Papers by Wu Sun
REST: Stress Testing Large Reasoning Models by Asking Multiple Problems at Once (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) lack a narrow evaluation paradigm . a single-question evaluation setup suffers from two major limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose a stress-testing framework that exposes LRMs to multiple problems simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on reasoning benchmarks and state-of-the-art models. |
Effective and Efficient Query-aware Snippet Extraction for Web Search (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract webpage snippets ignore contextual information of webpages, which may be sub-optimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-aware webpage snippet extraction method called DeepQSE that captures contextual information of webpages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can significantly improve the performance of DeepQSE without affecting its performance. |
Evolving Beyond Snapshots: Harmonizing Structure and Sequence via Entity State Tuning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) require predicting future facts by modeling structural dependencies within each snapshot and temporal evolution across snapshots. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-agnostic framework that provides persistent entity states . EST maintains a global state buffer and aligns structural evidence with sequential signals . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that EST improves diverse backbones and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
ERNIE-Doc: A Retrospective Long-Document Modeling Transformer (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level language pretraining are not suitable for long documents due to their quadratically increasing memory and time consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level language pretraining model based on Recurrence Transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on language understanding tasks. |
CORD: Bridging the Audio–Text Reasoning Gap via Weighted On-policy Cross-modal Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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Hu Jing, Danxiang Zhu, Xianlong Luo, Dan Zhang, Shuwei He, Yishu Lei, Shikun Feng, Hai-Tao Zheng, Jingzhou HE, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) exhibit a degradation in knowledge and reasoning capabilities . empirical results show that CORD significantly bridges the audio–text performance gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that performs online cross-modal self-distillation to bridge the acoustic-semantic gap between LALMs and text-based models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the acoustic-semantic gap between LALMs and text-based models . it employs on-policy reverse KL divergence with importance-aware weighting . |
Towards Storage-Efficient Visual Document Retrieval: An Empirical Study on Reducing Patch-Level Embeddings (2025.findings-acl)
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Yubo Ma, Jinsong Li, Yuhang Zang, Xiaobao Wu, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Cao, Haodong Duan, Jiaqi Wang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun
| Challenge: | Visualized Document Retrieval (VDR) uses large vision-language models to encode document pages into embeddings. |
| Approach: | They evaluate methods to reduce patch embeddings per page while minimizing performance degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maintains 98.2% of retrieval performance with only 11.8% of original memory usage and preserves 94.6% effectiveness at 2% memory footprint. |
Span-level Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Table Filling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to analyze aspect-based sentiment analysis focus on word-level dependencies between aspect and opinion expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-level ABSA model which considers consistency of multi-word opinion expressions at the span- level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to identify the sentiment polarity of a given aspect . it is based on a table filling method and a regularizer to guarantee consistency . |
Union-of-Experts: Neurons in Mixture-of-Experts are Secretly Routers (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on an external router to assign tokens to experts, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an MoE variant that performs "expert-autonomous routing" by pre-designating a fraction of neurons within each expert as "routing neurons" they pre-train UoE models with up to 3B parameters and show they outperform traditional MoEs with matched efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with 3B parameters and provides valuable insights into expert-autonomous selection and the broader routing mechanisms of MoE models. |
Contrastive Attention for Automatic Chest X-ray Report Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that learning-based models fail to accurately capture and describe abnormal regions due to data bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that compares the current input image with normal images to capture abnormal regions by contrasting the input image and normal images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be easily incorporated into existing models to boost their performance under most metrics. |
RSMeM: Knowledge-Enhanced Memory Evolution for Remote Sensing Agents with Systematic Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Bingxian Wu, Yu Zhang, Zonghao Guo, Tang Liu, Chen Qian, Yuxiang Lu, Xingbo Du, Yanghao Li, Yidan Zhang, Chi Chen, Ling Yao, Chenghu Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing RS agents built on general-purpose LLMs are domain-agnostic, resulting in brittle and error-prone workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced memory evolution mechanism that bootstraps RS agents with pre-distilled domain knowledge and iteratively integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the new model improves tool-use performance and accuracy . iteratively, iteration of the model integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution . |
Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that pre-trained language models have gained rich knowledge during pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to tune pre-trained language models with task-specific prompts to improve and stabilize prompttuning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on zero and few-shot text classification tasks show that prompt-tuning improves and stabilizes prompttun-ing. |
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. |
Coherent Comments Generation for Chinese Articles with a Graph-to-Sequence Model (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for article comment generation are too long and often result in general and irrelevant comments. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate comments with a graph-to-sequence model that models the input news as a topic interaction graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate coherent and informative comments compared with several strong baseline models. |
Self-Taught Agentic Long Context Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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Yufan Zhuang, Xiaodong Yu, Jialian Wu, Ximeng Sun, Ze Wang, Jiang Liu, Yusheng Su, Jingbo Shang, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments across seven long-context tasks demonstrate that AgenticLU significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods and specialized long-consumer LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance an LLM's understanding of long-context questions by integrating targeted self-clarification with contextual grounding within an agentic workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods and specialized long-context LLMs in seven long-constitut tasks. |
Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps (2022.naacl-main)
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Jiangang Bai, Yujing Wang, Hong Sun, Ruonan Wu, Tianmeng Yang, Pengfei Tang, Defu Cao, Mingliang Zhang1, Yunhai Tong, Yaming Yang, Jing Bai, Ruofei Zhang, Hao Sun, Wei Shen
| 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 Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework (2023.findings-acl)
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Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing models of robustness evaluation are incomprehensive, impractical, and invalid . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatic robustness evaluation that shifts towards model-centric evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a model-centric evaluation protocol and a robustness evaluation protocol. |
CLaMP 3: Universal Music Information Retrieval Across Unaligned Modalities and Unseen Languages (2025.findings-acl)
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Shangda Wu, Guo Zhancheng, Ruibin Yuan, Junyan Jiang, SeungHeon Doh, Gus Xia, Juhan Nam, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Music information retrieval (MIR) is a field that aims at developing computational tools for processing, organizing, and accessing music data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns music modalities with multilingual text in a shared representation space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show CLaMP 3 performs state-of-the-art on multiple MIR tasks . it surpasses baselines and shows excellent generalization in multimodal and multilingual contexts . |
FLAIR: Steering LLM Mathematical Problem Solving based on A Fuzzy-Logic-AssIsted Reasoner (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wu, Hongru Sun, Wanqing Li, Xinguo Yu, Hao Ming, Xiao Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Jiahong Zhao, Yi Guo, Jie Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mathematical reasoning rely on static heuristics or pre-determined reasoning strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive framework that integrates fuzzy theory into LLM-based mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while offering effective and interpretable diagnostics of intermediate problem-solving states. |
Pruning Adatperfusion with Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive to fine-tune and require large storage. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify the influence of each adapter module and a way to prune adapters based on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces size significantly while keeping performance intact. |
Label Effects: Shared Heuristic Reliance in Trust Assessment by Humans and LLM-as-a-Judge (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators . et al., 2024: strong labels can foster trust but also undermine it . |
| Approach: | They show that LLMs' source labels bias trust judgments by humans . they use eye-tracking data to analyze LLM internal states during judgment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is biased by disclosed source labels, the authors show . eye-tracking data show humans rely heavily on source labels for judgments . |
Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Principled Alignment with MoE Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Yuchen Feng, Zhenyu Zhang, Naibin Gu, Ziqi Wang, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a cornerstone for scaling LLMs, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood, often leading to sub-optimal specialization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Helmholtz Free Energy and Router Entropy to study the MoE lifecycle and identify a universal Three-Stage Phase Transition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces perplexity and improves expert distinctiveness, offering a principled path toward thermodynamically aligned computation. |
Named Entity Recognition via Noise Aware Training Mechanism with Data Filter (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition (NER) do not distinguish noisy from hard samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-aware-with-filter method to help model identify noisy samples . they propose 'incomplete trust' loss function which boosts L CRF with a robust term . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on six real-world Chinese and English NER datasets. |
ReasonBERT: Pre-trained to Reason with Distant Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods only harvest learning signals from local contexts of naturally occurring texts . ReasonBert provides a method for reasoning over long-range relations and multiple, possibly hybrid contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments language models with the ability to reason over long-range relations and multiple, possibly hybrid contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves sample efficiency over strong baselines. |
Q-TOD: A Query-driven Task-oriented Dialogue System (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelined task-oriented dialogue systems have difficulties adapting to unseen domains . end-to-end systems are plagued by large-scale knowledge bases in practice . |
| Approach: | They propose a query-driven task-oriented dialogue system that extracts dialogue context information into a natural language query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets. |
OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics (2025.findings-acl)
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Haote Yang, Xingjian Wei, Jiang Wu, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Győző Zijian Yang, Junyuan Gao, Jingchao Wang, Bowen Jiang, Shasha Wang, Nanjun Yu, Zihao Zhang, Shixin Hong, Hongwei Liu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Lijun Wu, Gábor Prószéky, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent significant strides toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). |
| Approach: | They introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. |
| Outcome: | The framework reveals intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of LLMs in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as an example. |
ZoFia: Zero-Shot Fake News Detection with Entity-Guided Retrieval and Multi-LLM Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are limited by knowledge cutoff and can generate factual hallucinations when handling time-sensitive news. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework that uses a hierarchical salience and saliency-calibrated minimum margin of relevance algorithm to extract core entities accurately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and even most few-shot methods on two public datasets. |
Distributional Clarity: The Hidden Driver of RL-Friendliness in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | RL-friendly models exhibit intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in probability assignments . under identical training, Qwen models achieve substantial gains, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify distributional clarity in probability space . they show distributional clearness is a trainable property underlying RL-Friendliness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model families achieve substantial gains under identical training, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
Dependency Parsing as MRC-based Span-Span Prediction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dependency parsing address the issue that edges should be constructed at the text span/subtree level rather than word level. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs dependency trees by directly modeling span-span relations by modeling subtree-subtree relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method constructs dependency trees by modeling span-span relations . it can retrieve missing spans in the span proposal stage, which leads to higher recall . |
RepoAgent: An LLM-Powered Open-Source Framework for Repository-level Code Documentation Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Qinyu Luo, Yining Ye, Shihao Liang, Zhong Zhang, Yujia Qin, Yaxi Lu, Yesai Wu, Xin Cong, Yankai Lin, Yingli Zhang, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Xia et al., 2018) demonstrate that a large language model can generate and maintain high-quality code documentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model powered open-source framework for generating, maintaining, and updating code documentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality documentation for the entire project. |
CipherBank: Exploring the Boundary of LLM Reasoning Capabilities through Cryptography Challenge (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their capabilities in cryptographic decryption tasks remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the reasoning capabilities of large language models in cryptographic decryption tasks. |
1+1>2: Can Large Language Models Serve as Cross-Lingual Knowledge Aggregators? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been recognized for their impressive capabilities in natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the multilingual performance of Large Language Models by aggregating knowledge from diverse languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the performance disparity across languages and offers valuable insights for further exploration. |
MDR: Model-Specific Demonstration Retrieval at Inference Time for In-Context Learning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval-based in-context learning ignore model biases and fail to retrieve the most appropriate demonstrations for different LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-specific demonstration retrieval method that considers the biases of different LLMs at inference time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on seen and unseen tasks with multi-scale inference LLMs by up to 41.2%. |
On the Vulnerability of Safety Alignment in Open-Access LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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Jingwei Yi, Rui Ye, Qisi Chen, Bin Zhu, Siheng Chen, Defu Lian, Guangzhong Sun, Xing Xie, Fangzhao Wu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to malicious exploitation, but are often rejected and limited harmfulness is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose two types of reverse alignment techniques: reverse supervised fine-tuning (RSFT) and reverse preference optimization (RPO). |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can significantly enhance the success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks, but they face high rejection rates and limited harmfulness. |
A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sub-Slot based task-oriented dialogs provide slot values segment by segment over multiple turns. |
| Approach: | They define a task called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) they build a Chinese dialog dataset SSD for boosting research on SSTOD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) it includes 40K dialogs and 500K utterances from Chinese names, phone numbers, ID numbers and license plate numbers . the dataset is well annotated with sub-slot values, slot values, dialog states and actions . |
MedAdapter: Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Large Language Models Towards Medical Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have improved generation and reasoning capabilities compared to traditional BERT-sized models due to massive number of parameters and extensive pre-training on vast textual corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-hoc adapter for test-time adaptation of large language models . they propose to fine-tune only a small BERT-sized adapter to rank candidate LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter improves performance on four biomedical tasks without requiring computational resources or sharing data with third parties. |
Pre-training Entity Relation Encoder with Intra-span and Inter-span Information (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models do not handle text spans and relation among text span pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate span-related information into pre-trained encoder for entity relation extraction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pre-training method outperforms distantly supervised pre-trained models on two entity relation extraction benchmark datasets. |
Optimizing User Profiles via Contextual Bandits for Retrieval-Augmented LLM Personalization (2026.acl-long)
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Linfeng Du, Ye Yuan, Zichen Zhao, Fuyuan Lyu, Emiliano Penaloza, Xiuying Chen, Zipeng Sun, Jikun Kang, Laurent Charlin, Xue Liu, Haolun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for personalizing large language models require modifying parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight approach to personalizing large language models via retrieval augmentation . relevance serves as an unreliable proxy for utility, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong heuristic and retrieval-augmented baselines on nine personalization tasks. |
Rethinking Text-to-SQL: Dynamic Multi-turn SQL Interaction for Real-world Database Exploration (2026.findings-acl)
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Linzhuang Sun, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liang, Ruitong Liu, Yuying Li, Qifeng Cai, Jingxuan Wei, Yuchen Wu, Bihui Yu, Xiangxiang Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Cui
| Challenge: | Structured Query Language (SQL) is the cornerstone for data-driven decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to rigorously evaluate Large Language Models within a dynamic interaction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to rigorously evaluate LLMs within a dynamic interaction framework. |
Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can model different IE tasks, generate targeted structures, and learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. |
Symmetrical Visual Contrastive Optimization: Aligning Vision-Language Models with Minimal Contrastive Images (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) tend to neglect image content and over-rely on language-model priors, resulting in errors in visually grounded tasks and hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel finetuning objective that steers the model toward capturing important visual details and aligning them with corresponding text tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 22% reduction in hallucinations and significant gains in vision-centric and general tasks while maintaining or improving the model's general abilities. |
Beyond Triplet: Leveraging the Most Data for Multimodal Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal machine translation (MMT) aims to improve translation quality by incorporating information from other modalities, such as vision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multimodal machine translation that utilizes large-scale non-triple data and a multimodal translation dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can significantly improve translation performance with more non-triple data. |
Towards Efficient NLP: A Standard Evaluation and A Strong Baseline (2022.naacl-main)
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Xiangyang Liu, Tianxiang Sun, Junliang He, Jiawen Wu, Lingling Wu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Rather than pursuing the reachless SOTA accuracy, researchers are focusing on model efficiency and usability. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation and a public leaderboard for efficient NLP models that depicts the Pareto Frontier for various language understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or performs on par with SOTA compressed and early exiting models. |
LaMP-Val: Large Language Models Empower Personalized Valuation in Auction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jie Sun, Tianyu Zhang, Houcheng Jiang, Kexin Huang, Xiang Shu, Zhibo Zhu, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Junkang Wu, Chi Luo, An Zhang, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Currently, most research focuses on the bidding algorithms used within auction mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a personalized valuation framework that integrates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process. |
Anchoring-Guidance Fine-Tuning (AnGFT): Elevating Professional Response Quality in Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in various fields, notably in Role-Playing Conversational Agents (RPCAs). |
| Approach: | They propose an Anchoring-Guidance Fine-Tuning Framework to integrate relevant expert knowledge into RPCAs' training process to mitigate this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the RPCAs’ performance in handling role-specific professional queries while preserving their robust role-playing abilities. |
Beyond Label Attention: Transparency in Language Models for Automated Medical Coding via Dictionary Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current efforts in interpretability of medical coding rely heavily on label attention mechanisms, which often leads to the highlighting of extraneous tokens irrelevant to the ICD code. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage dictionary learning to extract sparsely activated representations from dense language models embedded in superposition to facilitate accurate interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts sparsely activated representations from dense language models in superposition, even when the highlighted tokens are medically irrelevant. |
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. |
AdaV: Adaptive Text-visual Redirection for Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Vision-language models often generate excessive visual tokens, leading to poor performance . a novel training-free visual token pruning method is proposed to improve performance despite the computational cost associated with VLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free visual token pruning method that reduces biased token pruning . they plan to open-source the code upon publication . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces biased token pruning and enhances model robustness with limited visual token budget. |
Multimodal Dual-Path Decoding for Medical Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for radiology report generation rely on encoder-decoder based frameworks that fail to integrate multimodal clinical evidence with domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal dual-path framework that synergistically integrates large vision-language models and large language models for radiology report generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the public MIMIC-CXR benchmark and shows that it is superior to state-of-the-art models. |
SeeClick: Harnessing GUI Grounding for Advanced Visual GUI Agents (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents interact with the environment through extracted structured data, which can be notably lengthy (e.g., HTML) and occasionally inaccessible (e-book). |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance SeeClick with GUI grounding pre-training and devise a method to automate curation of GUI ground data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ScreenSpot, the first realistic GUI grounding benchmark that encompasses mobile, desktop, and web environments. |
Evolving Knowledge Distillation with Large Language Models and Active Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the direct use of large language models for text generation and labeling, without fully exploring their potential to comprehend the target task and acquire valuable knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill the knowledge of large language models into smaller models by generating annotated data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of small domain models while enhancing the ability of large language models. |
How to Ask Good Questions? Try to Leverage Paraphrases (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate human-like questions rely on paraphrases to generate good questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate paraphrase knowledge into question generation to generate human-like questions by combining paraphrases with a back-translation method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves obvious performance gain over several strong baselines and human evaluation validates that it can ask questions of high quality by leveraging paraphrase knowledge. |
De-Biased Court’s View Generation with Causality (2020.emnlp-main)
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Yiquan Wu, Kun Kuang, Yating Zhang, Xiaozhong Liu, Changlong Sun, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Luo Si, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to court’s view generation can be used to address this problem, but neglecting the confounding bias in data can limit the model performance and pollute learning outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Attentional and Counterfactual based Natural Language Generation method consisting of an attentional encoder and a pair of innovative counterfactual decoders to generate judgment-discriminative court's views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to generate judgment-discriminative court's views (both supportive and non-supportive views) under both quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics. |
From Paraphrasing to Semantic Parsing: Unsupervised Semantic Parsing via Synchronous Semantic Decoding (2021.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Bo Chen, Chunlei Xin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weipeng Zhang, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Synchronous Semantic Decoding (SSD) can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic parsing performance on multiple datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method which solves the semantic gap and the structure gap by leveraging paraphrasing and grammar-constrained decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can solve the semantic gap and structure gap on multiple datasets. |
UniRE: A Unified Label Space for Entity Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing joint entity relation extraction models setup two separate label spaces for the two sub-tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to eliminate the different treatment on the two sub-tasks’ label spaces by applying a unified classifier to predict each cell’s label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive accuracy with the best extractor and is faster. |
Robust Preference Optimization via Dynamic Target Margins (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an efficient method for ensuring safety and reliability in practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic target margin preference optimization algorithm that adjusts reward margins at the pairwise level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average 4.4% improvement over baselines, setting new benchmarks for state-of-the-art performance. |
Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on semantic parsing use Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) to train discriminative semantic parses. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning algorithm which can learn to distinguish fine-grained meaning representations and take the overall sequence-level semantic into consideration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on two standard datasets and gets state-of-the-art performance over existing methods. |
Gold Panning in Vocabulary: An Adaptive Method for Vocabulary Expansion of Domain-Specific LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle when it comes to specialized domains due to limited domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive method that automatically identifies valuable words from a given domain vocabulary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been validated on three Chinese datasets and performed on general tasks. |
Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Samuel Schmidgall, Yusheng Su, Ze Wang, Ximeng Sun, Jialian Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Jiang Liu, Michael Moor, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
| Approach: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
| Outcome: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
Automated Peer Reviewing in Paper SEA: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jianxiang Yu, Zichen Ding, Jiaqi Tan, Kangyang Luo, Zhenmin Weng, Chenghua Gong, Long Zeng, RenJing Cui, Chengcheng Han, Qiushi Sun, Zhiyong Wu, Yunshi Lan, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to review scientific papers are limited by their content or quality . SEA is a framework for automated scientific review, but its contents are generic or partial. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated scientific review using large language models . they propose to use a standardized review dataset to fine-tune an LLM to generate high-quality reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate high-quality reviews from standardized datasets and improves on the existing feedback mechanisms. |
Stabilizing Efficient Reasoning with Step-Level Advantage Selection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate long and verbose reasoning traces at inference time . short context post-training alone induces substantial reasoning compression . |
| Approach: | They propose a step-level advantage selection approach that reduces reasoning length by over 30% . they propose to use GRPO without any length-aware objective to train models in a shorter context window . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces average reasoning length by over 30% while improving Pass@1 accuracy by 3.79 points over the strongest length-aware baseline. |
Instance-level Randomization: Toward More Stable LLM Evaluations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Evaluations of large language models suffer from instability, where small changes of random factors can lead to drastic fluctuations of scores and even model rankings. |
| Approach: | They propose an instance-level randomization method to reduce variance and improve fairness in evaluations by randomizing all factors that affect evaluation scores for every single instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces variance and improves fairness in model comparisons by using instance-level randomization. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
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. |
Listening Like Humans: Semantics-Guided Noise-Robust Multimodal Speech Recognition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Severe acoustic degradation results in unreliable ASR outputs . et al., 2024b): critical concerns regarding reliability and fairness of ASR . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that reframes ASR as semantics-guided speech reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average reduction in WER while also attaining 98.71% BERTScore and 96.7% USE over advanced baselines. |
ConRPG: Paraphrase Generation using Contexts as Regularizer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for paraphrase generation lack reliable supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised paradigm for paraphrase generation based on contextual language models, candidate filtering and paraphrase model training based upon the selected candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing paraphrase generation methods in supervised and unsupervised setups. |
Towards Understanding Chain-of-Thought Prompting: An Empirical Study of What Matters (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to encourage the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem by providing a series of reasoning steps in the demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate coherent lines of reasoning even with invalid demonstrations while still generating coherent lines during inference. |
Do Large Language Models Know What They Don’t Know? (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have vast knowledge that allows them to excel in various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated method to detect uncertainty in the responses of large language models and a dataset to measure their self-knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects uncertainty in the responses of large language models and provides a novel measure of their self-knowledge. |
Beyond Human Labels: A Multi-Linguistic Auto-Generated Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Resume Parsing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Efficient resume parsing is critical for global hiring, yet the lack of dedicated benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on multilingual, structure-rich resumes hinders progress. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-in-the-loop pipeline to generate 2,500 synthetic resumes spanning 50 templates, 30 career fields, and 5 languages to evaluate large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform poorly on multilingual resumes and lack of standardized templates. |
Deciphering Digital Detectives: Understanding LLM Behaviors and Capabilities in Multi-Agent Mystery Games (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game and a novel area in Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven gaming. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to foster AI agent development in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables AI agents to engage in Jubensha games autonomously. |
Position Offset Label Prediction for Grammatical Error Correction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our proposed POL-Pc framework improves baseline models and yields consistent performance gain over various data augmentation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a position offset label prediction subtask to integrate correction editing operations into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on Chinese, English and Japanese datasets by a wide margin. |
Efficient Pretraining Data Selection for Language Models via Multi-Actor Collaboration (2025.acl-long)
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Tianyi Bai, Ling Yang, Zhen Hao Wong, Fupeng Sun, Xinlin Zhuang, Jiahui Peng, Chi Zhang, Lijun Wu, Qiu Jiantao, Wentao Zhang, Binhang Yuan, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Efficient data selection is crucial to accelerate the pretraining of language models . limited research has addressed the inherent conflicts between data selection methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-actor collaborative data selection mechanism that prioritizes data based on its specific criterion and updates prioritization rules using the current state of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model accelerates convergence in LM pretraining and achieves an average relative performance gain of 10.5% across multiple language model benchmarks. |
Reliable Use of Lemmas via Eligibility Reasoning and Section-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on mathematical benchmarks but often import conclusions without validating assumptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encodes a lemma specification and trains with reinforcement learning and section-aware loss masking to assign penalty to the section responsible for errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on benchmarks but often misapplyes lemmas . the model is able to encode the specification and train with reinforcement learning . |
Mars: Modeling Context & State Representations with Contrastive Learning for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show dialog context representations are more conducive to multi-turn task-oriented dialog. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end task-oriented dialog system with two contrastive learning strategies to model relationship between dialog context and belief/action state representations. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that dialog context representations are more conducive to multi-turn task-oriented dialog. |
GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Wang, Shuang Wu, Bixuan Wang, Lu Lin, Yuxin Chen, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Yufan Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) inherit contamination from training corpora, directional bias under social-desirability framing, and limited responsiveness to context beyond the item text. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)
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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan
| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
Enhancing Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation through Error-Aware Self-Reflection (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoyang Wu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Zhiyuan Liu, Minghe Yu, Cheng Yang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies treat SLMs as student models and use long-form Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) as supervision signals for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Existing research focuses on distilling reasoning ability from LLMs to enhance the mathematical reasoning performance of small-scale models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines teacher CoTs through an error-aware reflection process to enable the student model to construct more tailored teacher Cots. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ORION improves performance by more than 2% over all baselines. |
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. |
LEMON: Reviving Stronger and Smaller LMs from Larger LMs with Linear Parameter Fusion (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a stronger and smaller model with the help of large models are limited by the model size and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn competent initial points for smaller models by fusing parameters from larger models and introduce controllable receptive fields to model prior parameter characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities. |
Reverse Modeling in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Using pre-trained LLMs with reversed text inputs can improve their performance across multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to determine whether LLMs can understand reversed text inputs by reversing entire paragraphs or documents at the token level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to improve understanding across multiple languages. |
LongAttn: Selecting Long-context Training Data via Token-level Attention (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis, which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level framework which quantifies long-range dependencies for LLMs by calculating token-based dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies long-range dependencies, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection. |
CogGen: A Cognitively Inspired Recursive Framework for Deep Research Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deep research report generation rely on rigid predefined linear workflows, which cause error accumulation and limit in-depth multimodal fusion and report quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cognitively inspired recursive framework for deep research report Generation that simulates cognitive writing and abstract visual representation (AVR) they also propose CLEF, a cognitive load evaluation framework, and a benchmark from our world in data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art among open-source systems, surpassing Gemini Deep Research. |
PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize RAG generators fail to align with RAG requirements thoroughly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for optimizing the RAG generator from multiple preference perspectives to align with RAG requirements comprehensively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of RAG generators by incorporating retrieved documents into the prompt. |
AttnPO: Attention-Guided Process Supervision for Efficient Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Shuaiyi Nie, null Dingsiyu, Wenyuan Zhang, Linhao Yu, Tianmeng Yang, Yao Chen, Weichong Yin, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing trajectory-level length penalties fail to effectively shorten reasoning length and degrade accuracy, as they treat all reasoning steps uniformly and lack fine-grained signals to distinguish redundancy from necessity. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-overhead process-supervised RL framework that leverages the model’s intrinsic attention signals for step-level credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces reasoning length while improving performance across 9 benchmarks. |
VIDA: A Visual Intent-driven Design Assistant for Proactive Multimodal Clarification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models fail to provide accurate and complete answers to user requests . a new strategy-aware design assistant is developed to help designers create proactive, visually grounded, and strategically prioritized clarification questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual intent-driven design assistant to generate proactive, visually grounded, and strategically prioritized clarification questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed assistant improves the strategic alignment score by 20.59% over baselines and restores visual grounding capabilities lost during fine-tuning. |
Clip-Tuning: Towards Derivative-free Prompt Learning with a Mixture of Rewards (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work does not take full advantage of over-parameterized characteristics of large pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses frozen "thinned" networks to obtain a mixture of rewards and advance the derivative-free prompt learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous gradient-free prompt learning methods and achieves parity with gradient-based counterparts on seven language understanding benchmarks under few-shot settings. |
AdaSwitch: Adaptive Switching between Small and Large Agents for Effective Cloud-Local Collaborative Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Hao Sun, Jiayi Wu, Hengyi Cai, Xiaochi Wei, Yue Feng, Bo Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yan Zhang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have been remarkable . users face a choice between using cloud-based LLMs for generation quality or local-based ones for lower computational cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM utilization paradigm that facilitates collaborative operation . they evaluate AdaSwitch across 7 benchmarks and compare it to other LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance of local and cloud agents across 7 benchmarks . it achieves competitive results compared to the cloud agent while utilizing less computational overhead. |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-text contrastive learning methods encounter many false negatives, i.e., images and reports from separate patients probably carry the same semantics but are wrongly treated as negatives. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple medical image-text contrastive learning and replace it with semantic matching loss based on medical knowledge to eliminate false negatives in contrastive training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on zero-shot prediction, supervised classification, and image-text retrieval with only 20K pre-training data. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
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Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
Are You Copying My Model? Protecting the Copyright of Large Language Models for EaaS via Backdoor Watermark (2023.acl-long)
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Wenjun Peng, Jingwei Yi, Fangzhao Wu, Shangxi Wu, Bin Bin Zhu, Lingjuan Lyu, Binxing Jiao, Tong Xu, Guangzhong Sun, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities in both text understanding and generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an Embedding Watermark method that implants backdoors on embeddings to protect copyright of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method protects the copyright of large language models without compromising service quality while minimizing the adverse impact on the original embeddings’ utility. |
A Diverse and Effective Retrieval-Based Debt Collection System with Expert Knowledge (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing debt collection systems lack script diversity, contextual relevance and coherence due to their complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a script library based on real-world debt collection conversations and a retrieval based response system for contextual relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves script diversity and responds to debtor-collector conversations better through knowledge distillation. |
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. |
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Guo Zhancheng, Xu Tan, Ge Zhang, Monan Zhou, Jing Chen, Xuefeng Mu, Yuejie Gao, Yuanliang Dong, Jiafeng Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
Breaking the Evaluation Paradox: Evaluating High-Entropy Search with Computationally Irreducible Constraints (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for evaluation of exhaustive search capabilities is needed . high-entropy enumeration tasks make such ground truth impossible for humans to create . VERITAS is a framework built on the principle of computationally irreducible constraints . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses non-optimizable constraints to create verifiable searches . VERITAS can generate infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control . |
| Outcome: | a new evaluation framework for large language models is based on non-optimizable constraints . the framework can generate infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control . |
RexUIE: A Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal Information Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chengyuan Liu, Fubang Zhao, Yangyang Kang, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiang Zhou, Changlong Sun, Kun Kuang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) models have limited success when extracting general schemas such as quadruples and quintuples. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal formulation that covers almost all extraction schemas and a Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for UIE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows strong performance under full-shot and few-shot settings and achieves state-of-the-art results on the tasks of extracting complex schemas. |
Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Han Weng, Puzhen Wu, Cui Longjie, Yi Zhan, Boyi Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Dun Zeng, Yingxiang Yang, Qianru Zhang, Dong Huang, Xiaoming Yin, Yang Sun, Xing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks rely on execution-based or LLM-based reward models. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL that employs the GMNScore outcome reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward model outperforms existing reward models on standard benchmarks including Spider and BIRD. |
Improving Document Representations by Generating Pseudo Query Embeddings for Dense Retrieval (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval models based on dense representations show better performance than sparse representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mimic the queries to each of the documents by an iterative clustering process and represent the documents using multiple pseudo queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a large dataset while remaining high efficiency. |
StraGo: Harnessing Strategic Guidance for Prompt Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Bin Zhu, Zineng Zhou, Xiaodi Sun, Sheng Yang, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt optimization often lead to prompt drifting, wherein newly generated prompts canadversely impact previously successful cases while addressing failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate prompt drifting by integrating in-context learning to formulate specific, actionable strategies for prompt optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates prompt drifting by leveraging insights from both successful and failed cases to identify critical factors for achieving optimization objectives. |
BORT: Back and Denoising Reconstruction for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing task-oriented dialog systems suffer from error propagation from inaccurate dialog states and responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a back reconstruction approach for end-to-end task-oriented dialog system . they use back reconstruction to reconstruct the original input context from the generated dialog states . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on MultiWOZ 2.0 and CamRest676 show the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
More Than Catastrophic Forgetting: Integrating General Capabilities For Domain-Specific LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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Chengyuan Liu, Yangyang Kang, Shihang Wang, Lizhi Qing, Fubang Zhao, Chao Wu, Changlong Sun, Kun Kuang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that performance on general tasks decreases after Large Language Models are fine-tuned on domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a general capability integration approach to integrate general capabilities and domain knowledge within a single instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on domain-specific tasks by integrating general capabilities and domain knowledge. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
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Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
XFormParser: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Multilingual Semi-structured Form Parser (2025.coling-main)
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Xianfu Cheng, Hang Zhang, Jian Yang, Xiang Li, Weixiao Zhou, Fei Liu, Kui Wu, Xiangyuan Guan, Tao Sun, Xianjie Wu, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Document AI parsing semi-structured image form is a key information extraction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal and multilingual semi-structured FORM PARSER which integrates SER and relation extraction into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 1.79% improvement on RE tasks in multilingual and zero-shot settings. |
ERNIE-M: Enhanced Multilingual Representation by Aligning Cross-lingual Semantics with Monolingual Corpora (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for pretraining cross-lingual models are limited in their size due to the limited amount of parallel corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that encourages the model to align multiple languages with monolingual corpora to overcome the constraint of the parallel corpus size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing cross-lingual models and delivers new state-of-the-art results in various cross-linguistic downstream tasks. |
Reason from Future: Reverse Thought Chain Enhances LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Yinlong Xu, Yanzhao Zheng, Shuoshuo Sun, Shuaihan Huang, Baohua Dong, Zhu Hangcheng, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu, Hongxia Xu, Jian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning paradigms that focus on local optimum reasoning lack global perspective. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional reasoning paradigm that generates reasoning paths by bidirectional planning and bottom-up reasoning accumulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning paradigm outperforms conventional paradigms with higher accuracy and less searching space to solve complex tasks. |
Controllable Text Generation with Residual Memory Transformer (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale Causal Language Models (CLMs) have been successful in text generation, but there is still a challenge to control the generation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-intrusive, lightweight control plugin to control the generation process of a CLM at arbitrary time steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed plugin can handle any type of control conditions and cooperate with the base CLM through a residual learning paradigm. |
Inner Thinking Transformer: Leveraging Dynamic Depth Scaling to Foster Adaptive Internal Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yanxi Xie, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models face inherent performance bottlenecks under parameter constraints . challenging tokens induce abrupt gradient spikes across layers, exposing stress points . |
| Approach: | They propose an inner thinking transformer that reimagines layer computations as implicit thinking steps. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that ITT outperforms Transformer/Loop variants in 11 benchmarks. |
Genius: A Generalizable and Purely Unsupervised Self-Training Framework For Advanced Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Fangzhi Xu, Hang Yan, Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Junxian He, Jun Liu, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing LLM reasoning rely on supervisory signals . current methods rely heavily on outcome supervision and auxiliary reward models . |
| Approach: | They propose a gen-eralizable and purely unsupervised self-training framework to enhance LLM reasoning without supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM reasoning without supervision without external supervision. |
kFolden: k-Fold Ensemble for Out-Of-Distribution Detection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies studying OOD detection in NLP often rely on external data to diversify model predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which mimics OOD detection behavior without external data . they take text classification as an archetype and compare them to existing datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can resolve in- and out-distribution examples in a natural way using existing datasets. |
NACL: A General and Effective KV Cache Eviction Framework for LLM at Inference Time (2024.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Guoxia Wang, Junyuan Shang, Shiyao Cui, Zhenyu Zhang, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Dianhai Yu, Hua Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context windows are expensive and infeasible on fixed memory hardware due to the surprisingly large memory consumption of KV Cache. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework for long-context KV cache eviction that achieves more optimal and efficient evict in a single operation during the encoding phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on short- and long-text tasks by 80% and 76% respectively, reducing KV Cache by up to 5 with over 95% performance maintenance. |
A Hierarchical Reinforced Sequence Operation Method for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing text style transfer methods face three challenges: 1) the transfer is weakly interpretable; 2) generated outputs struggle in content preservation; 3) the trade-off between content and style is intractable. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reinforced sequence operation method that proposes operation positions and alters the sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on two text style transfer datasets. |
RAIDEN Benchmark: Evaluating Role-playing Conversational Agents with Measurement-Driven Custom Dialogues (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for RPCA evaluation are lacking for dialogues . authors introduce specialized judging LLM for automatic RPca evaluation . compelling role-playing agent is expected to lead to more in-depth conversations . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the effectiveness of RPCA interactions using dialogues . they introduce a specialized judging LLM tailored for automatic RPca evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark focuses on assessing particular dimensions at different stages of a conversation, facilitated through interactions conducted by annotators. |
Negation Scope Refinement via Boundary Shift Loss (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Negation detection is a complex linguistic phenomenon with long spans . existing methods tend to make wrong predictions around the scope boundaries . |
| Approach: | They propose a model which engages the Boundary Shift Loss to refine the predicted boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model refines the predicted boundary on multiple datasets. |
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)
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Xiao Cui, Yulei Qin, Yuting Gao, Enwei Zhang, Zihan Xu, Tong Wu, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods investigate divergence measures but fail to deliver effective supervision when few distribution overlap exists between teacher and student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation method that exploits the Sinkhorn distance to ensure a nuanced assessment of the disparity between teacher and student distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all kinds of LLMs with encoder-only, encoder decoder, and decoded architectures. |
Fast Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Fast kNN-MT uses the entire corpus as the datastore for the nearest neighbor search . knn-MT is two-orders slower than vanilla MT models . |
| Approach: | They propose a fast kNN-MT model that uses the entire corpus as the datastore for nearest neighbor search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is two-orders faster than kNN-MT and is only two times slower than the standard model. |
Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Levina Li, Frank Wan, Xiao Liang, Sophia Yin, Yuchen Wu, Xinfeng Li, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks rely on static or rule-based topologies that fail to adapt to task requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that generates highly task-adaptive topologies . they validated the framework on multiple benchmarks and validated it on multiple platforms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks in task-adaptive communication topologies. |
A Simple Hash-Based Early Exiting Approach For Language Understanding and Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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Tianxiang Sun, Xiangyang Liu, Wei Zhu, Zhichao Geng, Lingling Wu, Yilong He, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure instance difficulty use generalization and threshold-tuning . a new approach to learn to exit is based on hash functions to assign tokens to a fixed exiting layer. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hash-based Early Exiting approach that replaces learn-to-exit modules with hash functions to assign each token to a fixed exiting layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on learning to exit and predicting instance difficulty. |
CLARity: Reasoning Consistency Alone Can Teach Reinforced Experts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to supervise the reasoning process are prohibitively expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-effective reinforcement learning framework that enhances reasoning quality using a small, general-purpose LLM only. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CLARity improves reasoning quality by 16.5% over standard outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) human evaluations confirm substantial gains in factual correctness and reasoning coherence, leading to more trustworthy model outputs. |
SHIELD: Evaluation and Defense Strategies for Copyright Compliance in LLM Text Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed machine learning but have raised significant legal concerns due to their potential to produce text that infringes on copyrights. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight, real-time defense mechanism to prevent the generation of copyrighted text by evaluating methods and testing attack strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense significantly reduces the volume of copyrighted text generated by LLMs by effectively refusing malicious requests. |
SGM: Sequence Generation Model for Multi-label Classification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods ignore the correlations between labels and different parts of the text can contribute differently for predicting different labels. |
| Approach: | They propose to view the multi-label classification task as a sequence generation problem and apply a decoder-based sequence generation model to solve it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform previous work by a substantial margin. |
Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yiquan Wu, Siying Zhou, Yifei Liu, Weiming Lu, Xiaozhong Liu, Yating Zhang, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| 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. |
Autoregressive Pre-Training on Pixels and Texts (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | pixel-based language modeling integrates visual and textual data to improve performance of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates visual and textual data into an autoregressive framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of pixel-based language models by incorporating visual and textual data. |
Open Relation Extraction: Relational Knowledge Transfer from Supervised Data to Unsupervised Data (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relational facts from open domain corpora are time-consuming and human-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to learn similarity metrics of relations from labeled data . they propose to transfer relational knowledge to identify novel relations in unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two real-world datasets show that the proposed framework improves compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing video large language models (LMMs) employ an impedance of thousands of frames to understand long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module integrated with VideoLLMs to facilitate efficient lengthy video perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module boosts the performance of open-source VideoLLMs and proprietary assistants on long-form video benchmarks. |
OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu, Qiushi Sun, Zehao Li, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu, Fangzhi Xu, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Qingyun Li, Yu Qiao, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack visual-aware tutorial retrieval and historical visual context curation and pruning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an orchestrator and a Reflection-Memory Agent for robust automation. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across model scales. |
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)
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Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Zhe Zhao, Qi Ju, Xuefeng Yang, Rong Tian, Zhu Tao, Haoyan Liu, Han Guo, Xingyu Bai, Weiquan Mao, Yudong Li, Weigang Guo, Taiqiang Wu, Ningyuan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-linguistic similarity matching tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model using contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50% while the performance is only reduced by about 1%. |
The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmas (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs' moral reasoning capabilities rely on single-step evaluations, ignoring how models adapt to evolving ethical challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate evolving moral judgments of large language models (LLMs) using multi-step moral dilemma questionnaires. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables a fine-grained analysis of how LLMs adjust their moral reasoning across escalating dilemmas. |
Syntactic and Semantic-driven Learning for Open Information Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the supervised counterparts, and can even achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art (SoA) model. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactic and semantic-driven learning approach that can learn open IE models without human-labelled data by leveraging syntakic and semantic knowledge as noisier, higher-level supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms supervised counterparts and can achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art models. |
M3AV: A Multimodal, Multigenre, and Multipurpose Audio-Visual Academic Lecture Dataset (2024.acl-long)
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Zhe Chen, Heyang Liu, Wenyi Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Hongcheng Liu, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emerging approach to sharing knowledge online. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset with human annotations for multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. |
MoE Adapter for Large Audio Language Models: Sparsity, Disentanglement, and Gradient-Conflict-Free (2026.findings-acl)
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Yishu Lei, Shuwei He, Hu Jing, Dan Zhang, Xianlong Luo, Danxiang Zhu, Shikun Feng, Rui Liu, Jingzhou HE, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing research on Large Language Models (LLMs) limited to textual input modality . acoustic information is intrinsically heterogeneous, entangling attributes such as speech, music, and environmental context. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture to decouple acoustic information by routing audio tokens to specialized experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing models on audio semantic and paralinguistic tasks while retaining shared experts for global context. |
Unsupervised Distractor Generation via Large Language Model Distilling and Counterfactual Contrastive Decoding (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that large-scale models can generate unsupervised DG without expensive distractor annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual task training framework that integrates pseudo distractors from LLMs and answer information as the objective target with a two-stage training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses GPT-3.5-turbo zero-shot performance with 200 fewer model parameters. |
ImCoref-CeS: An Improved Lightweight Pipeline for Coreference Resolution with LLM-based Checker-Splitter Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Shuzheng Si, Cheng Gao, Zhitong Wang, Yingli Shen, Wenhao Li, Zhu Liu, Yufeng Han, Jiayi Wu, Cunliang Kong, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing supervised neural methods for coreference resolution are underexplored . current methods rely on small language models, but their potential is underexploited . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an enhanced supervised model with LLM-based reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in coreference resolution. |
From Scaffolding to Assimilation: Progressive Structural Internalization for Format-Constrained Creative Text Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms rely on unreliable prompting or rigid constrained decoding strategies to achieve aesthetic unity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to embed external constraints into the model’s intrinsic intuition and use it to generate open-ended creative texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines in both strict constraint adherence and literary aesthetics. |
Reflective RAG: Self-Evaluation Driven Strategy Optimization in Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent agentic RAG systems lack the capacity to evaluate the utility of retrieved information, leading to brittle reasoning and suboptimal decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates self-evaluation to dynamically optimize retrieval and generation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong agentic baselines on five knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks and improves training stability and generalization to multi-hop reasoning tasks. |
Act as you think: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Medical Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Songtao Jiang, Yuan Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Yan Zhang, Ruilin Luo, Bohan Lei, Yeying Jin, Sibo Song, ZhiBo Yang, Jimeng Sun, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances have improved the accuracy of medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) however, the high stakes nature of the medical domain has precipitated a shift towards interpretability and transparency of reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards framework that rewards internal consistency and logical coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework rewards internal consistency and logical coherence, and is highly versatile, the authors show. |
SAME: Safety-Aware Model Editing Guided by Safety Transformation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that update or insert new knowledge require sequential parameter updates while maintaining model capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model editing approach that estimates safety transforms and identifies corresponding safety direction in the neural activation space and aligns neural activations and network parameter updates under the safety constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces unsafe responses to malicious queries while preserving the effectiveness of model editing. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
TopoSHIELD: Reshaping the Flow of Malice via Spatio-Temporal Risk-Aware Topological Evolution in Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) inherit general task-solving and instruction-following capabilities, but their interconnectivity introduces significant security risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reshapes the flow of malice via risk-aware topological evolution. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, TopoSHIELD reduces toxicity by 58% on GPT-4o while preserving high utility (>90% success rate). |
Cost-Optimal Grouped-Query Attention for Long-Context Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Yutong Wu, Chenyang Song, Zhen Leng Thai, Xingyu Shen, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current GQA configurations overlook how context length influences inference cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a recipe for deriving cost-optimal GQA configurations that decouple the total head size from the hidden size and allow more flexible control over attention FLOPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed configurations reduce memory usage and FLOPs by more than 50% compared to Llama-3's GQA, with *no degradation in model capabilities*. |
Benchmarking Chinese Commonsense Reasoning of LLMs: From Chinese-Specifics to Reasoning-Memorization Correlations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, many benchmarks evaluate the commonsense reasoning of large language models (LLMs), but most are English-based, limiting non-English evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese commonsense reasoning to evaluate LLMs' commonsensing ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers both globally known and Chinese-specific commonsense reasoning abilities and can be used as a reference for future research. |
Efficient-FedRec: Efficient Federated Learning Framework for Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods rely on centralized storage of user click behavior data, which may lead to privacy concerns and hazards. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated learning framework for privacy-preserving news recommendation . they propose aggregation of news representations and user model by a client . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces computation and communication cost on clients while keeping promising model performance. |
Symbol-LLM: Towards Foundational Symbol-centric Interface For Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have limitations when it comes to comprehending and expressing world knowledge that extends beyond the boundaries of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates symbolic data into LLM training without loss of generality ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on symbol- and NL-centric tasks. |
Unified Dual-view Cognitive Model for Interpretable Claim Verification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies constructing direct interactions between the claim and each single user response to capture evidence have shown remarkable success in interpretable claim verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-view model based on the views of Collective and Individual Cognition (CICD) that captures word-level semantics based . on individual cognition, they adjust the proportion between them to generate global evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on the views of collective and individual cognition and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets. |
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
Question Condensing Networks for Answer Selection in Community Question Answering (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Community question answering (CQA) is a subtask of community question answering . previous researches ignored the difference between the two parts and concatenated them as the question representation . |
| Approach: | They propose a question condensing network that makes use of the subject-body relationship of community questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two CQA datasets. |
How do Language Models Generate Slang: A Systematic Comparison between Human and Machine-Generated Slang Usages (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Slang is a commonly used type of informal language that poses a daunting challenge to NLP systems. |
| Approach: | They compare human-attested slang and swiss-generated slurs with machine-generated ones . they find that LLMs have significant knowledge about the creative aspects of sling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model compares human and machine-generated slang usages to find biases in human perceptions of sling . the results suggest that human-attested slms have significant knowledge about the creative aspects of a language . |
TASO: Task-Aligned Sparse Optimization for Parameter-Efficient Model Adaptation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Daiye Miao, Yufang Liu, Jie Wang, Changzhi Sun, Yunke Zhang, Demei Yan, Shaokang Dong, Qi Zhang, Yuanbin Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LoRA introduces substantial parameter redundancy, which not only increases the number of trainable parameters but also hinders the effectiveness of fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages importance information from the pretrained model’s weights to mitigate LoRA redundancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters required for task adaptation while providing a task-aligned perspective for LoRA redundancy reduction. |
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. |
CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation is needed to address the problem of knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark for goal-oriented dialog evaluation that uses dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns to bridge the gap between academic benchmarks and spoken dialog scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark contains 96,763 dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns totally. |
MoNET: Tackle State Momentum via Noise-Enhanced Training for Dialogue State Tracking (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that MoNET outperforms previous DST methods in alleviating state momentum issues and improving the anti-noise ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to use previous state of each turn in training data as input to learn to predict current state. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on multiWOZ datasets and shows that it can update and correct slot values and improve anti-noise ability. |
MultiCapCLIP: Auto-Encoding Prompts for Zero-Shot Multilingual Visual Captioning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised visual captioning require large scale of images or videos paired with descriptions in a specific language. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach that generates captions for different scenarios without labeling . they use concept prompts to retrieve concepts and auto-encode them to learn writing styles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates captions for different scenarios and languages without labeled vision-caption pairs. |
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
Investigating and Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Pretrained Vision-Language (CLIP) Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have revealed that Large Vision-Language Models suffer from hallucinations in practice, including object hallucines, spatial hallucinos, attribute hallucinications, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose to use CLIP model to mitigate object hallucinations by using a data augmentation method to create negative samples with a variety of hallucinian issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates object hallucinations and can be used as a visual encoder, effectively alleviating the object halluination issue in LVLMs. |
HFT: Half Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) with one or more fine-tuning phases can unlock various capabilities, but can be catastrophic forgetting during sequential training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to regularly reset partial parameters to mitigate forgetting issues by using half fine-tuning instead of full fine-uning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the risk of catastrophic forgetting during training and the parametric knowledge lost during training may be overwhelmed by incoming training data. |
AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Sheng Yang, Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Zineng Zhou, Bin Zhu, Xiaodi Sun, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Anbang Hu, Yuan Fang, Yunsong Li, Junyan Chen, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing prompt engineering techniques are limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that iteratively develops a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best results across five tasks and demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to adoption of a minimal search strategy. |
KMatrix-2: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Knowledge Collaborative Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Shun Wu, Di Wu, Wangtao Sun, Ziyang Huang, Xiaowei Yuan, Kun Luo, XueYou Zhang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on K-LLMs systems focus on declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (rules) . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a toolkit that supports comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit provides unified knowledge integration and joint knowledge retrieval methods to achieve more comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement. |
SPO: Self Preference Optimization with Self Regularization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-free preference optimization methods exhibit higher training efficiency but are prone to overoptimization, leading to performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-free preference optimization method that replaces the logsigmoid loss function with a SiLU function to improve the model's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 7% improvement over SimPO on AlpacaEval 2 and MT-Bench. |
Comet: Dialog Context Fusion Mechanism for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog with Multi-task Learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems often encounter challenges arising from implicit information, coreference, and the presence of noisy and irrelevant data within the dialog context. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialog context fusion mechanism for end-to-end task-oriented dialog augmented with three additional tasks: dialog summarization, domain prediction, and slot detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the MultiWOZ and CrossWOZ datasets. |
ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Information (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ChineseBERT model incorporates glyph and pinyin information of Chinese characters into pretraining . proposed model achieves new performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a ChineseBERT model that incorporates glyph and pinyin information into pretraining . the glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a character, and the pinyink embeddment characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new performance boosts over baseline models with fewer training steps. |
On Training Data Influence of GPT Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | generative language models have redefined performance standards across tasks . current research on the influence of training data on autoregressivity remains underexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose a parameterized simulation to assess the impact of training examples on the training dynamics of GPT models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach compares existing methods with existing methods across training scenarios in generative language models, spanning tasks across 14 million to 2.8 billion parameters. |
Probabilistic Graph Reasoning for Natural Proof Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reasoning over formal representations do not explicitly consider inter-dependency between answers and proofs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for joint answer prediction and proof generation using an induced graphical model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 10%-30% improvement on QA accuracy in evaluations under diverse conditions. |
Benchmarking Hallucination in Large Language Models Based on Unanswerable Math Word Problem (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are highly effective in various natural language processing tasks, but can produce unreliable conjectures in ambiguous contexts, which is known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate LLM hallucination in Question Answering based on the unanswerable math word problem (UMWP) . they combine text similarity and mathematical expression detection to determine whether LLM considers the question unanswered. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines text similarity and mathematical expression detection to determine whether the LLM considers the question unanswerable. |
Interactive Evolution: A Neural-Symbolic Self-Training Framework For Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune Large Language Models without human annotations are lacking in the field of natural language training. |
| Approach: | They propose an environment-guided neural-symbolic self-training framework to overcome two main challenges: the scarcity of symbolic data and the limited proficiency of LLMs in processing symbolic language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes two main challenges: the scarcity of symbolic data, and the limited proficiency of LLMs in processing symbolic language. |
Benchmarking Contextual and Paralinguistic Reasoning in Speech-LLMs: A Case Study with In-the-Wild Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Qiongqiong Wang, Hardik Bhupendra Sailor, Tianchi Liu, Wenyu Zhang, Muhammad Huzaifah, Nattadaporn Lertcheva, Shuo Sun, Nancy F. Chen, Jinyang Wu, AiTi Aw
| Challenge: | Recent speech-LLMs have shown impressive performance in tasks like transcription and translation, yet they remain limited in understanding the paralinguistic aspects of speech crucial for social and emotional intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating speech-LLMs on contextual paralinguistic reasoning . the benchmark includes curated question answering datasets requiring both linguistic and empathetic understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals a key gap in existing evaluations and offers insights into building more context-aware and emotionally intelligent LLMs. |
Correcting Chinese Spelling Errors with Phonetic Pre-training (2021.findings-acl)
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Ruiqing Zhang, Chao Pang, Chuanqiang Zhang, Shuohuan Wang, Zhongjun He, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Chinese spelling correction only use pre-trained language model or incorporate phonological information as external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a phonetic Chinese spelling correction model that integrates phonetic features into language model by leveraging pre-training and fine-tuning methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on SIGHAN datasets and improves on other datasets. |
UltraEval: A Lightweight Platform for Flexible and Comprehensive Evaluation for LLMs (2024.acl-demos)
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Chaoqun He, Renjie Luo, Shengding Hu, Ranchi Zhao, Jie Zhou, Hanghao Wu, Jiajie Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation platforms are complex and poorly modularized, hindering seamless incorporation into researcher’s workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight evaluation framework characterized by lightweight, comprehensiveness, modularity, and efficiency that integrates models, data, and metrics into a unified evaluation workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is lightweight, comprehensive, modular, and efficient. |
Paraphrase Generation as Unsupervised Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for paraphrase generation rely on labeled datasets or are limited in narrow domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for paraphrase generation by treating the task as unsupervised machine translation based on pairs of unlabeled monolingual sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm can generate paraphrases on a large unlabeled monolingual corpus without relying on bilingual sentence pairs. |
GASim: A Graph-Accelerated Hybrid Framework for Social Simulation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale social simulators require high latency due to expensive memory retrieval and sequential ABM execution. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-accelerated hybrid multi-agent framework for large-scale social simulations that uses large language models and numerical agent-based models to scale up simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers 9.94 speedup over the traditional framework and consumes less than 20% of tokens. |
BertGCN: Transductive Text Classification by Combining GNN and BERT (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text classification is a core task in natural language processing (NLP) Graph neural networks (GNNs) serve as an effective approach for transductive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that combines large scale pretraining and transductive learning for text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance on a wide range of datasets. |
OS-Sentinel: Towards Safety-Enhanced Mobile GUI Agents via Hybrid Validation in Realistic Workflows (2026.acl-long)
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Qiushi Sun, Mukai Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Zhihui Xie, Fangzhi Xu, Zhangyue Yin, Kanzhi Cheng, Zehao Li, Zichen Ding, Qi Liu, Zhiyong Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ben Kao, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting unsafe mobile GUI agents are underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile agent safety detection framework that integrates a formal verifier and a VLM-based contextual judge to detect system-level violations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. |
Automated Molecular Concept Generation and Labeling with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Concept-based models lack explainability and need predefined concepts and manual labeling in molecular science. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to generate and label predictive molecular concepts without human input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on several benchmarks while maintaining explainability and allowing easy intervention. |
DRIFT: Transferring Reasoning Priors for Efficient MLLM Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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Chao Huang, Zeliang Zhang, Jiang Liu, Ximeng Sun, Jialian Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Ze Wang, Chenliang Xu, Emad Barsoum, Zicheng Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in perception and alignment, but their reasoning ability often lags behind strong text-only LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transfers reasoning knowledge in the gradient space while preserving multimodal alignment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that DRIFT outperforms naive merging and standard SFT. |
ProFit: Leveraging High-Value Signals in SFT via Probability-Guided Token Selection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional fine-tuning ignores one-to-many nature of language, leading to overfitting . authors propose a method to fine- tune LLMs by leveraging tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune Large Language Models by leveraging tokens to mask low-probability tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on general reasoning and mathematical benchmarks. |
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo
| Challenge: | Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. |
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoyun Du, LujieZheng LujieZheng, Renjun Hu, Yuyang Xu, Xiawei Li, Ying Sun, Wei Chen, Jian Wu, Haolei Cai, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
Learning to Generate Structured Output with Schema Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yaxi Lu, Haolun Li, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Fangming Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have facilitated the development of intelligent applications like automatic web search (Qin et al., 2023) Several methods exist for generating JSON strings from LLMs, including Prompting but often miss certain schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 40K different JSON schemas to assess models' ability to generate valid JSON outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves both in generating JSON outputs and downstream tasks. |
EasyQuant: An Efficient Data-free Quantization Algorithm for LLMs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that large language models are superior to conventional methods in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-independent quantization algorithm that leaves outliers in the weight and quantization ranges . they find the algorithm runs over 10 times faster than the data-dependent methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method runs over 10 times faster than the data-dependent methods. |
Large Language Models Badly Generalize across Option Length, Problem Types, and Irrelevant Noun Replacements (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks have exposed patterns and may not truly assess generalization ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a “Generalization Stress Test” to assess Large Language Models’ generalization ability under slight and controlled perturbations, including option length, problem types, and irrelevant noun replacements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test shows that LLMs exhibit severe accuracy drops and unexpected biases when faced with minor but content-preserving modifications. |
Why Are We Moral? An LLM-based Agent Simulation Approach to the Study of Moral Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Zhou Ziheng, Huacong Tang, Mingjie Bi, Wanying He, Fang Sun, Yizhou Sun, Ying Nian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Yipeng Kang, Fangwei Zhong
| Challenge: | Existing models of moral evolution must abstract away cognitive processes . et al. (2017): evolution of morality presents a puzzle: natural selection favors selfish . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent simulation framework that manipulates cognitive factors to understand moral evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exploits cognitive realism to explore moral evolution in a hunter-gatherer society. |
CERD: A Comprehensive Chinese Rhetoric Dataset for Rhetorical Understanding and Generation in Essays (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Nuowei Liu, Xinhao Chen, Hongyi Wu, Changzhi Sun, Man Lan, Yuanbin Wu, Xiaopeng Bai, Shaoguang Mao, Yan Xia
| Challenge: | Existing rhetorical understanding and generation datasets focus on single coarse-grained categories or fine-grain categories, neglecting the intrinsic connections between different rhetorical devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Essay Rhetoric Dataset with four coarse-grained categories . they propose to treat these categories as separate sub-tasks, thereby improving writing skills . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset improves the author's writing proficiency and language usage skills by recognizing and generating rhetorical sentences under given conditions. |
Joint Type Inference on Entities and Relations via Graph Convolutional Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel graph convolutional network (GCN) is proposed for the task of joint entity relation extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph convolutional network running on an entity-relation bipartite graph . they propose combining two different methods to perform joint entity relation extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing joint models in entity performance and is competitive with the state-of-the-art in relation performance. |
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. |
Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation via Adaptive Prefix Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, especially in solving complex mathematical problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits teacher CoTs for distillation through adaptive prefix alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks by over 3%. |
PSST: A Benchmark for Evaluation-driven Text Public-Speaking Style Transfer (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to transfer text style focus on sentence-level data, limiting performance . current LLMs struggle to generate public speaking texts that align with human preferences . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to transform official texts into public-speaking styles by analyzing real-world data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to transform public speaking texts into public-speaking styles . the proposed framework analyzes characteristics and identifies problems of stylized texts . |
Few Clean Instances Help Denoising Distant Supervision (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing distantly supervised entity relation extractors rely on noisy data for training and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a criterion for clean instance selection based on influence functions to collect sample-level evidence for recognizing good instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows strong performance on real and synthetic noisy datasets. |
Logic-Regularized Verifier Elicits Reasoning from LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Typical verifiers require resource-intensive supervised dataset construction, which is costly and faces limitations in data diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised verifier regularized by logical rules that uses internal activations and logical constraints on multiple reasoning paths. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 10 datasets show that the proposed verifier outperforms baselines and is comparable to the supervised verifier. |
OPERA: Operation-Pivoted Discrete Reasoning over Text (2022.naacl-main)
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Yongwei Zhou, Junwei Bao, Chaoqun Duan, Haipeng Sun, Jiahui Liang, Yifan Wang, Jing Zhao, Youzheng Wu, Xiaodong He, Tiejun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict logical forms ignore the utilization of symbolic operations and lack reasoning ability and interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an operation-pivoted discrete reasoning framework that uses symbolic operations as neural modules to facilitate reasoning ability and interpretability. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on DROP and RACENum datasets show the reasoning ability of OPERA. |
Beyond Length Scaling: Synergizing Breadth and Depth for Generative Reward Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Generative Reward Models have demonstrated that scaling the length of Chain-of-Thought reasoning enhances reliability of evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconfigures raw rationales into structured Breadth-CoT and Depth-Co T through a modular synthesis pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses open-source RMs by an average of 8.2%. |
CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a communication inference attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents’ reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC up to 0.99, revealing the privacy risk in MAS. |
Structure-aware Fine-tuning for Code Pre-trained Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing CodePTMs are mainly structure-free and structurebased, but how to fine-tune them remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play fine-tuning method that incorporates structural knowledge into pre-trained code models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can benefit CodePTMs more with limited training data. |
GPT-NER: Named Entity Recognition via Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Shuhe Wang, Xiaofei Sun, Xiaoya Li, Rongbin Ouyang, Fei Wu, Tianwei Zhang, Jiwei Li, Guoyin Wang, Chen Guo
| Challenge: | Large-scale language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for in-context learning with limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel sequence labeling task that transforms a sequence labeled as a text-generation task into a self-verification task that LLMs can adapt to. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on NER than supervised models on a variety of tasks . the proposed model can be easily adapted by LLMs to generate a text sequence . |
Fine-grained Entity Typing via Label Reasoning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to fine-grained entity typing are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-granular entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a label reasoning network that exploits label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network can model, learn and reason complex labels in a sequence-to-set, end-to end manner. |
Legal Judgment Prediction based on Knowledge-enhanced Multi-Task and Multi-Label Text Classification (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is an essential task for legal AI, aiming at predicting judgments based on the facts of a case. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced approach that incorporates 'label-level knowledge' to enhance the representation of case facts for each task and 'task-level' knowledge to improve synergy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. |
DuSQL: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Text-to-SQL Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsing methods mainly focus on English, but there is no labeled data available for the language . a larges-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset is used for cross-domain text- to-Sql task . |
| Approach: | They propose a larges-scale Chinese dataset for a cross-domain text-to-SQL task . they analyze questions from several representative applications and use an effective data construction framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 200 databases, 813 tables, and 23,797 question/SQL pairs. |
DebugBench: Evaluating Debugging Capability of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Runchu Tian, Yining Ye, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Yankai Lin, Yinxu Pan, Yesai Wu, Hui Haotian, Liu Weichuan, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional coding capabilities, but their debugging capabilities remain relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a debugging benchmark consisting of 4,253 LLMs with four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. |
Tracking Satisfaction States for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for customer satisfaction prediction (CSP) focus on analyzing subjective customer satisfaction in conversational service, but they are hard to represent the important dynamic satisfaction states throughout the customer journey. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to track customer satisfaction in chatbots using a dialogue-level classification module to represent the dynamic satisfaction states at each turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and shows that it significantly outperformed multiple baselines. |
A Survey on Multi-modal Intent Recognition: Recent Advances and New Frontiers (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal intent recognition (MIR) requires integrating non-verbal cues from real-world contexts to enhance human intention understanding. |
| Approach: | They present a comprehensive review of multi-modal intent recognition . they provide a survey of the field covering textual, visual, and acoustic signals . |
| Outcome: | The present survey summarises the current state of multi-modal intent recognition . it includes a comprehensive taxonomy and advanced methods . |
SafeLawBench: Towards Safe Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Chuxue Cao, Han Zhu, Jiaming Ji, Qichao Sun, Zhenghao Zhu, Wu Yinyu, Josef Dai, Yaodong Yang, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Recent studies indicate that large language models (LLMs) may exhibit risks, including threats to the protection of private data and the generation of hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs from a legal perspective using the SafeLawBench benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework categorizes safety risks into three levels based on legal standards and includes 24,860 multi-choice questions and 1,106 open-domain question-answering tasks. |
Layer-wise Model Pruning based on Mutual Information (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In spite of impressive results of neural networks, the huge model size has hindered their applications in cases where computation and memory resources are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for layer-wise pruning using mutual information based feature selection in SVMs and logistic regression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning strategy offers greater speedup and higher performance than weight-based pruning methods. |
QuantumQA: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Physics-Consistent Dataset and Verification-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Songxin Qu, Tai-Ping Sun, Yun-Jie Wang, Huan-Yu Liu, Cheng Xue, Xiao-Fan Xu, Han Fang, Yang Yang, Yu-Chun Wu, Guo-Ping Guo, Zhao-Yun Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models lack reliability in scientific domains that require strict adherence to physical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models and is competitive with proprietary models. |
ERNIE-Code: Beyond English-Centric Cross-lingual Pretraining for Programming Languages (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | ERNIE-Code is a unified pre-trained language model for 116 NLs and 6 PLs. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified pre-trained language model for 116 NLs and 6 PLs . they employ span-corruption language modeling that learns patterns from monolingual NL or PL . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous multilingual models for NL or NL across end tasks. |
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. |
Context-Value-Action Architecture for Value-Driven Large Language Model Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs exhibit behavioral rigidity, a flaw often masked by the self-referential bias of current "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Context-Value-Action architecture that decouples action generation from cognitive reasoning via a Value Verifier trained on authentic human data to explicitly model dynamic value activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture significantly outperforms baseline models on 1.1 million real-world interaction traces on CVABench. |
Sparse Growing Transformer: Training-Time Sparse Depth Allocation via Progressive Attention Looping (2026.findings-acl)
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Yao Chen, Yilong Chen, Yinqi Yang, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Zefeng Zhang, Shuaiyi Nie, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to increasing effective depth of LLMs rely on parameter reuse, extending computation through recursive execution. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time sparse depth allocation framework that progressively increases depth for a small subset of parameters as training evolves. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing approaches to increasing the effective depth of language models while reducing training FLOPs overhead from approximately 16–20% to only 1–3% relative to a standard Transformer backbone. |
Sentence Similarity Based on Contexts (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure sentence similarity face limited dataset size and training-test gap . existing methods lack large-scale labeled datasets with labeles that are labor-intensive and expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures sentence similarity by comparing probabilities of generating two sentences given the same context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance boosts over baselines under supervised and unsupervised settings. |
Is “hot pizza” Positive or Negative? Mining Target-aware Sentiment Lexicons (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing sentiment lexicons assume words’ sentiments are invariant within a domain, but this assumption is weak for fine-granularity analyses of text sentiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a "perturb-and-see" method to extract commonsense sentiments from large-scale datasets by binding a word's sentiment to its collocation words instead of domain labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to achieve highly competitive performances on the unsupervised opinion relation extraction task. |
AgentStore: Scalable Integration of Heterogeneous Agents As Specialized Generalist Computer Assistant (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing agents lack generalization and specialization capabilities for open-ended tasks . specialized generalists are often underdeveloped in real-world environments . |
| Approach: | They propose a platform to dynamically integrate heterogeneous agents for automating computer tasks . they propose specialized generalist agent MetaAgent with the AgentToken strategy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform expands capabilities of existing agents in generalization and specialization . it can be used to automate open-ended tasks in real-world environments . |
Preference Heads in Large Language Models: A Mechanistic Framework for Interpretable Personalization (2026.acl-long)
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Weixu Zhang, Ye Yuan, Changjiang Han, Yuxing Tian, Zipeng Sun, Linfeng Du, Jikun Kang, Hong Kang, Xue Liu, Haolun Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong implicit personalization ability, but most approaches treat this behavior as a black box. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanistic interpretation perspective and propose 'sparse' set of Preference Heads . they compute a Preference Contribution Score for each attention head and compare their predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework computes a Preference Contribution Score (PCS) for each attention head and measures its causal impact on user aligned outputs. |
O2NA: An Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive Approach for Controllable Video Captioning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video captioning consider a sequence of frames and biases towards focused objects. |
| Approach: | They propose an Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive approach to video captioning . it performs three steps: 1) identify the focused objects and predict their locations . 2) generate related attribute words and relation words of these focused objects to form a draft caption . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art methods but with higher diversity and faster inference speed. |
Text Classification via Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale Language Models (LLMs) have shown the ability for in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive reasoning strategy tailored to addressing complex linguistic phenomena such as intensification, contrast, irony and limited number of tokens allowed in in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on 4 out of 5 widely-used text-classification benchmarks, while demonstrating comparable performance to SOTA on MR. |
Large Language Models Might Not Care What You Are Saying: Prompt Format Beats Descriptions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning has improved performance of large language models, but descriptive instructions are still under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose an ensemble prompt framework to describe selection criteria of multiple in-context examples. preliminary experiments on machine translation confirm that this framework boosts ICL performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on commonsense, math, logical reasoning and hallucination tasks with three LLMs. |
BeamLoRA: Beam-Constraint Low-Rank Adaptation (2025.acl-long)
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Naibin Gu, Zhenyu Zhang, Xiyu Liu, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Weiping Wang, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most efficient parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. |
| Approach: | They propose to conceptualize each LoRA module as a beam where each rank corresponds to a potential sub-solution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on three base models and 12 datasets. |
Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced NLP Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using dice loss, we find that data imbalance is a common issue in many NLP tasks . data imbalance affects the performance of many tasks, such as tagging and machine reading comprehension . |
| Approach: | They propose to use dice loss to replace the standard cross-entropy objective for data-imbalanced NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training objective achieves significant performance boost on a wide range of data imbalanced tasks. |
Equal Truth: Rumor Detection with Invariant Group Fairness (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection methods rarely consider fairness issues inherent in the model . this can lead to biased predictions across stakeholder groups, undermining their detection effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to address fairness issues inherent in rumor detection models . they perform unsupervised partitioning to dynamically identify potential unfair data patterns . then, they apply invariant learning to these partitions to extract fair and informative feature representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines regarding detection and fairness performance . it also shows robust performance on out-of-distribution samples . |
ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model coarse-grained linguistic information do not integrate coarse-gram information into pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance integration of coarse-grained linguistic information into pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tunes on 19 downstream tasks. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Keyu Li, Junhao Shi, Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Yunze Wu, Dayuan Fu, Shijie Xia, Xiaojie Cai, Tianze Xu, Weiye Si, Wenjie Li, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates 6 agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that closed-source models outperform open-source model (48.4% vs 32.1%) integrating models with advanced scaffolds to form autonomous agents is a paradigm shift. |
An Error-Guided Correction Model for Chinese Spelling Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural network approaches have achieved great progress on Chinese spelling correction, but there is still room for improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose an error-guided correction model that uses pre-trained BERT models to detect errors and integrate the error confusion set into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on widely used benchmarks and achieves superior performance on both quality and computation speed. |
Curiosity-Driven Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, but often at the cost of reduced output diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates intrinsic rewards for novel states alongside traditional sparse extrinsic rewards to optimize both output diversity and alignment quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant gains in diversity on multiple diversity-oriented metrics while maintaining alignment with human preferences comparable to standard RLHF. |
Divide-Then-Align: Honest Alignment based on the Knowledge Boundary of RAG (2025.acl-long)
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Xin Sun, Jianan Xie, Zhongqi Chen, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Yuehe Chen, Bowen Song, Zilei Wang, Weiqiang Wang, Liang Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval systems have significantly advanced natural language processing tasks by integrating external knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that conditions large language models to generate answers even in the absence of reliable knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach balances accuracy with appropriate abstention, enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of retrieval-augmented systems. |
AdaCQR: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search via Sparse and Dense Retrieval Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to address conversational search challenges are limited by one specific retrieval system. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance generalizability of information-seeking queries by aligning reformulation models with term-based and semantic retrieval systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in a more efficient framework. |
Fusion or Defusion? Flexible Vision-and-Language Pre-Training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to vision-and-language pretraining (VLP) lack effectiveness and efficiency in downstream multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible vision-and-language pre-training model by incorporating cross-modal fusions into a dual-encoder architecture and a cross-module knowledge transfer strategy to guide the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is well-equipped with effectiveness and efficiency compared with other strong VLP models. |
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs. |
Upcycling Instruction Tuning from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts via Parameter Merging (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for tuning large language models from dense to MoE face significant data requirements and require large-scale post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose an upcycling instruction tuning approach for tuning a dense pre-trained model into a MoE instruction model using genetic algorithm and parameter merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large language models with a small amount of seed data and improves their scaling. |
ERNIE-Layout: Layout Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Qiming Peng, Yinxu Pan, Wenjin Wang, Bin Luo, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhengjie Huang, Yuhui Cao, Weichong Yin, Yongfeng Chen, Yin Zhang, Shikun Feng, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visually rich document understanding lack layout-centered knowledge . experimental results show that ERNIE-Layout improves layout awareness . |
| Approach: | They propose a document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on key downstream tasks. |
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision. |
MVP: Enhancing Video Large Language Models via Self-supervised Masked Video Prediction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has attempted to transfer reinforcement learning paradigms to Video Large Language Models (MLLMs) but these methods lack explicit supervision for intrinsic temporal coherence and inter-frame correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel post-training objective: Masked Video Prediction (MVP) that requires the model to reconstruct a masked continuous segment from a set of challenging distractors and employs Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a fine-grained reward function to enhance the model's understanding of video context and temporal properties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves video reasoning capabilities by reinforcing temporal reasoning and causal understanding. |
Noise-Robust Semi-Supervised Learning for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) methods are not capable of extracting relation labels for individual sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised learning relation extraction framework for sentence-level DSRE . they discard only the labels of the noisy samples and utilize them as unlabeled samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance enhancements on two real-world datasets. |
Extracting Entities and Relations with Joint Minimum Risk Training (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting entities and relations are limited by the complexity of the joint learning paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning paradigm based on minimum risk training . they implement a strong and simple neural network to execute the MRT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to achieve state-of-the-art in the extraction task on ACE05 and NYT datasets. |
Generation with Dynamic Vocabulary (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using static vocabulary, vocabulary is ignored in advanced generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic vocabulary that can involve arbitrary text spans during generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed vocabulary can be deployed in a plug-and-play way, thus is attractive for various downstream applications. |
MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
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Weiwei Sun, Zhengliang Shi, Wu Long, Lingyong Yan, Xinyu Ma, Yiding Liu, Min Cao, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Existing IR benchmarks focus on a limited scope of tasks, making them insufficient for evaluating the latest IR models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task instruction-tuned IR benchmark that includes 126 distinct IR tasks across 6 domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on instruction-tuned models than non-instruction-tunned models on MAIR. |
CodeIE: Large Code Generation Models are Better Few-Shot Information Extractors (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models pre-trained on massive corpora have shown impressive few-shot learning ability on many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to recast structured output in the form of code instead of natural language and use generative LLMs of code to perform IE tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fine-tuning moderate-size pre-trained models and prompting NL-LLMs under few-shot settings. |
Different Absorption from the Same Sharing: Sifted Multi-task Learning for Fake News Detection (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting fake news use shared features as complementarity features without selection. |
| Approach: | They propose a sifted multi-task learning method with a selected sharing layer for fake news detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the F1-score by more than 0.87%, 1.31% on two public and widely used competition datasets. |
Chain-of-Thought Matters: Improving Long-Context Language Models with Reasoning Path Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Zhu, Xiyu Wei, Guangxiang Zhao, Wenhao Wu, Haosheng Zou, Junfeng Ran, null XWang, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought framework that teaches models to generate high-quality reasoning paths for enhanced long-context performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes across most long-context scenarios and amplifys with increasing context length. |
ENPAR:Enhancing Entity and Entity Pair Representations for Joint Entity Relation Extraction (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for joint entity relation extraction use multitask learning frameworks, but annotations for additional tasks are hard to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training method to improve the joint extraction performance with just extra entity annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on ACE05, SciERC, and NYT and outperformed BERT on other tasks. |
Few-shot Joint Multimodal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis Based on Generative Multimodal Prompt (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies require massive labeled data to train models for multimodal data analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multimodal prompt model that captures specific aspect terms in a few-shot scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on two MABSA-related tasks on a few-shot dataset. |
CuBridge: An LLM-Based Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing High-Performance Attention Kernels (2026.acl-long)
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Xing Ma, Yangjie Zhou, Wu Sun, Zihan Liu, Jingwen Leng, Yun Lin, Shixuan Sun, Minyi Guo, Jin Song Dong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to support diverse attention variants trade performance for flexibility . expert-written kernels achieve high efficiency but are difficult to adapt . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adapts expert-written attention kernels to GPUs . they use a structured lift–transfer–lower workflow to make execution explicit . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and compilers on diverse variants and GPU platforms. |
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. |