Papers by Wei Tong

47 papers
Improving Knowledge Graph Completion with Generative Hard Negative Mining (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for knowledge graph completion (KGC) use generative methods with a self-information-enhanced training strategy to generate high-quality negatives.
Approach: They propose to leverage a sequence-to-sequence architecture to generate high-quality hard negatives from the same decoding distributions as the anchor.
Outcome: The proposed method produces high-quality negatives with good hardness and diversity on three KGC benchmarks.
Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing works of knowledge infusion depend on multi-task learning frameworks, which are inefficient and require large-scale retraining when new knowledge is considered.
Approach: They propose a method which integrates knowledge-generated attention maps into the self-attention mechanism and integrates it into the model.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods on academic datasets and industry-scale ad relevance applications.
From Lists to Emojis: How Format Bias Affects Model Alignment (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Format biases in reinforcement learning from human feedback are underexplored . despite its effectiveness, RLHF faces challenges, including policy and regulatory constraints .
Approach: They extend the study of preference biases beyond verbosity bias to a wider range of format biase . they show that with a small amount of biased data, they can inject significant bias into the reward model .
Outcome: The proposed approach can be easily exploited by large language models to achieve higher rankings on popular benchmarks like AlpacaEval and LMSYS Chatbot Arena.
The LLM Already Knows: Estimating LLM-Perceived Question Difficulty via Hidden Representations (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for difficulty estimation rely on repeated response sampling, auxiliary models, or fine-tuning the target model itself.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages only the hidden representations produced by large language models.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines in difficulty estimation on textual and multimodal tasks and improves adaptive reasoning strategies with fewer generated tokens.
EvoPrompt: Evolving Prompts for Enhanced Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a low-resource task that requires supervised learning, but practical scenarios lack annotated data.
Approach: They propose an Evolving Prompts framework that guides the model to better address these issues through continuous prompt refinement.
Outcome: The proposed framework shows consistent performance improvements on four benchmarks.
Do VLMs Have a Moral Backbone? A Study on the Fragile Morality of Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal learning, driving progress in cross-modal reasoning.
Approach: They propose to examine moral robustness of vision-language models by analyzing their moral stances under multimodal perturbations.
Outcome: The proposed model-agnostic multimodal perturbations expose VLMs to a variety of moral vulnerabilities, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion.
VisiPruner: Decoding Discontinuous Cross-Modal Dynamics for Efficient Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from significant computational overhead due to the quadratic growth of attention computations with the number of multimodal tokens.
Approach: They propose a training-free pruning framework that prunes multimodal tokens without a trained pruning method.
Outcome: The proposed pruning framework outperforms existing token pruning methods and generalizes across diverse MLLMs.
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax.
Approach: They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods.
Improving Relation Extraction with Relational Paraphrase Sentences (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing annotated data is expensive and non-scalable, limiting performance of relation extraction models.
Approach: They propose to enrich relation expressions by relational paraphrase sentences by annotating human-annotated data.
Outcome: The proposed model improves performance even on a strong baseline.
Multi-level Association Refinement Network for Dialogue Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for identifying quadruples rely on predefined dialogue structure and word semantics to achieve accurate and comprehensive sentiment associations between utterances and words.
Approach: They propose a multi-level association refinement network to achieve more accurate sentiment associations between utterances and words.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance under low-resource conditions.
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance safety of its o-series models, but effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs is understudied.
Approach: They propose a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for large language models . they propose to use reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains .
Outcome: The proposed method avoids narrowly enumerated rules and allows broader adaptability.
Harnessing Consistency for Robust Test-Time LLM Ensemble (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing efforts to improve LLM ensemble quality have focused on model consistency, but failures are often due to heterogeneous tokenization schemes and varying model expertise.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play technique that harnesses model consistency for robust LLM ensemble.
Outcome: The proposed technique improves ensemble performance and robustness against erroneous signals.
DESED: Dialogue-based Explanation for Sentence-level Event Detection (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for sentence-level event detection depend on manual annotations or domain expertise to design sophisticated templates and rules.
Approach: They propose a dialogue-based explanation paradigm to enhance sentence semantics for event detection.
Outcome: The proposed method can be applied to two event detection datasets.
Large Language Models and Causal Inference in Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential to enhance Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in areas such as predictive accuracy, fairness, robustness, and explainability.
Approach: They evaluate or improve generative Large Language Models from a causal perspective in areas such as reasoning capacity, fairness and safety issues, explainability, and handling multimodality.
Outcome: The proposed models can be used to perform causal relationship discovery and causal effect estimation tasks.
Mem-Gallery: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Conversational Memory for MLLM Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks evaluate multi-session memory in text-only conversations or assess multimodal understanding within localized contexts.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for evaluating multimodal long-term conversational memory in MLLM agents.
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses key memory capabilities along three functional dimensions: memory extraction and test-time adaptation, memory reasoning, and memory knowledge management.
FGraDA: A Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Recent research on domain adaptation neglects diversity in translation within a domain . current research on NMT models considers very broad target domains .
Approach: They propose a fine-grained domain adaptation task for autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone.
Outcome: The proposed task is compared with a dataset of Chinese-English translation tasks for four sub-domains of information technology: autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone.
PAPERMIND: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks assess integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning in isolation . Existing systems assess integrated reasoning in isolated tasks .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over research papers.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over scientific papers.
LMFlow: An Extensible Toolkit for Finetuning and Inference of Large Foundation Models (2024.naacl-demo)

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Challenge: Foundation models have demonstrated a great ability to achieve general human-level intelligence far beyond traditional approaches.
Approach: They propose a toolkit to simplify the finetuning of general foundation models.
Outcome: The proposed toolkit simplifies the domain- and task-aware finetuning of general foundation models with limited computing resources.
From Long Videos to Engaging Clips: A Human-Inspired Video Editing Framework with Multimodal Narrative Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods for video editing rely on textual cues from ASR transcripts and segment selection, often neglecting rich visual context.
Approach: They propose a human-inspired automatic video editing framework that leverages multimodal narrative understanding to address these limitations.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines across general and advertisement-oriented editing tasks.
Arithmetic Control of LLMs for Diverse User Preferences: Directional Preference Alignment with Multi-Objective Rewards (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on scalar rewards to capture user preferences.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates multi-objective reward modeling to represent diverse preference profiles.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance across reward objectives and targets.
Visualization Recommendation with Prompt-based Reprogramming of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Traditional visualization recommendations require extensive manual maintenance and yet fail to fully comprehend tabular data.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical table prompt-based reprogramming framework that integrates tabular data into LLMs through a strategically crafted prompt learning method.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Double-Checker: Large Language Model as a Checker for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent studies have demonstrated remarkable performance on few-shot Named Entity Recognition tasks due to the high cost of obtaining high-quality labeled data.
Approach: They propose to decompose the task into entity span detection and entity type classification using a type-independent entity span detector and then classify the detected spans based on their types.
Outcome: The proposed method consistently yields improvements over two baseline approaches.
Premise-based Multimodal Reasoning: Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work in vision language cross-modal reasoning uses binary or multi-choice classification based on source image and textual query.
Approach: They propose a task where a textual premise is the background presumption on each source image.
Outcome: The proposed task is based on a dataset of 15,360 movie screenshots and human-curated premise templates from 6 pre-defined categories.
VIRT: Improving Representation-based Text Matching via Virtual Interaction (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that representation-based text matching methods suffer from performance degradation due to the lack of interactions between the pair of texts.
Approach: They propose a virtual interaction mechanism that enables deep interaction between texts . they propose 'inteRacTion mechanism' that can be integrated into existing methods as plugins .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on six text matching benchmarks.
Interpretable Preferences via Multi-Objective Reward Modeling and Mixture-of-Experts (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the primary method for aligning large language models with human preferences.
Approach: They propose to train an Absolute-Rating Multi-Objective Reward Model with multi-dimensional absolute-rating data.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the LLM-as-a-judge method on RewardBench . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark .
LegalCore: A Dataset for Event Coreference Resolution in Legal Documents (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing research on event coreference resolution is limited to news articles . existing datasets for news articles are limited to events and coreferences .
Approach: They present a dataset for the legal domain LegalCore which has been annotated with event and event coreference information.
Outcome: The legal contract documents annotated in this dataset are several times longer than news articles, with an average length of around 25k tokens per document.
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.
Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, but runtime code generation is limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs.
Approach: They propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset by exploiting large language models and publicly available scripting guides.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation.
GRAPHIA: Harnessing Social Graph Data to Enhance LLM-Based Social Simulation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Social graphs provide high-quality supervision signals that encode local interactions and global network structure, yet they remain underutilized for LLM training.
Approach: They propose a general LLM-based social graph simulation framework that leverages graph data as supervision for LLM training.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves micro-level alignment by 6.1% on three real-world networks compared to the strongest baseline.
Exploiting Hybrid Semantics of Relation Paths for Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to answer natural language questions on knowledge graphs (KGQA) use large-scale entity-related text corpus or knowledge graph embeddings as auxiliary information to facilitate answer selection.
Approach: They propose to integrate explicit textual information and implicit KG structural features of relation paths into a novel rotate-and-scale entity link prediction framework.
Outcome: The proposed method is superior to existing methods on three KGQA datasets and shows that it can be used to identify answer entities.
Supportiveness-based Knowledge Rewriting for Retrieval-augmented Language Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their performance in various natural language processing tasks.
Approach: They propose a robust and pluggable knowledge rewriter that is optimized for LLM generation by supporting the model's supportiveness.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to rewrite knowledge in a supervised manner.
Multi-Hop Transformer for Document-Level Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to document-level neural machine translation (NMT) simply introduce the representations of context sentences without explicitly characterizing the inter-sentence reasoning process.
Approach: They propose a novel multi-hop Transformer which explicitly models the human-like draft-editing and reasoning process by attending to multiple antecedent sentences iteratively.
Outcome: Experiments on four widely used document translation tasks show that the proposed model significantly improves document-level translation performance and tackles discourse phenomena such as coreference error and the problem of polysemy.
KGA: A General Machine Unlearning Framework Based on Knowledge Gap Alignment (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent legislation of the "right to be forgotten" has led to the interest in machine unlearning . MU can be used to forget specific training instances as if they have never existed .
Approach: They propose a general unlearning framework called KGA to induce forgetfulness . they propose several unlearning evaluation metrics with pertinence .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on large-scale datasets and provides insight into unlearning for NLP tasks.
Following Occam’s Razor: Dynamic Combination of Structured Knowledge for Multi-Hop Question Answering using LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multi-hop question answering is a challenging task that requires capturing information from multiple positions in multiple documents.
Approach: They propose a framework for integrating text-based and triple-based paradigms that incorporates structured knowledge into large-scale question answering.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves multi-hop question answering by incorporating structured knowledge into the models.
Think and Recall: Layer-Level Prompting for Lifelong Model Editing (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for lifelong model editing suffer from limitations in usability, such as requiring additional training corpora or lacking support for reversible and detachable edits.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play method for knowledge retrieval and storage, i.e., Layer-Level Prompting, which enables seamless and efficient lifelong model editing.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on question answering and hallucination benchmarks across different LLMs.
Can Large Language Models Identify Implicit Suicidal Ideation? An Empirical Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing data on suicidal ideation in private conversations are limited . a new dataset of 1,200 test cases is presented to address this gap .
Approach: They propose a dataset of 1,200 test cases simulating implicit suicidal ideation in private contexts.
Outcome: The proposed dataset includes 1,200 test cases simulating implicit suicidal ideation in dialogue scenarios.
MedFact: A Large-scale Chinese Dataset for Evidence-based Medical Fact-checking of LLM Responses (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing medical fact-checking datasets focus on human-generated content, leaving the verification of content generated by large language models (LLMs) relatively unexplored.
Approach: They propose to use Chinese medical fact-checking datasets to verify LLM-generated medical content by combining in-context learning and fine-tuning.
Outcome: The first evidence-based Chinese medical fact-checking dataset of LLM-generated medical content consists of 1,321 questions and 7,409 claims .
Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for event extraction neglect grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting . et al., 2004; Ahn, 2006) show that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extracting compared with the state-of-the-art.
Approach: They propose a framework for event extraction that generates additional training data and iteratively selects the effective subset from the generated training data.
Outcome: The proposed method generates more diverse representations of training data and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art.
Multiplex Graph Neural Network for Extractive Text Summarization (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for extractive text summarization do not consider multiple types of inter-sentential relationships, nor model intra-sententential relationships.
Approach: They propose a novel method to combine different types of relationships among sentences and words to model sentence embedding.
Outcome: The proposed model is compared with existing methods on CNN/DailyMail benchmark dataset to demonstrate its effectiveness.
VecInfer: Efficient LLM Inference with Low-Bit KV Cache via Outlier-Suppressed Vector Quantization (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing quantization methods for large language models suffer performance degradation at ultra-low bit-widths due to key cache outliers.
Approach: They propose a vector quantization method that suppresses outliers in the key cache and reduces memory access overhead.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline quantization methods across long-context understanding and mathematical reasoning tasks while minimizing memory access overhead.
Point, Disambiguate and Copy: Incorporating Bilingual Dictionaries for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have been criticized for lack of integration of bilingual lexical information into the neural architecture.
Approach: They propose a neural architecture to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation models by introducing three new components: Pointer, Disambiguator, and Copier.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves the following merits inherently compared with previous efforts: (1) Pointer leverages the semantic information from bilingual dictionaries, for the first time, to better locate source words whose translation in dictionary can potentially be used; (2) Disambiguator synthesizes contextual information from source view and target view, both of which contribute to distinguishing translation of a specific source word from multiple candidates in dicaries; (3) Copier systematically connects Pointer and Disambiguators based on a hierarchical
SelfElicit: Your Language Model Secretly Knows Where is the Relevant Evidence (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have found that Language Models struggle to fully comprehend and utilize key evidence from the context.
Approach: They propose an inference-time approach that helps LMs focus on key contextual evidence through self-guided explicit highlighting.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on multiple evidence-based QA tasks while maintaining computational efficiency.
iPET: An Interactive Emotional Companion Dialogue System with LLM-Powered Virtual Pet World Simulation (2025.acl-demo)

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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.
Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for automated feature generation rely on predefined operator libraries and do not incorporate feature semantics, limiting their ability to produce high-quality features.
Approach: They propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MALMAS) that decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities.
Outcome: The proposed method extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning.
Privacy-Preserving Reasoning with Knowledge-Distilled Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing RAG systems require uploading local documents to the cloud, resulting in inference latency and poor generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs.
Approach: They propose a generalizable knowledge-distilled parametric RAG model aligned with standard RAG in document structure and parameter activation.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines in accuracy and generalizes well on out-of-distribution (OOD) data.
Can Multiple-choice Questions Really Be Useful in Detecting the Abilities of LLMs? (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in the evaluation of large language models (LLMs) however, there are concerns about whether MCQ can truly measure LLM’s capabilities.
Approach: They propose to use multiple choice questions to evaluate large language models (LLMs) to assess their capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed methods show that MCQs are less reliable than LFGQs in terms of expected calibration error.
Towards Accurate and Consistent Evaluation: A Dataset for Distantly-Supervised Relation Extraction (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Distant Supervision (DS) generates large-scale annotated data but has wrong labels that result in incorrect evaluation scores during testing.
Approach: They build a dataset using DS-generated data as training data and hire annotators to label test data.
Outcome: The proposed dataset NYTH has a much larger test set and performs more accurate and consistent evaluation.

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