Papers by Weiming Zhang

50 papers
MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC.
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors.
Approach: They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback.
Text Fluoroscopy: Detecting LLM-Generated Text through Intrinsic Features (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing because of their excellent performance on various tasks.
Approach: They propose a black-box method with better generalizability for detecting LLM-generated text by mining the intrinsic features of the text to be detected.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 7.36% and 2.84% improvement in detection performance compared to baselines in detecting texts from different domains generated by GPT-4 and Claude3 respectively.
DebateCoder: Towards Collective Intelligence of LLMs via Test Case Driven LLM Debate for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing debate-based approaches to code generation are limited due to several reasons: 1) Reliance on different instances of the same LLM for debate, 2) under-utilization of test cases, and 3) reliance on third-party moderators for result consolidation and decision-making.
Approach: They propose to use test cases to analyze code and identify bugs while opposing models generate test cases for each other to challenge each other's code during the debate process.
Outcome: The proposed model collects intelligence of LLMs via test case-driven debate for code generation.
DB-Explore: Automated Database Exploration and Instruction Synthesis for Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent text-to-SQL systems that use large language models struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries.
Approach: a framework that aligns large language models with database knowledge is proposed . DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas .
Outcome: a new framework outperforms existing text-to-SQL systems by outperforming existing systems.
Pause or Fabricate? Training Language Models for Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models implicitly fabricate information when inputs are incomplete, causing confidence but unreliable conclusions.
Approach: They propose a framework for grounded reasoning under incomplete information that decomposes reasoning into two stages . they propose stage-specific rewards to penalize hallucinations, enabling models to detect gaps, stop proactively, and resume reasoning after clarification.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves premise detection and task success by 30% . it also reduces average response length by over 20% .
Leveraging Outline-Optimized Generative Interactions and Critique for Self-Refining Outlines with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Logic-RL is a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning.
Approach: They propose a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on FreshWiki and WikiOutline . it can be iteratively applied, with improved quality continuing through three refinement rounds before diminishing returns.
Self-Training with Pseudo-Label Scorer for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP) aims to predict all quads (aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, sentiment polarity) for a given review.
Approach: They propose a self-training framework with a pseudo-label scorer to assess the match between reviews and their pseudo-labels and train a generative model on it.
Outcome: The proposed framework can predict all quads (aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, sentiment polarity) for a given review, and it can significantly improve self-training.
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.
MES-RAG: Bringing Multi-modal, Entity-Storage, and Secure Enhancements to RAG (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to retrieve entity information are limited by document level retrieval and intermingled storage of information from different entities.
Approach: They propose a framework that enhances entity-specific query handling . MES-RAG introduces proactive security measures that ensure system integrity .
Outcome: Experimental results show that MES-RAG improves accuracy and recall . the framework can be integrated into existing RAG architectures .
Advancing Process Verification for Large Language Models via Tree-Based Preference Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating step-by-step rationales fail to fully utilize the relative merits of intermediate steps, limiting the effectiveness of feedback provided.
Approach: They propose a tree-based preference learning verifier that constructs reasoning trees via a best-first search algorithm and collects step-level paired data for preference training.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing benchmarks on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks.
Logic: Long-form Outline Generation via Imitative and Critical Self-refinement (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for long-form outline generation have low knowledge density and lack detail . retrieval-augmented approaches struggle to maintain logical coherence across retrieved information .
Approach: They propose a system that mimics human writers' refinement process by mimicking outlines through imitation and critical self-refinement.
Outcome: The proposed system improves on the FreshWiki and WikiOutline datasets and establishes a coherent planning framework and structured knowledge base.
Towards Interactivity and Interpretability: A Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction Framework (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process.
Approach: They propose a rationale-based legal judgment prediction framework that follows the judge's real trial logic and provides good interactivity and interpretability.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use.
Agent-Pro: Learning to Evolve via Policy-Level Reflection and Optimization (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed as specific task solvers with sophisticated prompt engineering, but are inherently incapacitating to address complex dynamic scenarios.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based agent with policy-level reflection and optimization that can learn from interactive experiences and progressively elevate its behavioral policy.
Outcome: The proposed agent outperforms vanilla LLM and specialized models in blackjack and Texas hold’em.
AskToAct: Enhancing LLMs Tool Use via Self-Correcting Clarification (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing tools for ambiguous and incomplete queries are limited by manual construction and lack of error correction mechanisms during multi-turn clarification.
Approach: They propose a framework that exploits the mapping between queries and their tool invocation solutions by removing key parameters from queries while retaining them as ground truth.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods while maintaining high accuracy in tool invocation.
CoVerRL: Breaking the Consensus Trap in Label-Free Reasoning via Generator-Verifier Co-Evolution (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Label-free reinforcement learning enables large language models to improve reasoning capabilities . but as training maximizes self-consistency, output diversity collapses, authors say . authors propose a framework where a single model alternates between generator and verifier roles .
Approach: They propose a framework where a model alternates between generator and verifier roles, bootstrapping each other.
Outcome: Experiments show that CoVerRL outperforms label-free baselines on reasoning benchmarks . the framework can be used to improve reasoning abilities without ground-truth supervision .
CompileAgent: Automated Real-World Repo-Level Compilation with Tool-Integrated LLM-based Agent System (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: CompileAgent is the first LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation.
Approach: They propose a LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves compilation success rate, ranging from 10% to 71%.
Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions.
Approach: They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively.
SciExplore: Evaluating Autonomous Agents from Scientific Navigation to Information Integration (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks emphasize general-domain retrieval or static scientific question answering . SciExplore focuses on scientific database navigation, ambiguous literature retrieval, missing reference completion, and cross-source structured knowledge synthesis tasks.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate scientific information-seeking and reasoning capabilities of LLMs and agents.
Outcome: The new benchmark assesses the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs and agents in scientific research workflows.
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Self-Injecting Hallucinations (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for hallucination mitigation are based on external dependency and require external annotations or auxiliary models for preference data collection.
Approach: a new method is proposed to help model-generated hallucinations without external dependencies.
Outcome: a new method that self-injects hallucinations into a generated response improves halluuutations mitigation.
Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Court View Generation by Stimulating Internal Knowledge and Incorporating External Knowledge (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in language generation, but they encounter difficulties in the knowledge-intensive legal domain.
Approach: They propose to decompose court views into different parts, stimulate internal knowledge, and incorporate external information to unleash the power of LLMs in the task.
Outcome: The proposed method generates more accurate and reliable court views on two real-world datasets LAIC2021 and CJO2022.
EvoBench: Towards Real-world LLM-Generated Text Detection Benchmarking for Evolving Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to detect LLM-generated texts rely on static benchmarks that neglect the evolving nature of LLMs.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the generalization of LLM-generated text detection methods.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark measures generalization of 14 detection methods across LLMs.
Seeing but Not Thinking: Routing Distraction in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing multimodal Mixture-of-Experts models accurately perceive image content yet fail in subsequent reasoning . Seeing but not thinking phenomenon is a puzzling phenomenon .
Approach: They propose a routing-guided intervention method that enhances domain expert activation.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves consistent improvements on visual reasoning tasks.
Semantics-enhanced Cross-modal Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling.
Approach: They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks.
Scaling LLMs’ Social Reasoning: Sprinkle Cognitive “Aha Moment” into Fundamental Long-thought Logical Capabilities (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies have examined how large language models’ social reasoning capabilities evolve during model size scaling or reasoning tokens scaling.
Approach: They propose to optimize evaluation of Large Language Models from both data and model perspectives and to analyze their reasoning trajectories to identify notable cognitive "Aha Moments"
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the o1-preview model by 19.0 points in the evaluation of large language models.
Multi-View Reasoning: Consistent Contrastive Learning for Math Word Problem (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating complex semantics and diverse equations are limited by a fixed view.
Approach: They propose a multi-view consistent contrastive learning approach that decouples human reasoning into two independent but consistent views.
Outcome: The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on complex problems on multiple languages.
Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages the strength of both LLMs and domain-specific models in the context of precedents.
Outcome: The proposed framework leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents.
De-Bias for Generative Extraction in Unified NER Task (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Named entity recognition (NER) are not consistent with the task, which makes the model vulnerable to incorrect biases.
Approach: They propose to use generative model to recognize entities from sentences . they analyze incorrect biases in the generation process from a causal perspective .
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of the generative NER model in various datasets.
Making MLLMs Blind: Adversarial Smuggling Attacks in MLLM Content Moderation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly being deployed as content moderators . however, they exploit the Human-AI capability gap and create adversarial environments . smuggling attacks exploit the human-AI gap and exploit the vulnerability .
Approach: They construct a benchmark to evaluate the vulnerability of MLLMs as content moderators . they identify three root causes: limited capabilities of vision encoders, robustness gap in OCR .
Outcome: The proposed model exploits the Human-AI capability gap and is vulnerable to smuggling attacks.
UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UITARS-1.5-7B.
Approach: They propose a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B on MemGUI-Bench and delivers 17.1% improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model.
An Expression Tree Decoding Strategy for Mathematical Equation Generation (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to generate mathematical equations from natural language ignore parallel or dependent relations between math expressions.
Approach: They propose to integrate tree structure into the expression-level generation and advocate an expression tree decoding strategy.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline methods for generating mathematical equations from natural language.
D-RAG: Differentiable Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) but subgraph selection process is non-differentiable, preventing end-to-end training of the retriever and the generator.
Approach: They propose a Differentiable RAG approach that optimizes the retriever and the generator for KGQA.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on WebQSP and CWQ.
Learning Global Controller in Latent Space for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance, but their training costs are exorbitant.
Approach: They propose a parameter-efficient method for exploring optimal solutions within latent space by using latent units to extract input representations from LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance on a range of natural language processing tasks.
Query-based Instance Discrimination Network for Relational Triple Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent approaches to extract relational triples from open domain texts suffer from error propagation, relation redundancy and lack of high-level connections.
Approach: They propose a query-based approach to construct instance-level representations for relational triples . they use query embeddings and token embeddables to extract all types of triples in one step .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on five widely used benchmarks.
LaMPE: Length-aware Multi-grained Positional Encoding for Adaptive Long-context Scaling Without Training (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) experience significant performance degradation when the input exceeds the pretraining context window due to the out-of-distribution (OOD) behavior of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE).
Approach: They propose a training-free method that remaps out-of-distribution (OOD) positions into the in-distance range with fixed mapping strategies, ignoring the dynamic relationship between input length and effective context window.
Outcome: Experiments on three representative LLMs across five mainstream long-context benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves significant performance improvements compared to existing methods.
STaR-SQL: Self-Taught Reasoner for Text-to-SQL (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating step-by-step “chain-of-thought” rationales are limited to text-to-SQL.
Approach: They propose a method that prompts SQL query generation to produce reasoning steps for SQL queries and fine-tunes it on rationales that lead to correct outcomes.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms agent-like prompting methods on the Spider benchmark.
On the Vulnerability of Text Sanitization (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing reconstruction attacks on text sanitization are not able to accurately assess their effectiveness.
Approach: They propose to use ASR to measure the effectiveness of reconstruction attacks to evaluate sanitization performance.
Outcome: The proposed reconstruction attacks achieve a 46.4% improvement in ASR over the state-of-the-art baseline with a privacy budget of =4.0 on the SST-2 dataset.
PromptNER: Prompt Locating and Typing for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for prompt learning require a multi-round prompting manner and require elaborate templates.
Approach: They propose to unify entity locating and entity typing into prompt learning by enumerating spans to predict their entity types or constructing type-specific prompts to locate entities.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model in a few-shot setting . it uses a template filled with multiple prompts and a bipartite graph matching mechanism .
Gunrock: A Social Bot for Complex and Engaging Long Conversations (D19-3)

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Challenge: Gunrock is a speech-based social chatbot that can be used to understand complex sentences and have in-depth conversations.
Approach: They propose a system that allows users to understand complex sentences and have in-depth conversations in open domains.
Outcome: The proposed system produces longer sentences, which are directly related to user engagement (e.g., ratings, number of turns).
Sociolectal Analysis of Pretrained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Using data from English cloze tests, we demonstrate wide performance gaps across demographic groups and show that pretrained language models disfavor young non-white male speakers.
Approach: They use data from English cloze tests to examine performance differences of pretrained language models across demographic groups.
Outcome: The models disfavor young non-white male speakers, but larger models reduce performance gaps between majority and minority groups.
SQL Injection Jailbreak: A Structural Disaster of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to jailbreak Large Language Models (LLMs) exploited internal properties or capabilities of the model, such as optimization-based jailbreak methods and methods that leveraged the model’s context-learning abilities.
Approach: They propose a new method which injects jailbreak information into user prompts and induces the model to generate harmful content.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves near 100% success rates on open-source models while incurring lower time costs compared to previous methods.
Focus-aware Response Generation in Inquiry Conversation (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on response generation focus on relevance and fluency, rarely paying attention to the focus.
Approach: They propose a Focus-aware response generation method that takes the focus into consideration and optimizes a multi-level encoder and focal decoder to generate multiple candidate responses.
Outcome: The proposed method generates candidate responses that correspond to different focuses and performs better on two orthogonal inquiry conversation datasets.
ColorBrowserAgent: Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent with Adaptive Knowledge Evolution (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Xue et al., 2025): deploying autonomous web agents in production remains difficult due to site heterogeneity and long-horizon instability.
Approach: They propose a knowledge-evolving agent that can be used to automate web workflows . they use human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization .
Outcome: Experiments on WebArena, WebChoreAren and industrial deployment show it outperforms baselines.
Self-Contrast: Better Reflection Through Inconsistent Solving Perspectives (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent research indicates without external feedback, LLM’s intrinsic reflection is unstable.
Approach: They propose a method that combines self-evaluated and external feedback to improve LLM's reflection.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the quality of self-evaluated feedback and can catalyze more accurate and stable reflection.
Locate and Label: A Two-stage Identifier for Nested Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-studied task in natural language processing.
Approach: They propose a method that generates span proposals and labels them with categories . they use boundary information of entities and partially matched spans to locate them .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on nested NER datasets.
Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks, but their effectiveness in embodied domains remains largely unexplored.
Approach: They propose a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks that synthesizes 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing visual reasoning models by +9%, 24%, and +13% on long-horizon tasks.
Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: a goal of LLM alignment is to balance usefulness with harmlessness, but this conflictes when knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes.
Approach: They propose a framework that combines safety-research contexts with adversarial interactions to exploit a vulnerability in Jargon queries.
Outcome: a framework outperforms existing methods in analyzing Jargon queries, a study shows . it achieves 93% of attacks across seven models, while remaining useful, the authors say .
AutoTaskEval: Towards Domain-Specific and Fine-Grained Evaluation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing automated approaches operate within fixed task schemas and often fail to autonomously discover new evaluation dimensions.
Approach: They propose an automated framework that constructs domain-specific benchmarks directly from unstructured corpora using Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Outcome: The proposed framework uncovers a broader and more fine-grained task space than expert-curated benchmarks while producing high-quality instances that preserve established model-level evaluation trends.
TimeToM: Temporal Space is the Key to Unlocking the Door of Large Language Models’ Theory-of-Mind (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Theory of Mind (ToM) is the foundation of social interaction and is crucial for social interaction.
Approach: They propose a tool-belief solver that can transform a character’s higher-order beliefs into another character’ s first-order belief under belief communication period.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the ToM capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multiple scenarios.
Multimodal Self-Instruct: Synthetic Abstract Image and Visual Reasoning Instruction Using Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Using large language models, large multimodal models struggle with basic tasks like reading time from a clock and planning a route using a road map.
Approach: They propose a multimodal self-instruct that synthesizes massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions.
Outcome: The proposed model synthesizes 11,193 abstract images and reasoning instructions across eight visual scenarios.

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