Papers by Wei Ren

47 papers
Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Kernels (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Empirical studies show that our approach gains approximately an improvement of 1 BLEU score on most benchmarks over the Transformer baseline.
Approach: They propose to extract several semantic kernels from a source sentence to capture global semantic information.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed approach improves 1 BLEU score on benchmarks . it is also 1.7 times faster than previous works on average at inference time .
Event Transition Planning for Open-ended Text Generation (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Open-ended text generation tasks require models to generate coherent continuation given limited preceding context.
Approach: They propose a novel two-stage method which explicitly arranges ensuing events in open-ended text generation tasks.
Outcome: The proposed method improves coherence and diversity of open-ended text generation tasks.
Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: composition of pre-training datasets for large language models remains undisclosed . current methods for evaluating data quality are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies.
Approach: They propose a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings.
Outcome: The proposed method doubles convergence speed for 1.3B model models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23%.
DTDES-KGE: Dual-Teacher Knowledge Distillation with Distinct Embedding Spaces for Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge distillation methods rely on a single teacher embedding space . existing methods overlook valuable complementary knowledge from teachers in distinct embeddable spaces.
Approach: They propose a knowledge distillation framework that leverages dual teachers in embedding spaces to enhance performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves knowledge distillation performance by leveraging dual teachers in distinct embedding spaces.
Timeline-based Sentence Decomposition with In Context Learning for Temporal Fact Extraction (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent research on temporal fact extraction fails to establish time-to-fact correspondences in complex sentences.
Approach: They propose a timeline-based sentence decomposition strategy using large language models with in-context learning to extract temporal facts from natural language text.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on a complex temporal fact extraction dataset.
MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

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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%.
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models.
Approach: They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks.
Outcome: The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles.
RubricHub: A Comprehensive and Highly Discriminative Rubric Dataset via Automated Coarse-to-Fine Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating open-ended rubrics suffer from scalability bottlenecks and coarse criteria resulting in a supervision ceiling effect.
Approach: They propose a framework for automated Coarse-to-Fine Rubric Generation . their framework uses principle-guided synthesis, multi-model aggregation, difficulty evolution .
Outcome: The proposed framework produces comprehensive and highly discriminative criteria capable of capturing the subtle nuances.
ConCISE: Confidence-guided Compression in Step-by-step Efficient Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fine-tuning-based compression suffer from verbose outputs, increasing computational overhead.
Approach: They propose a framework to generate concise reasoning chains using Confidence Injection and Early Stopping.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces the length of the model by up to 50% while maintaining high task accuracy.
UOR: Universal Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to attack pre-trained language models rely on manual selection of triggers and backdoor representations.
Approach: They propose a backdoor attack method that turns manual selection into automatic optimization . they propose to use poisoned contrastive learning to learn more uniform backdoor representations .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves better attack performance on text classification tasks compared to manual methods.
Backdoor NLP Models via AI-Generated Text (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing attacks disregard fluency and semantic fidelity of poisoned text, rendering it easily detectable.
Approach: They propose to use AI-generated poisoned text to attack NLP models by establishing covert associations between trigger patterns and target labels without affecting normal accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves effective attacks while maintaining fluency and semantic similarity across all scenarios.
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.
Structural Bias for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing structural bias adapters for aspect sentiment triplet extraction are under-confident . a large-scale dataset for ASTE shows the adapter is effective and efficient to a larger scale.
Approach: They propose to use a structural adapter to integrate structural bias into pretrained language models . they propose to add a relative position structure in place of the syntactic dependency structure .
Outcome: The proposed adapter achieves state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines, but with a light parameter demand and low latency.
ASAP: A Chinese Review Dataset Towards Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis and Rating Prediction (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Sentiment analysis is a key task in e-commerce to detect fine-to-coarse sentiment polarities.
Approach: They propose to use a large-scale Chinese restaurant review dataset ASAP to investigate the sentiment polarities underlying user reviews.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on both tasks.
Cross-Domain Audio Deepfake Detection: Dataset and Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing audio deepfake detection datasets are outdated and lack generalization capabilities.
Approach: They construct a new cross-domain audio deepfake detection dataset comprising over 300 hours of speech data that is generated by five advanced zero-shot TTS models.
Outcome: The proposed models achieve 4.1% and 6.5% error rates in the cross-domain ADD dataset generated by five advanced zero-shot TTS models.
Revisiting Entropy in Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Approach: They propose a positive-advantage reweighting approach that regulates model entropy by adjusting the loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training.
Outcome: The proposed approach regulates model entropy by adjusting loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training while maintaining competitive performance.
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.
Retrieve-and-Sample: Document-level Event Argument Extraction via Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies show the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in many generative NLP tasks.
Approach: They investigate retrieval settings from the input and label distribution views . they further augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations sampled from event semantic regions .
Outcome: The proposed methods can augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations . the methods can be used in generative NLP tasks such as dialogue response generation .
Symbolic Working Memory Enhances Language Models for Complex Rule Application (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in single-step rule application but struggle with multi-step deductive reasoning when rules are presented non-sequentially.
Approach: They propose to augment LLMs with external working memory and introduce a neurosymbolic framework for rule application that stores facts and rules in both natural language and symbolic forms, enabling precise tracking.
Outcome: The proposed framework iteratively performs symbolic rule grounding and LLM-based rule implementation.
XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Prompt tuning learns soft prompts to condition pre-trained Language Models for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner.
Approach: They propose a Prompt tuning model with an eXtremely small scale that learns soft prompts to condition the frozen Pre-trained Language Models for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the vanilla Prompt-Tuning and can significantly improve across tasks and model scales.
From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing definitions of streaming LLMs are fragmented and lack a systematic taxonomy . large language models are pre-trained on static and full-context corpora .
Approach: They propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming Large Language Models and propose underlying methodologies for streaming LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities.
LR²Bench: Evaluating Long-chain Reflective Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models via Constraint Satisfaction Problems (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in o1-like models have significantly enhanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the Long-chain Reflective Reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates the Long-chain Reflective Reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) it consists of 850 samples across six Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs)
DEIE: Benchmarking Document-level Event Information Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese News Dataset (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing event-based datasets mainly target sentence-level tasks . current models struggle with "document" annotation, a key feature of the current model .
Approach: They propose a large-scale document-level event information extraction dataset with over 56,000+ events and 242,000+ arguments.
Outcome: The proposed dataset has over 56,000+ events and 242,000+ arguments.
CoTrust: Privacy-Preserving Collaboration Between Large and Small Language Models in Trusted Execution Environments (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) provide powerful text generation capabilities, but accessing sensitive user inputs raises privacy concerns.
Approach: They propose a privacy-preserving collaborative inference framework that combines large language models with small language models inside TEE to preserve privacy.
Outcome: Experiments show that CoTrust outperforms unconstrained LLMs on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks while maintaining strong privacy protection.
LEAF: Large Language Diffusion Model for Time Series Forecasting (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent work has applied large language models (LLMs) into time series forecasting, but they lack an understanding of holistic temporal patterns with potential error accumulation.
Approach: They propose a framework that marries Larg e Langu age Diffusion Model with time series forecasting (LEAF) they propose converting time series into tokens and adopting language diffusion models to capture temporal dependencies.
Outcome: The proposed framework generates future predictions with a diffusion model from a holistic view.
Implicit Relation Linking for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods rely on textual similarities between NL and KG to build relation links.
Approach: They propose an implicit relation linking method called ImRL which links relation phrases in NL to relation paths in KG.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmarks and a newly-created 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.
Query and Output: Generating Words by Querying Distributed Word Representations for Paraphrase Generation (N18-1)

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Challenge: Existing models tend to memorize words instead of learning meaning of words . existing models tend not to model semantic information, resulting in incorrect sentences .
Approach: They propose a novel model that generates words by querying distributed word representations . they evaluate model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks, namely text simplification and short abstractive summarization .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on these benchmark datasets .
CLIO: Role-interactive Multi-event Head Attention Network for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for document-level event extraction struggle due to two intrinsic challenges: nested arguments and multiple events.
Approach: They propose a role-interactive multi-event head attention network to solve two challenges . they map different events to multiple subspaces and then determine whether the current event exists .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two widely used DEE datasets on the Internet.
SemFace: Pre-training Encoder and Decoder with a Semantic Interface for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Using pre-training methods for NMT models is difficult because of the cross-attention module . cross-linguistic embeddings are not used to pretrain a decoder .
Approach: They propose a semantic interface between pre-trained encoder and pre-train decoder to improve NMT performance.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on translation and unsupervised translation tasks.
How Large Language Models Encode Context Knowledge? A Layer-Wise Probing Study (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused on enhancing the factualness of large language models using context knowledge.
Approach: They propose to use ChatGPT to construct probing datasets that provide diverse and coherent evidence corresponding to various facts.
Outcome: The proposed model can encode knowledge across different layers, and it is compared with existing models.
Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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.
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack spatial reasoning, despite text-based CoTs . e-ViC reframes spatial intelligence as a verifiable, tool-using capability, argues a new study.
Approach: They propose a framework that moves reasoning beyond text into the visual domain . they ground reasoning in pixel-level interactions to enable human-like "look-and-confirm" strategies .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing Vision-Language Models with an average gain of 10.1%.
GA-S3: Comprehensive Social Network Simulation with Group Agents (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing social network simulations focus on discrete events or system dynamics instead of elucidating underlying mechanisms or causal relationships.
Approach: They propose a Social network simulation system that leverages newly designed Group Agents to make intelligent decisions regarding various online events.
Outcome: The proposed system can make intelligent decisions regarding online events at a manageable cost.
Lifelong Pretraining: Continually Adapting Language Models to Emerging Corpora (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Pretrained language models are typically learned over a large, static corpus and fine-tuned for various downstream tasks.
Approach: They propose to continuously update a pretrained language model to adapt to emerging data and to keep track of the model's performance.
Outcome: The proposed model can adapt to new corpora while retaining knowledge in earlier domains.
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work shows that pre-trained models can improve in various natural language processing tasks.
Approach: They propose a unified-modal encoder-decoder framework that pre-trains speech-text representations using large-scale unlabeled speech and text data.
Outcome: The proposed framework is superior to existing models on speech-to-text processing tasks.
Building an Ellipsis-aware Chinese Dependency Treebank for Web Text (L18-1)

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Challenge: ellipsis is a common linguistic phenomenon that some words are left out as they are understood from the context, especially in oral utterance.
Approach: They propose to use a Chinese dependency treebank to facilitate the parsing of web text . they propose to restore omissions and reserve contexts in the web text to improve dependency parsers .
Outcome: The proposed framework enables the parsing of web text from online microblogs.
EthicMind: A Risk-Aware Framework for Ethical-Emotional Alignment in Multi-Turn Dialogue (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing dialogue models address empathy and ethical safety in isolation . Existing models fail to adapt their behavior as ethical risk and user emotion evolve .
Approach: They propose a risk-aware framework that integrates ethical-emotional alignment in dialogue as an explicit turn-level decision problem.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves more consistent ethical guidance and emotional engagement than baselines in ethically complex interactions.
ECC: An Emotion-Cause Conversation Dataset for Empathy Response (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing empathy dialogue datasets focus on emotion labels while cause annotations are added post hoc.
Approach: They propose an emotion-cause conversation dataset with 2.4K dialogues that can be scalable . they use a framework that utilizes knowledge and large language models to automatically generate dialogues .
Outcome: The proposed dataset can achieve comparable or even superior performance to existing empathy dialogue datasets.
Can LLMs Reason with Rules? Logic Scaffolding for Stress-Testing and Improving LLMs (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have impressive human-like performance across various reasoning tasks, but their mastery of underlying inferential rules falls short of human capabilities.
Approach: They propose a logic scaffolding inferential rule generation framework to construct an infer- ential rule base, ULogic, comprising both primitive and compositional rules across five domains.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the ability to generate accurate, complex and abstract conclusions and premises and improves various commonsense reasoning tasks.
Making Pretrained Language Models Good Long-tailed Learners (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Prompt-tuning has shown appealing performance in few-shot classification . however, it is less promising in long-tailed classification due to long tail .
Approach: They propose to use prompt-tuning to make pretrained language models at least good long-tailed learners by bridging the gap between prompt- and commonly used finetun.
Outcome: The proposed method makes pretrained language models at least good long-tailed learners, bridging the gap between prompt-tuning and finetunation.
Subtle Signatures, Strong Shields: Advancing Robust and Imperceptible Watermarking in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to an increase in AI-generated text on the Internet, presenting a crucial challenge to differentiate AI-created content from human-written text.
Approach: They propose a novel approach to embed watermarks into LLMs that leverages token prior probabilities to improve detectability and maintain watermark imperceptibility.
Outcome: The proposed method improves detectability and imperceptibility of watermarks by partitioning tokens into two distinct groups based on prior probabilities and employing tailored strategies for each group.
Seeing No Evil: Blinding Large Vision-Language Models to Safety Instructions via Adversarial Attention Hijacking (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing attacks optimize image perturbations to maximize harmful output likelihood, but suffer from slow convergence due to gradient conflict between adversarial objectives and the model’s safety-retrieval mechanism.
Approach: They propose a push-pull approach which suppresses attention to system-prompt tokens and anchors generation on adversarial image features to avoid collisions.
Outcome: The proposed approach reduces gradient conflict by 45% and achieves 94.4% attack success rate on Qwen-VL (vs. 68.8% baseline) with 40% fewer iterations.
OntoGuard: Enforcing Action Admissibility for LLM Agents in Complex Interactive Environments (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to large language models (LLMs) are limited by their ability to enforce environmental and behavioral admissibility.
Approach: They propose an ontological framework to guard LLM agents by enforcing environmental and behavioral admissibility.
Outcome: Experiments on ScienceWorld and VirtualHome show that OntoGuard can enforce environmental and behavioral admissibility while preventing invalid actions.
Look Again, Think Slowly: Enhancing Visual Reflection in Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in text-only "slow thinking" reasoning have prompted efforts to transfer this capability to vision-language models (VLMs).
Approach: They propose a VRM Reflection-V which enhances visual reflection based on reasoning data for cold-start and reward design for reinforcement learning.
Outcome: The proposed model improves visual reflection for cold-start and reward design for reinforcement learning (RL) it maintains a stronger and more consistent reliance on visual information during visual reasoning, indicating effective enhancement in visual reflection capabilities.

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