via shared parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can achieve comparable performance to autoregressive Transformers using various decoding methods. |
Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuanfu Wang, Pengyu Wang, Chenyang Xi, Bo Tang, Junyi Zhu, Wenqiang Wei, Chen Chen, Chao Yang, Jingfeng Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Yijun Niu, Keming Mao, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang
| Challenge: | Modern language models rely on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to encourage safe behaviors, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to three key limitations: (1) the inefficiency and high cost of human annotation; (2) the vast diversity of potential adversarials; and (3) the risk of feedback bias and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative adversarial training method that incorporates three key innovations to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 show that the proposed method significantly enhances robustness and reduces harmful outputs from 5.88% to 0.43%. |
Everything of Thoughts: Defying the Law of Penrose Triangle for Thought Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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Ruomeng Ding, Chaoyun Zhang, Lu Wang, Yong Xu, Minghua Ma, Wei Zhang, Si Qin, Saravan Rajmohan, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced problem solving in diverse domains such as mathematical reasoning and knowledge reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a thought prompting approach called 'Everything of Thoughts' it leverages pretrained reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search to incorporate external domain knowledge and planning capability into thoughts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on game of 24, 8-Puzzle, and Pocket Cube. |
Dependency-Guided LSTM-CRF for Named Entity Recognition (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is one of the most important and fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency-guided model to encode dependency trees and capture their properties for named entity recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves named entity recognition performance on standard datasets. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
How Abilities in Large Language Models are Affected by Supervised Fine-tuning Data Composition (2024.acl-long)
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Guanting Dong, Hongyi Yuan, Keming Lu, Chengpeng Li, Mingfeng Xue, Dayiheng Liu, Wei Wang, Zheng Yuan, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a technique used to enhance multiple abilities in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to study the interplay of data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves math reasoning and code generation with increasing data amount . the proposed model size and SFT strategies can be used to learn multiple skills with different scaling patterns. |
Miracle: Towards Personalized Dialogue Generation with Latent-Space Multiple Personal Attribute Control (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Personalized dialogue systems aim to endow the chatbot agent with more anthropomorphic traits for human-like interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate personalized dialogues using latent-space energy-based models by using a latent space energy-model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in personality controllability and response quality. |
Layer-Aware Representation Filtering: Purifying Finetuning Data to Preserve LLM Safety Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that fine-tuning with benign data can compromise safety of aligned LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Layer-Aware Representation Filtering method that detects safety-degrading layers within the LLM and leverages their representations to detect them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect safety-degrading features in benign data and remove them from the model. |
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. |
Neural Chinese Address Parsing (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent research shows that systems that perform address parsing can be useful for building e-commerce or product recommendation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of parsing Chinese addresses into semantically meaningful chunks using a linear-chain structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to capture complex dependencies between labels that cannot be readily captured by a simple linear-chain structure. |
Skill-Aware Data Selection and Fine-Tuning for Data-Efficient Reasoning Distillation (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 and their distilled variants achieve impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet their costs remain substantial. |
| Approach: | They propose a skill-centric distillation framework that efficiently transfers reasoning ability to weaker models with two components: (1) Skill-based data selection, which prioritizes examples targeting the student model’s weaker skills, and (2) Skillaware fine-tuning, which encourages explicit skill decomposition during problem solving. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines on Qwen3-4B and Qwend3-8B and focuses on skills emphasized during training. |
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training Models (D19-3)
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Zhe Zhao, Hui Chen, Jinbin Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tao Liu, Wei Lu, Xi Chen, Haotang Deng, Qi Ju, Xiaoyong Du
| Challenge: | Existing work on pre-training models have shown that it is important to use a framework to deploy various pre- training models efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit that assembles pre-trained models on demand and encapsulates them with rich modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reproduce state-of-the-art models or develop models that remain unexplored. |
Better Few-Shot Relation Extraction with Label Prompt Dropout (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies assume textual labels are always present during learning and prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which randomly drops out textual labels in the learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the few-shot relation extraction task by randomly dropping out labels in the learning process. |
MoQAE: Mixed-Precision Quantization for Long-Context LLM Inference via Mixture of Quantization-Aware Experts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize large language models for long-context inference are inefficient and consume memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-precision quantization method via mixture of experts that inputs tokens into router chunk by chunk to reduce inference overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art KV cache quantization methods on multiple benchmark datasets. |
Libra-VLA: Achieving Learning Equilibrium via Asynchronous Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Vision-Language-Action models ground high-level semantic instructions into executable physical actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System VLA architecture that decouples learning complexity into a coarse-to fine hierarchy while leveraging structural modularity to implement an asynchronous execution strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture decouples learning complexity into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy while leveraging structural modularity to implement an asynchronous execution strategy. |
Tab-CoT: Zero-shot Tabular Chain of Thought (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to encourage more structured reasoning procedures to be captured have shown that chain-of-though (CoT) prompting methods can be effective in NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tabular-format CoT prompting method that allows the complex reasoning process to be explicitly modeled in a highly structured manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows impressive performance improvements on a range of reasoning tasks. |
TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Transformer-based pre-training models like BERT are computationally expensive and limited to resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which ternarizes the weights in a fine-tuned BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the other methods on the GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks while being 14.9x smaller. |
Narrative Order Aware Story Generation via Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing storytelling systems suffer from insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative order aware framework to generate coherent stories with flashbacks . they propose 'bidirectional pretraining model with Optimal Transport Reward' to improve quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates coherent stories with flashbacks with a novel optimal transport reward. |
Learning Explicit and Implicit Structures for Targeted Sentiment Analysis (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing research efforts focus on targeting sentiment analysis as a sequence labeling problem, building models that can capture explicit structures in the output space. |
| Approach: | They argue that both implicit and explicit structural information are crucial for building a successful targeted sentiment analysis model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by capturing implicit and explicit structural information. |
Combining Spans into Entities: A Neural Two-Stage Approach for Recognizing Discontiguous Entities (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) aims at identifying shallow semantic elements in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural two-stage approach to recognizing discontiguous and overlapping entities by decomposing the problem into two subtasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in a standard dataset even without external features. |
Learning with Structured Representations for Negation Scope Extraction (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to negation scope detection have been criticized for capturing information related to negations, long-distance dependencies and structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use conditional random fields, semi-Markov CRF and latent-variable CRF models to capture useful information such as long-distance dependencies and some latent structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can capture useful information such as features related to negation cue, long-distance dependencies and some latent structural information. |
Tell2Design: A Dataset for Language-Guided Floor Plan Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated impressive results in generating high-fidelity artistic images. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sequence-to-Sequence model that can serve as a strong baseline for future research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used as a baseline for future research and human evaluations are conducted on the generated samples and provided an analysis of human performance. |
Re-examining the Role of Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models treat schema linking as a minor component . Existing solutions treat schema as merely a string component based on string matching . |
| Approach: | They build a schema linking corpus based on a Spider text-to-SQL dataset . they find schema linking is the crux for the current text- to-Sql task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on the Spider text-to-SQL dataset despite its simplicity. |
Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yijia Xiao, Wanjia Zhao, Junkai Zhang, Yiqiao Jin, Han Zhang, Zhicheng Ren, Renliang Sun, Haixin Wang, Guancheng Wan, Pan Lu, Xiao Luo, Yu Zhang, James Zou, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on specific aspects or applications, but this study provides a comprehensive overview of Protein-specific large language models. |
| Approach: | This paper proposes a structured taxonomy of state-of-the-art ProteinLLMs . they analyze how they leverage large-scale protein sequence data for improved accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers their architectures, training datasets, evaluation metrics, and diverse applications. |
MemTR: Enhancing Tool-Calling Reliability via Uncertainty-Triggered FFN-Space Retracing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing tool-calling methods rely on costly tool-use training data or only constrain syntax, leaving tool selection and argument value errors largely unsolved. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decodes tool evidence from the tool library and mixes it into the output at the uncertain layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces tool calling failures by 2%–9% with only 1%–2% runtime overhead. |
Joint Detection and Location of English Puns (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on puns has focused on understanding the meanings of words and phrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that addresses pun detection and pun location jointly from a sequence labeling perspective. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model can handle both homographic and heterographic puns. |
Decomposed Prompt Tuning via Low-Rank Reparameterization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance on various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed prompt tuning approach that utilizes low-rank matrices to initialize the soft prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters while maintaining effectiveness. |
Better Modeling of Incomplete Annotations for Named Entity Recognition (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) assume that the training data is fully annotated with named entity information. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised setup for named entity recognition where annotated data is assumed to be available during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is able to recognize named entities with incomplete annotations. |
Incorporating Argument-Level Interactions for Persuasion Comments Evaluation using Co-attention Model (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing research explores different text features of reply comments on word level and ignores interactions between participants. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-attention mechanism based neural network to capture interactions between participants on argument level to better model dialogical argumentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a publicly available dataset showing that it extracts interactive argument pairs from the original post and the reply. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
A Role-Selected Sharing Network for Joint Machine-Human Chatting Handoff and Service Satisfaction Analysis (2021.emnlp-main)
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Jiawei Liu, Kaisong Song, Yangyang Kang, Guoxiu He, Zhuoren Jiang, Changlong Sun, Wei Lu, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to predict chatbot failure hatches vital apprehensions due to complexity of human conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework. |
Orthogonal Representation Editing: Decoupling Semantic Entanglement in Batch Knowledge Editing of LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods suffer from performance degradation in batch knowledge editing. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal representation editing method which decouples semantic entanglement from edit vectors and enforcing orthogonals on edit vector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and achieves superior performance in cross-lingual knowledge editing scenarios. |
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. |
LoRASC: Expressive and Generalizable Low-rank Adaptation for Large Models via Slow Cascaded Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing low-rank adaptations have limited expressiveness, a tendency to overfit, and sensitivity to hyperparameter settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to enhance LoRA’s expressiveness and generalization capabilities while preserving its training efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines, mitigates overfitting, enhances model stability, and improves OOD robustness. |
Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that rely on limited demos and out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries fail when faced with out- of-demotion queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-aware prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability of large language models by query-based demo generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the OOD setting and two public math benchmarks. |
Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are often customized by fine-tuning for the requirements of different domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable training framework to make undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process while preserving the ability to learn other information. |
Enhancing LLM Language Adaption through Cross-lingual In-Context Pre-training (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing cross-lingual transfer are limited by parallel resources and lack linguistic and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual in-context pre-training approach that leverages semantically related bilingual Wikipedia documents to enhance cross-linguistic transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves multilingual performance on three models across six target languages. |
Explainable Recommendation with Personalized Review Retrieval and Aspect Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the development of explainable recommendation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that combines prediction and generation tasks to produce more persuasive explanations by obtaining additional information from the training sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three datasets and shows that it is more persuasive than previous models. |
Advancing Sequential Numerical Prediction in Autoregressive Models (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive models are the de facto choice for sequence generation tasks, but standard approaches treat digits as independent tokens and apply cross-entropy loss, overlooking the coherent structure of numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to entropy loss by extending the Earth Mover’s Distance to preserve ordinal relationships between numerical values and sequence-level to penalize the overall discrepancy between predicted and actual sequences. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that NTIL improves numerical prediction and integrates effectively with LLMs/MLLMs. |
A Neural Multi-digraph Model for Chinese NER with Gazetteers (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incorporating gazetteers into NER systems rely on manually defined selection strategies or handcrafted templates, which may not lead to optimal effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to use graph neural networks to automatically learn how to incorporate multiple gazetteers into an NER system by capturing the information that the gazetteer offers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on Chinese NER datasets while incorporating rich gazetteer information while resolving ambiguities. |
Differentiable Data Augmentation for Contrastive Sentence Representation Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a contrastive learning framework is used to fine-tune pre-trained language models with unlabeled sentences or labeled sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that makes hard positives from unlabeled sentences . they use a prefix attached to a model to allow for differentiable data augmentation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields significant improvements over existing methods under semi-supervised and supervised settings. |
AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yifei Li, Hanane Nour Moussa, Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Botao Yu, Mingyi Xue, Benjamin Burns, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Vishal Dey, Zitong Lu, Chen Wei, Qianheng Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Song Gao, Xuhui Huang, Xia Ning, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages. |
Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature focuses on integrating domain-specific knowledge into LLMs to enhance accuracy using a fixed task template. |
| Approach: | They propose a collection of supervised learning tasks augmented with labels derived from a conventional recommender model to improve LLMs’ proficiency in adhering to recommendation-specific instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the capability of LLMs to respond to instructions within recommender systems, reducing formatting errors while maintaining a high level of accuracy. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification with Aspect-Specific Opinion Spans (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing attention-based models for sentiment analysis are not able to capture opinion spans as a whole or variable-length opinion span. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that extracts aspect-specific opinion spans and evaluates sentiment polarity by exploiting extracted opinion features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts aspect-specific opinion spans and evaluates sentiment polarity using extracted opinion features. |
From Tens of Hours to Tens of Thousands: Scaling Back-Translation for Speech Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) have been fueled by massive speech corpora, but extending coverage to diverse languages with limited resources remains a formidable challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that converts large-scale text corpora into synthetic speech using off-the-shelf text-to-speech (TTS) models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates 500,000 hours of synthetic speech in ten languages and achieves transcription error reductions of over 30%. |
TabDSR: Decompose, Sanitize, and Reason for Complex Numerical Reasoning in Tabular Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models often underperform due to complex queries, noisy data, and limited numerical capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates seamlessly with mainstream LLMs to improve tabular reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in state-of-the-art analysis. |
Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation . yet, they struggle with translating low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that chained multilingual dictionaries to elicit translation abilities for LLMs . they show that CoD can significantly improve LLM translation by evoking more information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on ChatGPT and InstructGPT's translation abilities. |
LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Jiongnan Liu, Yutao Zhu, Shuting Wang, Xiaochi Wei, Erxue Min, Yu Lu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in natural language understanding, generation, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play LLM model that embeds a user-specific embedding for each individual by modeling her historical contexts through a lightweight plug-in user embedder module. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on various tasks in the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing personalized LLM approaches. |
Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Semantic Compression (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on a quadratic computation to generate long texts . current models impose limitations on the length of text inputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic compression method that extends the context window of large language models . the method reduces the semantic redundancy of long inputs before passing them to the LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extends the context window of large language models across tasks . it exhibits consistent fluency in text generation while reducing associated computational overhead. |
Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs that represent entities in different languages are not covered by existing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose two ways to embed entities from multilingual knowledge graphs into the same vector space, where equivalent entities are close to each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing systems on two benchmark datasets. |
Not All Metrics Are Guilty: Improving NLG Evaluation by Diversifying References (2024.naacl-long)
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Tianyi Tang, Hongyuan Lu, Yuchen Jiang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tom Kocmi, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks with limited references may not accurately reflect the quality of the model’s hypotheses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enrich evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of a single reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enhance evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
Neural Adaptation Layers for Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition is a type of information extraction task whereby features can be designed based on domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing neural architectures to adapt to new domains without retraining . they propose to add adaptation layers to existing neural models to minimize re-training based on source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on social media domains. |
R-CHAR: A Metacognition-Driven Framework for Role-Playing in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing structures lack cognitive consistency in complex scenarios . Existing models excel in math and coding tasks but lack coherent reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a metacognition-driven framework that enhances role-playing performance . experimental results show performance improvements across varying scenario complexities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in social intelligence tasks and shows strength in long-context comprehension and group-level social interactions. |
One Network, Many Masks: Towards More Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient transfer learning methods can be expensive in storage when applied to broader ranges of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enables efficient sharing of a single PETL network across layers and tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other methods with 10% parameters required by the latter on various downstream tasks. |
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. |
SOAPTriage: SOAP-Guided Multi-View Clinical Text Modeling Framework for Automated ESI Prediction (2026.acl-long)
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Enming Wang, Jianlei Wang, Xueping Peng, Hongjiao Guan, Yinglong Wang, Sibo Wei, Jianbin Guo, Ruifeng Xu, Wenpeng Lu
| Challenge: | Emergency departments rely on the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) to assess patient acuity and prioritize care. |
| Approach: | They propose a SOAP-guided multi-view clinical text modeling framework for automated ESI prediction based on the SOAP paradigm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prompting-based, multi-agent, and encoder-based baselines. |
From English to Second Language Mastery: Enhancing LLMs with Cross-Lingual Continued Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire strong language skills through extensive pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instructionresponse pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which leverages translation-based parallel instruction data to enhance cross-lingual adaptability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Llama-2-7B across five languages against three objective benchmarks and an LLM-as-a-judge benchmark. |
LIFBench: Evaluating the Instruction Following Performance and Stability of Large Language Models in Long-Context Scenarios (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks rarely focus on instruction-following in long-context scenarios or stability on different inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable dataset to evaluate LLMs’ instruction-following capabilities and stability across long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates LLMs’ instruction-following capabilities and stability across long contexts. |
Attention Guided Graph Convolutional Networks for Relation Extraction (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for selecting relevant partial dependency structures may not yield optimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which directly takes full dependency trees as inputs and uses them to selectively attend to relevant sub-structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be understood as a soft-pruning approach that automatically learns how to selectively attend to the relevant sub-structures useful for the relation extraction task. |
Improving Contextual Query Rewrite for Conversational AI Agents through User-preference Feedback Learning (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Contextual query rewriting (CQR) is a crucial component in Conversational AI agents, leveraging contextual information from previous user-agent conversations to improve comprehension of current user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance the CQR model's capability in generating user preference-aligned rewrites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the CQR model's ability to generate user preference-aligned rewrites. |
Guess What I am Thinking: A Benchmark for Inner Thought Reasoning of Role-Playing Language Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs) have attracted broad attention in various applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating character thought generation using literature . they propose 'MIRROR' which generates character thoughts by retrieving memories, predicting character reactions, and synthesizing motivations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing methods in evaluating character thought generation. |
Exploring Task Difficulty for Few-Shot Relation Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models do not distinguish hard tasks from easy ones in the learning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that exploits relation label information to learn better representations by focusing on hard tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two standard datasets show the proposed approach performs better than previous methods. |
Detecting Customer Complaint Escalation with Recurrent Neural Networks and Manually-Engineered Features (N19-2)
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Wei Yang, Luchen Tan, Chunwei Lu, Anqi Cui, Han Li, Xi Chen, Kun Xiong, Muzi Wang, Ming Li, Jian Pei, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | e-commerce companies often have the option of escalating complaints by filing grievances with a government authority . this is detrimental to an ecommerce company, but this problem is challenging to solve by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and provides better recall and triage for specialized agents. |
iPET: An Interactive Emotional Companion Dialogue System with LLM-Powered Virtual Pet World Simulation (2025.acl-demo)
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Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Zuozhu Liu, Zheyu Ye, Zihan Niu, Chonggang Lu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen, Zhe Xu, Yao Hu, Wei Lu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing emotional companion products lack sustained personalization and contextual adaptability, limiting their effectiveness in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual pet agent that can enhance user engagement through rich, dynamic pet behaviors and interactions tailored to individual preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has been deployed in a real-world, non-commercial product for 200 days and has demonstrated its effectiveness in practical applications. |
Learning to Reason Deductively: Math Word Problem Solving as Complex Relation Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve math word problems do not provide explanations for generated expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a deductive approach that presents explainable deductive reasoning steps to iteratively construct target expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing strong baselines on four benchmark datasets. |
To be Closer: Learning to Link up Aspects with Opinions (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dependency parsers are not designed for capturing interaction between opinion words and aspect words. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn an aspect-centric tree structure to shorten distance between aspects and opinion words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on five aspect-based sentiment datasets. |
ASR-EC Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models on Chinese ASR Error Correction (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have a substantial number of erroneous recognition due to environmental noise, ambiguity, etc. |
| Approach: | They use a benchmark dataset to analyze ASR errors in the Chinese language . they then apply large language models to correct ASR error correction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a dataset of ASR errors in the Chinese language . it shows prompting is not effective for ASR error correction . |
TED-TTS: Training-Free Intra-Utterance Emotion and Duration Control for Text-to-Speech Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing controllable Text-to-Speech methods limited to inter-utterance-level control . utterance expressiveness remains a challenge in building human-like TTS synthesis systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free controllable framework for pretrained zero-shot TTS to enable intra-utterance emotion and duration expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art intra-utterance consistency while maintaining baseline-level speech quality. |
PIPER: Benchmarking and Prompting Event Reasoning Boundary of LLMs via Debiasing-Distillation Enhanced Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Zhicong Lu, Changyuan Tian, PeiguangLi PeiguangLi, Li Jin, Sirui Wang, Wei Jia, Ying Shen, Guangluan Xu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on Large Language Models (LLMs) have failed to evaluate their performance in event reasoning with a single event relational type or reasoning format. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' event reasoning capability using a single event relational type or reasoning format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 10K diverse instruction-tuning demonstrations to alleviate event reasoning-oriented data scarcity. |
ENT-DESC: Entity Description Generation by Exploring Knowledge Graph (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for knowledge-to-text generation use RDF triples or key-value pairs to generate a natural language description. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset to facilitate the study of KG-to-text . they propose MGCN model architecture that incorporates aggregation methods to extract the rich graph information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can represent the original graph information more comprehensively and integrates multiple aggregation methods to extract the rich graph information. |
Task-Oriented Clustering for Dialogues (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for task-oriented dialogue clustering are difficult to apply directly due to inherent differences between them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dialogue Task Clustering Network model for task-oriented clustering . they use context-aware utterance representations and cross-dialogue utterrance cluster representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three public datasets on all metrics. |
APE: Argument Pair Extraction from Peer Review and Rebuttal via Multi-task Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Argument mining is an important research field that attracts growing attention in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to extract argument pairs from peer review and rebuttal . they use an open review platform to analyze the contents, structure and connections . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a dataset of 4,764 fully annotated review-rebuttal passage pairs . it is able to detect argumentative propositions and extract argument pairs from the corpus . |
Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Feng, Shu Wei, Xiang Fei, Wei Shi, Yingdong Han, Lei Liao, Jinghui Lu, Binghong Wu, Qi Liu, Chunhui Lin, Jingqun Tang, Hao Liu, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Current document image parsing solutions rely on specialized models or generate content autoregressively. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal document image parsing model that integrates specialized models with autogeneous content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse page-level and element-level settings while ensuring superior efficiency. |
Generative Prompt Tuning for Relation Classification (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt tuning methods for RC are limited by label spaces and rigid prompt restrictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative prompt tuning method to reformulate relation classification as an infilling problem by adding cloze-style phrases to masked language modeling problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits rich semantics of entity and relation types and can predict label verbalizations with varying lengths at multiple predicted positions. |
Structured Optimal Brain Pruning for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods for Large Language Models rely on unstructured pruning or require special hardware to accelerate computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retraining-free structured pruning method called SoBP . they evaluate the effectiveness of SoBP across 14 models from 3 LLM families . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art pruning methods on 8 datasets. |