Papers by Xi Zhang
UniCodec: Unified Audio Codec with Single Domain-Adaptive Codebook (2025.acl-long)
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Yidi Jiang, Qian Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Yu Xi, Wen Wang, Chong Zhang, Xianghu Yue, ShiLiang Zhang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing neural audio codecs are not capable of handling multi-domain audio data . et al., 2023) integrate speech modality with text-based large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified audio codec with a single codebook to support multi-domain audio data . they propose combining a mix-of-experts strategy and a partitioned domain-adaptive codebook method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms existing codecs on acoustic and semantic representation capabilities. |
To Forget or Not? Towards Practical Knowledge Unlearning for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Bozhong Tian, Xiaozhuan Liang, Siyuan Cheng, Qingbin Liu, Mengru Wang, Dianbo Sui, Xi Chen, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing unlearning paradigms are mired in vague forgetting boundaries, erasing knowledge indiscriminately. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate if unlearning erases essential knowledge . they propose 'knowUnDo' which uses copyrighted content and privacy domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both precise knowledge unlearning and general knowledge retaining of LLMs. |
MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haowei Liu, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Yaya Shi, Chaoya Jiang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC. |
Improving In-Context Learning with Prediction Feedback for Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising results in sentiment analysis through the in-context learning paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates prior predictions and feedback to improve sentiment understanding by incorporating prior feedback and leveraging a feedback-driven prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on nine sentiment analysis datasets with an average improvement of 5.95% over conventional methods. |
Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxiang Chen, Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Boyang Hong, Jiazheng Zhang, Nijun Li, Tao Gui, Yun Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing processes that reward for each step are one-directional and lack a mechanism to model the distance to the final target. |
| Approach: | They propose a process supervision model that evaluates the correctness of previous steps and the probability of future success. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing supervision models like ORM and PRM on reasoning tasks and improves solution re-design. |
RadEval: A framework for radiology text evaluation (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Justin Xu, Xi Zhang, Javid Abderezaei, Julie Bauml, Roger Boodoo, Fatemeh Haghighi, Ali Ganjizadeh, Eric Brattain, Dave Van Veen, Zaiqiao Meng, David W Eyre, Jean-Benoit Delbrouck
| Challenge: | Evaluating automated radiology report generation systems remains a fundamental challenge in the development of safe, accurate, and clinically useful medical AI. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified, open-source framework for evaluating radiology texts that consolidates a diverse range of metrics from classic ngram overlap (BLEU) and contextual measures (BERTScore) to clinical concept-based scores (GREEN). |
| Outcome: | The framework consolidates a diverse range of metrics from ngram overlap (BLEU) and contextual measures (BERTScore) to clinical concept-based scores (F1CheXbert, F1RadGraph, RaTEScore, SRR-BERT, TemporalEntityF1) and advanced LLMbased evaluators (GREEN). |
A Survey on Asking Clarification Questions Datasets in Conversational Systems (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Asking Clarification Questions (ACQs) are incomparable due to inconsistent data, experimental setups and evaluation strategies. |
| Approach: | They analyse the current research status on Asking Clarification Questions (ACQs) and propose a set of evaluation metrics and benchmarks for multiple ACQs-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques are compared with the available datasets and evaluated against benchmarks. |
Capturing Event Argument Interaction via A Bi-Directional Entity-Level Recurrent Decoder (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to capture event argument interactions are limited by the argument role type information of contextual entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture event argument interactions as a Seq2Seq-like learning problem where a sentence with a specific event trigger is mapped to a sequence of event argument roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed neural architecture generates argument roles by incorporating contextual entities’ argument role predictions, like a word-by-word text generation process, thereby distinguishing implicit argument distribution patterns within an event more accurately. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
DSG-MCTS: A Dynamic Strategy-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search for Diversified Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in complex reasoning tasks, but their performance often degrades, resulting in hallucinations, errors, and logical inconsistencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multiple reasoning strategies to expand the reasoning space and a dynamic strategy selection mechanism that adapts to the task context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on a set of reasoning benchmarks. |
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Dingwen Yang, Jiaqi Liu, Jixuan Huang, Honglin Guo, Baodai Huang, Tinggang Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhonghang Lu, Chenyu Liu, Jiajun Sun, Jiazheng Zhang, Dingwei Zhu, Xin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Zhihao Zhang, Yuming Yang, Junjie Ye, Minghe Gao, Dongrui Liu, Jiaming Ji, Guohao Li, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 . |
Chain-of-Scrutiny: Detecting Backdoor Attacks for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various domains, but are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-scrutiny approach which leverages LLMs’ unique reasoning abilities to mitigate backdoor attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is well-suited for the popular API-only LLM deployments, enabling detection at minimal cost and with little data. |
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Yan Liu, Songyang Gao, Wei Shen, Limao Xiong, Yuhao Zhou, Xiao Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Shiliang Pu, Jiang Zhu, Rui Zheng, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting. |
Probing Simile Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
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Weijie Chen, Yongzhu Chang, Rongsheng Zhang, Jiashu Pu, Guandan Chen, Le Zhang, Yadong Xi, Yijiang Chen, Chang Su
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn generic knowledge from a large corpus are time-consuming and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to probe simile knowledge from pre-trained language models to solve SI and SG tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework solves the SI and SG tasks in a simile triple completion task. |
MADial-Bench: Towards Real-world Evaluation of Memory-Augmented Dialogue Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for memory-augmented dialogue systems lack practical value . current evaluation methods only consider passive memory retrieval while ignoring diverse memory recall with rich triggering factors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use long-term memory to create human-like dialogues using chatbots. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers memory retrieval and memory recognition tasks with both passive and proactive memory recall data. |
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
CCD: Mitigating Hallucinations in Radiology MLLMs via Clinical Contrastive Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models generate medical hallucinations due to over-sensitivity to clinical sections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates structured clinical signals from task-specific radiology expert models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves overall performance on radiology report generation (RRG) on the MIMIC-CXR dataset, it yields up to 17% improvement in RadGraph-F1. |
Youling: an AI-assisted Lyrics Creation System (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Rongsheng Zhang, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li, Lin Jiang, Lin Chen, Zhiwei Hu, Yadong Xi, Changjie Fan, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on a single pass of lyrics generation with little human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-assisted lyrics creation system that supports one pass full-text generation and interactive generation modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports full-text generation and interactive generation modes . it also provides a revision module which enables users to revise undesired lyrics repeatedly. |
C-World: A Computer Use Agent Environment Creator (2026.acl-long)
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Ziqiao Xi, Shuang Liang, Qi Liu, Jiaqing Zhang, Letian Peng, Fang Nan, Meshal Nayim, Tianhui Zhang, Rishika Mundada, Lianhui Qin, Biwei Huang, Kun Zhou
| Challenge: | C-World enables users to build agent environments on demand. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that enables users to build agent environments on demand. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines on 119k samples and achieves Spearman = 0.883 ranking correlation with real execution. |
Conditioned Masked Language and Image Modeling for Image-Text Dense Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale two-stream pre-trained models like CLIP have achieved tremendous success in image-text retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal framework for image-text retrieval using two-stream pre-trained models . they embed images and texts into instance representations with two separate encoders . experimental results on MSCOCO and Flickr30k reveal the effectiveness of their framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves image-text retrieval performance on two popular cross-modal retrieval benchmarks. |
Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Binghai Wang, Senjie Jin, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Zhihao Zhang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current methods rely on ranking losses to teach reward model to assess preferences, but they are susceptible to noise and ambiguous data, often failing to deeply understand human intentions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates contrastive learning into the reward modeling process to enhance generalization and stabilize the reinforcement learning training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances generalization of the reward model, stabilizes the reinforcement learning training process, and improves the final alignment with human preferences. |
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Hengyuan Zhang, Zhihao Zhang, Ercong Nie, Mingyang Wang, Zunhai Su, Yiwei Wang, Qianli Wang, Shuzhou Yuan, Xufeng Duan, Qibo Xue, Zeping Yu, Chenming Shang, Xiao Liang, Jing Xiong, Hui Shen, Chaofan Tao, Zhengwu Liu, Senjie Jin, Zhiheng Xi, Dongdong Zhang, Sophia Ananiadou, Tao Gui, Ruobing Xie, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Hinrich Schuetze, Xuanjing Huang, Qi Zhang, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency. |
GFT: From Imitation to Reward Fine-Tuning with Unbiased Group Advantages and Dynamic Coefficient Rectification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning are effective in integrating knowledge injection with robust generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-training framework that addresses intrinsic limitations of supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses SFT-based methods and yields policies that integrate more smoothly with subsequent RL training. |
Long-tail Relation Extraction via Knowledge Graph Embeddings and Graph Convolution Networks (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing distance supervised relation extraction models for long-tail data are inadequate for many applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage implicit relational knowledge among class labels and learn explicit relational knowing using graph convolution networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines for long-tail relations on a large-scale dataset. |
Novel Relation Detection: Discovering Unknown Relation Types via Multi-Strategy Self-Supervised Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to relation extraction can only recognize predefined relation types . new or out-of-scope relation types may continually emerge after the model is deployed . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel relation detection task that uses self-supervised learning to handle shallow semantic similarity problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
AgentV-RL: Scaling Reward Modeling with Agentic Verifier (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiazheng Zhang, Ziche Fu, Zhiheng Xi, Wenqing Jing, Mingxu Chai, Wei He, Guoqiang Zhang, Chenghao Fan, Chenxin An, Wenxiang Chen, Zhicheng Liu, Haojie Pan, Dingwei Zhu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve LLM reasoning are limited in complex domains and lack external grounding makes verifiers unreliable on computation-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms reward modeling into a multi-turn, tool-augmented deliberative process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art ORMs by 25.2% under parallel and sequential TTS. |
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Yujiong Shen, Tingyi Yang, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Shihan Dou, Qinhao Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Zhihao Zhang, Yi Dong, Zhen Wang, Zhihui Fei, Mingyang Wan, Tao Liang, Guojun Ma, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset. |
Time-for-Accuracy: Formalizing Chain-of-Thought as an Expansion of Logical Depth (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can improve multi-step reasoning, but it is unclear what kind of additional sequential computation longer traces actually enable. |
| Approach: | They propose a deletion-based measure of step necessity under a specified inference interface to operationalize realized depth beyond raw length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines effective logical depth with Bennett's logical depth to show that it is more efficient than a linear model. |
Counteracting the Matthew Effect in Self-Improvement of LVLMs through Head-Tail Re-balancing (2026.acl-long)
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Xin Guo, Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Yitao Zhai, Xiaowei Shi, Xunliang Cai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large vision language models have impressive reasoning capabilities across complex multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use distribution-reshaping and trajectory-rebalancing to improve visual reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2-VL-7B-Instruct and InternVL2.5-4B models show that their methods outperform baselines by 3.86 points. |
Mitigating Tail Narrowing in LLM Self-Improvement via Socratic-Guided Sampling (2025.naacl-long)
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Yiwen Ding, Zhiheng Xi, Wei He, Lizhuoyuan Lizhuoyuan, Yitao Zhai, Shi Xiaowei, Xunliang Cai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate solutions themselves and iteratively train on filtered, high-quality rationales, but performance reaches a ceiling after a few iterations. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to improve the efficiency of sampling heavy-tailed data by using Socratic-style guidance signals to help LLMs reasoning with complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective on difficult queries and on held-out tasks, while requiring human supervision. |
Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Yuhao Zhou, Rui Zheng, Songyang Gao, Jia Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods have been used to enhance multistep reasoning capabilities of large language models, but they have overlooked the potential of formulating higher-quality problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts from the problem side and refines problems to be more comprehensible and solvable for models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models. |
What Makes an LLM a Good Optimizer? A Trajectory Analysis of LLM-Guided Evolutionary Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has demonstrated the promise of orchestrating large language models (LLMs) within evolutionary and agentic optimization systems. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale study of LLM-guided evolutionary search . they find strong LLMs behave as local refiners, producing frequent improvements . weaker LLM optimizers exhibit large semantic drift, they say . |
| Outcome: | The results highlight the importance of trajectory analysis for understanding and improving LLM-based optimization systems. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)
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Shihan Dou, Jiazheng Zhang, Jianxiang Zang, Yunbo Tao, Weikang Zhou, Haoxiang Jia, Shichun Liu, Yuming Yang, Shenxi Wu, Zhiheng Xi, Muling Wu, Rui Zheng, Changze Lv, Limao Xiong, Shaoqing Zhang, Lin Zhang, Wenyu Zhan, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yueming Wu, Ming Wen, Yixin Cao, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs). |
DecBERT: Enhancing the Language Understanding of BERT with Causal Attention Masks (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Transformer Encoder model can't automatically capture word order, so explicit position embeddings are required to be fed into the target model. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based language model DecBERT that uses a causal attention mask to capture word order. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the GLUE language understanding benchmark and accelerates the pre-training process. |
An Industry Evaluation of Embedding-based Entity Alignment (2020.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly important in various applications such as question answering and search engines. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a supervised learning environment with unbiased seed mappings for training and validation to evaluate alignment methods in an industrial context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are evaluated in an industrial context and are compared with DBpedia and Wikidata benchmarks. |
Dialogue Distillation: Open-Domain Dialogue Augmentation Using Unpaired Data (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on training open-domain dialogue models using unpaired data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-level distillation method for training open-domain dialogue models by utilizing unpaired data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality dialogue pairs with diverse contents, and can improve competitive baselines. |
Beyond Surface-Level Detection: Towards Cognitive-Driven Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks via Meta-Operations Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses rely on shallow pattern matching, which struggles to generalize to novel and unseen attack strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which emulates human cognitive reasoning through a structured reasoning chain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong generalization to unseen attacks. |
BaitAttack: Alleviating Intention Shift in Jailbreak Attacks via Adaptive Bait Crafting (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing attacks focus on meticulously constructing prompts to disguise harmful intentions . however, incorporation of disguising prompts may incur the challenge of "intention shift" |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak attack component, BaitAttack, to alleviate the effects of intention shift . Bait provides a response to the query, prompting LLMs to rectify or supplement the knowledge within the bait . |
| Outcome: | The proposed component, BaitAttack, reduces the effects of intention shift within jailbreak attacks. |
OntoEA: Ontology-guided Entity Alignment via Joint Knowledge Graph Embedding (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aligning knowledge graph entities ignore the ontology which contains critical meta information such as classes and membership relationships with entities. |
| Approach: | They propose an ontology-guided method where KGs and ontologies are jointly embedded. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on seven public and industrial benchmarks show the ontology-guided method performs well and is cost-effective. |
PRGC: Potential Relation and Global Correspondence Based Joint Relational Triple Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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Hengyi Zheng, Rui Wen, Xi Chen, Yifan Yang, Yunyan Zhang, Ziheng Zhang, Ningyu Zhang, Bin Qin, Xu Ming, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Recent methods for extracting entities and relations from unstructured texts suffer from limitations, such as redundancy of relation prediction and inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint relational triple extraction framework based on Potential Relation and Global Correspondence (PRGC) they propose overlapping triples for relation prediction and relation-relational alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks with higher efficiency and consistent performance gain on complex scenarios of overlapping triples. |
Editing the Moving World: Model Editing for Video LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Qian Zhang, Xinye Li, Xiaokai Wu, Junhao Xu, Zhanyue Qin, Qingbin Liu, Junxian Cai, Xi Chen, Bolin Zhang, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Xiaoyan Yu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Existing models for knowledge editing focus on knowledge-level or static visual domains, overlooking dynamic semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for modeling large language models using six representative models . they analyze the strengths and limitations of existing models and identify new directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark extends existing models from static modalities to dynamic video scenarios. |
Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Mengru Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Ziwen Xu, Zekun Xi, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Qishen Zhang, Linyi Yang, Jindong Wang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) are limiting, but knowledge editing can be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a baseline method to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces toxicity of large language models with one instance of tuning . it reduces the toxicity, while minimizing the toxins, the authors show . |
SudokuFill: A Multi-Agent Progressive Filling Framework for Document-Level Scientific Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yang Li, Yajiao Wang, Yu Zhang, Yuanzhe Zhang, Maodi Hu, Mengting Zhang, Xi Sun, Hua Yue, Zhixiong Zhang
| Challenge: | Scientific information extraction (SciIE) is a key bottleneck for turning unstructured papers into computable knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a scientific information extraction framework that solves a Sudoku problem as a progressive filling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the GPT-4o model on a document-level adjuvant dataset. |
Libra: Leveraging Temporal Images for Biomedical Radiology Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for radiology report generation rely on single-image analysis or rule-based heuristics to process multiple images. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-aware MLLM tailored for chest X-ray report generation that combines a radiology-specific image encoder with a novel Temporal Alignment Connector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets new standards in clinical relevance and lexical accuracy on the MIMIC-CXR dataset. |
OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zekun Xi, Wenbiao Yin, Jizhan Fang, Jialong Wu, Runnan Fang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in machine writing such as open domain long-form generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a slow-thinking machine writing framework that emulates the human-like process of iterative expansion and reflection to improve the knowledge density of generated articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the knowledge density of generated articles without compromising metrics such as coherence and depth. |
LLMEval-Fair: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study on Robust and Fair Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Jingyi Deng, Yuhui Wang, Huayu Sha, Kexin Tan, Qiyuan Peng, Yue Zhang, Junzhe Wang, Shichun Liu, Yueyuan Huang, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Zhihao Zhang, Mingqi Wu, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation of Large Language Models on static benchmarks is vulnerable to data contamination and leaderboard overfitting. |
| Approach: | LLMEval-Fair framework provides a framework for dynamic evaluation of Large Language Models . evaluators use a proprietary bank of 220k graduate-level questions to analyze model data . |
| Outcome: | LLMEval-Fair provides robust and credible evaluation framework for Large Language Models . it provides a strong empirical validation for the dynamic evaluation paradigm . |
Improving Embedding-based Large-scale Retrieval via Label Enhancement (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large-scale retrieval are trained with 0-1 hard labels that indicate whether a query is relevant to a document, ignoring rich information of the relevance degree. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce label enhancement for the first time to characterize query-document relevance degree by embedding label distribution into contextual embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing retrieval models and its counterparts equipped with two alternative methods on English and Chinese large-scale retrieval tasks. |
LLaST: Improved End-to-end Speech Translation System Leveraged by Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | ***LLaST*** is a framework for building high-performance Large Language model based Speech-to-text Translation systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for building high-performance Large Language model based Speech-to-text Translation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the CoVoST-2 benchmark and showcases exceptional scaling capabilities powered by LLMs. |
Efficient Self-Evaluation for Diffusion Language Models via Sequence Regeneration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Non-sequential and bidirectional nature of diffusion large language models makes direct likelihood-based self-evaluation challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evaluation confidence quantification method for diffusion large language models that quantifies confidence by computing the probability of regenerating tokens in the entire generated sequence, given the full context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is correlated with semantic coherence and answer accuracy. |
Datasets for Scientific Literature Understanding: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empowering machines to understand scientific literature is crucial for accelerating scientific discovery and advancing the AI for Science paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy that organizes resources spanning structural understanding, text understanding, multimodal understanding and pre-training/instruction fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy organizes resources spanning structural understanding, text understanding, multimodal understanding and pre-training/instruction fine-tuning. |
Knowledge Router: Learning Disentangled Representations for Knowledge Graphs (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from relational patterns and structural information ignore the intrinsic complexity of KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn latent properties of KG entities by using a neighborhood mechanism to disentangle the inner properties of each entity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance on key metrics on several benchmark datasets. |
Sensitivity-LoRA : Low-Load Sensitivity-Based Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Zhang, Bo Huang, Zhenjia Li, Xi Xiao, Hui Yi Leong, Zumeng Zhang, Xinwei Long, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a promising approach to adapting LLMs to specialized tasks . existing rank allocation techniques remain computationally inefficient and unstable . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adapted model that approximates model weight updates using low-ranked decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is limited by its uniform rank allocation to each incremental matrix . it leverages the second-order derivatives of the loss function to capture weight sensitivity . |
iAgent: LLM Agent as a Shield between User and Recommender Systems (2025.findings-acl)
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Wujiang Xu, Yunxiao Shi, Zujie Liang, Xuying Ning, Kai Mei, Kun Wang, Xi Zhu, Min Xu, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Traditional recommender systems focus on the user-platform paradigm, where users are directly exposed under the control of the platform's recommendation algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose a user-agent-platform paradigm where agent serves as the protective shield between user and recommender system that enables indirect exposure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves 16.6% over baselines on four datasets and mitigates echo chamber effects and reduces model bias in disadvantaged users. |
Summarizing Chinese Medical Answer with Graph Convolution Networks and Question-focused Dual Attention (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate answer summarization for medical questions are not straightforward to apply to the medical domain. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that utilizes graph convolution networks and question-focused dual attention for Chinese medical answer summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more coherent and informative summaries compared with baseline models. |
Can We Edit Multimodal Large Language Models? (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to edit multimodal models have been used to incrementally infuse a language model with a new set of facts. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark for editing multimodal Large Language Models and establish metrics for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that editing multimodal models is not as difficult as editing single-modal models. |
Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has identified retrieval heads as a subset of attention heads responsible for retrieving salient information in long-context language models. |
| Approach: | They introduce a retrieval head that uses attention scores to enhance retrieval from long context . they use QRRetriever to select the most relevant parts with the highest retrieval scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval heads outperform other retrieval-based retrieval retrievers on BEIR benchmarks. |
HyperAdaLoRA: Accelerating LoRA Rank Allocation During Training via Hypernetworks without Sacrificing Performance (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Zhang, Zhenjia Li, Yifan Gao, Xi Xiao, Heng Zhang, Shuyang Zhang, null Xiaoxincc, Bo Huang, Yuhang Wu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) assumes a uniform rank r for each incremental matrix, not accounting for the varying significance of weight matrices across modules and layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for faster convergence of low-rank adaptive models . they use a hypernetwork to prune the outputs of the hypernetworks to generate parameters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates convergence of AdaLoRA by leveraging a hypernetwork. |
How to Determine the Most Powerful Pre-trained Language Model without Brute Force Fine-tuning? An Empirical Survey (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Transferability estimation has been a topic of great interest in computer vision fields . a lack of a comprehensive comparison between these estimation methods is a problem . |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough survey of existing methods to find the most suitable model . they also outline difficulties of consideration of training details and applicability to text generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well with superiorities in effectiveness and efficiency. |
Subspace Defense: Discarding Adversarial Perturbations by Learning a Subspace for Clean Signals (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that extract discrete inputs into fixed-length representations are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that place perturbations on clean inputs to fool DNNs. |
| Approach: | They propose to inspect the subspaces of sample features through spectral analysis to better understand adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy enables the model to inherently suppress adversaries, which boosts model robustness and motivates new directions of effective adversarial defense. |
Graph Enhanced Dual Attention Network for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction requires inter-sentence reasoning capabilities to capture local and global contextual information for multiple relation facts. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize the interaction between sentences and potential relation instances via a Graph Enhanced Dual Attention network (GEDA) . they also propose a simple yet effective regularizer based on the natural duality of the S2R and R2S attentions, whose weights are also supervised by the supporting evidence of relation instances during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive performance on an existing large-scale dataset while the predictions can be interpretable and easily observed. |
Towards Realistic Low-resource Relation Extraction: A Benchmark with Empirical Baseline Study (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract relational facts from text are limited in their ability to learn from limited labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompt-based methods with few-shot labeled data to evaluate performance . data augmentation technologies and self-training are also proposed to generate more labeles in-domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well in low-resource settings with 8 relation extraction datasets. |
Finding Influential Instances for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Distant supervision models suffer from high label noise and are not reliable for DS. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic instance sampling method for relation extraction (RE) by influence function, namely REIF. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational complexity from O(mn) to O(1), with analyzing its robustness on the selected sampling function. |
GPT-Fathom: Benchmarking Large Language Models to Decipher the Evolutionary Path towards GPT-4 and Beyond (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM leaderboards often reference scores reported in other papers without consistent settings and prompts, which may encourage cherry-picking favored settings and for better results. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source and reproducible LLM evaluation suite built on top of OpenAI Evals that systematically evaluates 10+ leading LLMs and OpenAI’s legacy models on 20+ curated benchmarks across 7 capability categories. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite is built on top of OpenAI Evals and evaluates 10+ leading LLMs and OpenAI’s legacy models on 20+ curated benchmarks across 7 capability categories. |
Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhiheng Xi, Rui Zheng, Yuansen Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei, Minlong Peng, Mingming Sun, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting inter-task transferability are sparse and task-specific. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses connectivity patterns of neurons as a unique identifier associated with a task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in predicting inter-task transferability across data regimes and transfer settings while keeping high efficiency in computation and storage. |
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Binghai Wang, Rui Zheng, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Wei Shen, Yuhao Zhou, Dong Yan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets. |
Characterizing the Impacts of Instances on Robustness (2023.findings-acl)
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Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Qin Liu, Wenbin Lai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Jin Ma, Ying Shan, Weifeng Ge
| Challenge: | Existing defense approaches focus on developing new model structures or training algorithms, but they do little to tap the potential of training instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training. |
ScEdit: Script-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Xinye Li, Zunwen Zheng, Qian Zhang, Dekai Zhuang, Jiabao Kang, Liyan Xu, Qingbin Liu, Xi Chen, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Dianbo Sui
| Challenge: | Knowledge Editing (KE) has gained increasing attention, yet current evaluation frameworks do not integrate KE into real-world application scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based benchmark which encompasses both counterfactual and temporal edits and integrates token-level and text-level evaluation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines token-level and text-level evaluation methods with a new fact-based evaluation framework. |
AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaxin Bai, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Qing Zong, Chunyang Li, Hong Ting Tsang, Hongyu Luo, Yauwai Yim, Haoyu Huang, Xiao Zhou, Feng Qin, Tianshi Zheng, Xi Peng, Xin Yao, Huiwen Yang, Leijie Wu, JI Yi, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
TwinVoice: A Multi-dimensional Benchmark Towards Digital Twins via LLM Persona Simulation (2026.findings-acl)
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Bangde Du, Minghao Guo, Songming He, Ziyi Ye, Xi Zhu, Weihang Su, Shuqi Zhu, Yujia Zhou, Yongfeng Zhang, Qingyao Ai, Yiqun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that advanced LLMs produce text indistinguishable from human writing. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess persona simulation across diverse contexts by decomposing the evaluation into six fundamental capabilities including opinion consistency, memory recall, logical reasoning, persona tone, and syntactic style. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves moderate accuracy but falls short of the basic capabilities needed to simulate personas in real-world contexts. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
SCCD: A Session-based Dataset for Chinese Cyberbullying Detection (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on cyberbullying detection in Chinese is underdeveloped due to the lack of comprehensive and reliable datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese social media sessions to analyze Chinese cyberbullying content to improve the quality of annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that it performs better than existing methods on Weibo and a major social media platform. |
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)
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Chenhao Zhang, Xi Feng, Yuelin Bai, Xeron Du, Jinchang Hou, Kaixin Deng, Guangzeng Han, Qinrui Li, Bingli Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yifei Zhang, Qixuan Zhao, Yiming Liang, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Ge Zhang, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context. |
PromptFix: Few-shot Backdoor Removal via Adversarial Prompt Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained language models can be backdoored such that model behavior is manipulated when trigger tokens are presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor mitigation strategy for NLP models via adversarial prompt-tuning in few-shot settings that uses two extra sets of soft tokens which approximate the trigger and counteract it respectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method keeps model parameters intact and only utilizes two extra sets of soft tokens which approximate the trigger and counteract it respectively. |
Inconsistency Matters: A Knowledge-guided Dual-inconsistency Network for Multi-modal Rumor Detection (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection models focus on textual data to extract distinctive features, but they fail to capture the inconsistency information among the content and background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture inconsistency semantics and content-knowledge level in a unified framework to detect rumors with multimedia content. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two public real-world datasets show that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art models. |
WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Zhenglin Wang, Zekun Xi, Runnan Fang, Linhai Zhang, Yulan He, Deyu Zhou, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of LLMs to perform web traversal by using an explore-critic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics human-like web navigation through an explore-critic paradigm and demonstrates the effectiveness of RAG combined with WebWalker in real-world scenarios. |
Label-Free Distant Supervision for Relation Extraction via Knowledge Graph Embedding (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate large scale labeled data for relation extraction produce noisy relation labels when there are multiple relationships between entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which assumes that a pair of entities appears in a Knowledge Graph and trains a relation classifier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well in the current distant supervision dataset. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
CogniBench: A Legal-inspired Framework and Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Faithfulness of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on “factual statements” that rephrase source materials, but ignore “cognitive statements” . evaluating and detecting "faithfulness hallucinations" remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess faithfulness of cognitive statements and introduce a dataset to scale easily across models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses faithfulness of cognitive statements and scales easily across models. |
Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuanfu Wang, Pengyu Wang, Chenyang Xi, Bo Tang, Junyi Zhu, Wenqiang Wei, Chen Chen, Chao Yang, Jingfeng Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Yijun Niu, Keming Mao, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang
| Challenge: | Modern language models rely on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to encourage safe behaviors, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to three key limitations: (1) the inefficiency and high cost of human annotation; (2) the vast diversity of potential adversarials; and (3) the risk of feedback bias and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative adversarial training method that incorporates three key innovations to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 show that the proposed method significantly enhances robustness and reduces harmful outputs from 5.88% to 0.43%. |
ORTicket: Let One Robust BERT Ticket Transfer across Different Tasks (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are susceptible to subtle perturbations and require multiple adversarial training during fine-tuning to improve their robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial defense method ORTicket that fine-tunes a model for downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable robustness to other defense methods while maintaining the efficiency of fine-tuning. |
Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Rui Zheng, Hongyi Guo, Zhihan Liu, Xiaoying Zhang, Yuanshun Yao, Xiaojun Xu, Zhaoran Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yang Liu, Hang Li
| Challenge: | Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values. |
| Approach: | They propose an alignment method based on a two-agent game consisting of an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a two-agent game with an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
Class Lifelong Learning for Intent Detection via Structure Consolidation Networks (2023.findings-acl)
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Qingbin Liu, Yanchao Hao, Xiaolong Liu, Bo Li, Dianbo Sui, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Xi Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen
| Challenge: | Existing intent detection models can only handle predefined intent classes in the offline environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that continually learns new intent classes from new data . structure-based retrospection and contrastive knowledge distillation are used to solve these problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on three benchmarks. |
Enhancing LLM-based Search Agents via Contribution Weighted Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training large language models suffer from unstable value estimation, whereas outcome supervision struggles with credit assignment due to sparse, trajectory-level rewards. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates process supervision into group relative policy optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard GRPO on knowledge-intensive benchmarks by 5.0% and 6.3% on Qwen3-1.7B. |
Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Yuming Yang, Mingyoung Lai, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Mingqi Wu, Chiyue Huang, Jun Zhao, Haijun Lv, Jian Tong, Yunhua Zhou, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model’s current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rank–Surprisal Ratio metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Peng Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian, Zekun Xi, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Mengru Wang, Shengyu Mao, Xiaohan Wang, Siyuan Cheng, Kangwei Liu, Yuansheng Ni, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for Large Language Models that allows users to easily edit updated knowledge and adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. |
RAVR: Reference-Answer-guided Variational Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that reinforcement learning (RL) can refine the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) but requires a key prerequisite: the model must already be able to generate high-utility reasoning paths with non-negligible probability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses answer-conditioned reasoning as a variational surrogate for question-only reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 benchmarks and 3 models show that RAVR reduces hesitation, strengthens conclusion consolidation, and promotes problem-specific strategies in reasoning. |
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yifei Yu, Qian-Wen Zhang, Lingfeng Qiao, Di Yin, Fang Li, Jie Wang, Chen Zeng Xi, Suncong Zheng, Xiaolong Liang, Xing Sun
| Challenge: | Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs. |
Efficient Adversarial Training with Robust Early-Bird Tickets (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the robustness of pre-trained language models are expensive because of the need to generate adversarial examples via gradient descent. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial optimization method that searches for robust tickets with structured sparsity in the early stage and fine-tunes tickets in the remaining time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 7 13 training speedups while maintaining comparable or even better robustness compared to the most competitive state-of-the-art methods. |
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training Models (D19-3)
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Zhe Zhao, Hui Chen, Jinbin Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tao Liu, Wei Lu, Xi Chen, Haotang Deng, Qi Ju, Xiaoyong Du
| Challenge: | Existing work on pre-training models have shown that it is important to use a framework to deploy various pre- training models efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit that assembles pre-trained models on demand and encapsulates them with rich modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reproduce state-of-the-art models or develop models that remain unexplored. |
ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal recommenders lack explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ranking metrics and performance on four standard recommendation tasks across five real-world datasets. |
Targeted Distillation for Sentiment Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies demonstrate that large language models exhibit remarkable capabilities and achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse sentiment analysis tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation framework that decouples knowledge from alignment and introduces a sentiment analysis benchmark that covers a diverse set of tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models' generalization to unseen tasks and their generalization is strong against existing small-scale models. |
MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiahang Lin, Kai Hu, Binghai Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Shichun Liu, Junzhe Wang, Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Hang Yan, Zhenhua Han, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on long document visual question answering is based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where textual or visual content is encoded into embeddings and relevance is determined by similarity scores with respect to the original query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing RL systems by 10.4% on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark and demonstrates superior training performance over GRPO. |
LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Zelin Li, Huayu Sha, Binze Hu, Yuhui Wang, Chenhao Huang, Shichun Liu, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current medical benchmarks have limitations in question design, data sources and evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark covering five core medical areas . it includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers five core medical areas and includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records and expert-designed clinical scenarios. |
TL-Training: A Task-Feature-Based Framework for Training Large Language Models in Tool Use (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Junjie Ye, Yilong Wu, Sixian Li, Yuming Yang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Peng Wang, Zhongchao Shi, Jianping Fan, Zhengyin Du
| Challenge: | a new approach to training large language models (LLMs) overlooks task-specific characteristics in tool use, leading to performance bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-feature-based framework that mitigates the effects of suboptimal training data . they use a dataset to train large-scale LLMs and a reward mechanism tailored to error categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or surpasses open- and closed-source LLMs in tool-use performance using only 1,217 training data points. |
Label Smoothing for Text Mining (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing text mining models are trained with 0-1 hard label that indicates whether an instance belongs to a class, ignoring rich information of the relevance degree. |
| Approach: | They propose a keyword-based method to automatically generate soft labels from hard labels . they exploit relevance between labels and instances to incorporate them into models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves models under balanced and unbalanced conditions. |
Schema-adaptable Knowledge Graph Construction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) tasks rely on static information extraction with a closed set of pre-defined schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose a static knowledge Graph Construction task that extracts entity, relation, and event based on dynamically changing schema graph without retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing methods but still has room for improvement . it can extract entity, relation, and event based on dynamically changing schema graph without re-training . |
Inverse-Q*: Token Level Reinforcement Learning for Aligning Large Language Models Without Preference Data (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on complex methodologies like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) that require extensive hyper-parameter tuning and pose challenges in sample efficiency and stability. |
| Approach: | They propose an innovative framework that leverages direct preference optimization techniques but extends them by estimating the conditionally optimal policy directly from the model’s responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches and exceeds the effectiveness of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in terms of convergence speed and alignment of model responses with human preferences. |
PromptNER: Prompt Locating and Typing for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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Yongliang Shen, Zeqi Tan, Shuhui Wu, Wenqi Zhang, Rongsheng Zhang, Yadong Xi, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt learning require a multi-round prompting manner and require elaborate templates. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify entity locating and entity typing into prompt learning by enumerating spans to predict their entity types or constructing type-specific prompts to locate entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model in a few-shot setting . it uses a template filled with multiple prompts and a bipartite graph matching mechanism . |
SAME: Signer-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Test-Time Adaptation in Sign Language Translation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning are limited due to labeled data . existing methods require long adaptation times and batch statistics are unavailable in streaming settings . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play, signer-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) TTA architecture for SLT . they use a combination of lightweight MoE modules and unsupervised regularizers to decouple domain shift . |
| Outcome: | The proposed test-time adaptation outperforms existing TTA methods in sign language translation . the proposed architecture can be used in real-world deployments without labeling . |
Evidence Retrieval is almost All You Need for Fact Verification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evidence retrieval methods adopt a trivial retrieval strategy, resulting in task-irrelevant evidence and undesirable performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evidence retrieval and joint fact verification that integrates two modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evidence retrieval and claims verification on a FEVER dataset. |
Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Senjie Jin, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Sirui Song, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbo Zhang, Peng Sun, Hong Lu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline. |
AEGIS: A Holistic Benchmark for Evaluating Forensic Analysis of AI-Generated Academic Images (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Zhang, Tzu-Yen Ma, Zichen Tang, Junpeng Ding, Zirui Wang, Yizhuo Zhao, Peilin Gao, Zijie Xi, Zixin Ding, Haiyang Sun, Haocheng Gao, Yuan Liu, Liangjia Wang, Yiling Huang, Yujie Wang, Yuyue Zhang, Ronghui Xi, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Haihong E
| Challenge: | AEGIS examines whether current models can effectively audit AI-generated images in academic papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic benchmark for forensic analysis of AI-Generated academic ImageS that reveals limitations in academic image forensics. |
| Outcome: | AEGIS compared with existing benchmarks on seven academic categories and features key advances in forensic analysis. |
RoCoIns: Enhancing Robustness of Large Language Models through Code-Style Instructions (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in following human instructions and solving NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use code style instructions to replace typically natural language instructions to provide more precise instructions and strengthen the robustness of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms natural language models on eight robustness datasets and achieves an improvement of 5.68% in test set accuracy and a reduction of 5.66 points in Attack Success Rate (ASR). |
Ambiguity Awareness Optimization: Towards Semantic Disambiguation for Direct Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically re-weights ambiguous content to reduce ambiguities by calculating semantic similarity from preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in performance across multiple model scales and widely adopted benchmark datasets. |
Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that rely on limited demos and out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries fail when faced with out- of-demotion queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-aware prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability of large language models by query-based demo generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the OOD setting and two public math benchmarks. |
ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Yang, Honglin Guo, Li Ji, Jiazheng Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhikai Lei, Shuo Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Shichun Liu, Yuxin Wang, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
| Outcome: | The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
Context-Aware Query Rewriting for Improving Users’ Search Experience on E-commerce Websites (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing query rewriting models ignore user history behaviors and consider only the instant search query, which is often a short string offering limited information about the true shopping intent. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end context-aware query rewriting model that takes search context into account and builds a session graph using the history search queries and their contained words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models under various metrics. |
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality. |
Field Embedding: A Unified Grain-Based Framework for Word Representation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current methods focus on learning word embeddings while linguistic information is discarded after the learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework field embedding to jointly learn word and grain embedds by incorporating morphological, phonetic, and syntactical linguistic fields. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates morphological, phonetic, and syntactical linguistic fields to learn word embeddings and grain embedds. |
Rethinking Stateful Tool Use in Multi-Turn Dialogues: Benchmarks and Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongru Wang, Wenyu Huang, Yufei Wang, Yuanhao Xi, Jianqiao Lu, Huan Zhang, Nan Hu, Zeming Liu, Jeff Z. Pan, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that assess Language Models (LMs) as Language Agents (LAs) for tool use focus on stateless, single-turn interactions or partial evaluations, overlooking the inherent stateful nature of interactions in multi-turn applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue dataset with stateful tool interactions considering the whole life cycle of tool use across six key tasks in three stages . they also build VirtualMobile – an embodied virtual mobile evaluation environment to simulate API calls and assess the robustness of the created APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates 13 open- and closed-source LLMs and provides detailed analysis at each stage. |
Attention-Based Capsule Networks with Dynamic Routing for Relation Extraction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural networks focus on instance representation, and subsampling fails to retain precise spatial relationships between higher-level parts. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach based on capsule networks with attention mechanisms to extract relational information from a capsule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the precision of the predicted relations with different benchmarks. |
RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Enyu Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Songyang Gao, Xiaoran Fan, Zichu Fei, Jingting Ye, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on human-like behaviors in foundation models do not verify their faithfulness . a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-type behaviors . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to characterize humanoid behaviors in foundation models . they argue that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal consistency, and generalizability. |
Stand on The Shoulders of Giants: Building JailExpert from Previous Attack Experience (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xi Wang, Songlei Jian, Shasha Li, Xiaopeng Li, Bin Ji, Ma Jun, Xiaodong Liu, Jing Wang, Jianfeng Zhang, Jie Yu, Feilong Bao, null Wangbaosheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate human-aligned content with a “jailbreak prompt” are inefficient and repetitive, causing inefficiency and a lack of experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates past attack experiences to aid current jailbreak attempts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves both attack effectiveness and efficiency compared to the current black-box jailbreak method. |
VRPO: Rethinking Value Modeling for Robust RL under Noisy Supervision in LLM Post-Training (2026.acl-long)
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Dingwei Zhu, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Guoqiang Zhang, Jiazheng Zhang, Junjie Ye, Mingxu Chai, Enyu Zhou, Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Caishuang Huang, Chenhao Huang, Yunke Zhang, Yuran Wang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world environments often suffers from ambiguous or incomplete supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances value modeling for robust RL in LLM post-training by integrating auxiliary losses guided by entropy and perplexity from a frozen language model and variational information bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multi-turn dialogue, math reasoning, and science QA with rule-based and model-based rewards. |
A Survey of Large Language Model-Based Search Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Yunjia Xi, Jianghao Lin, Yongzhao Xiao, Zheli Zhou, Rong Shan, Te Gao, Jiachen Zhu, Weiwen Liu, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized web search, but their integration is static and cannot handle complex contexts. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing research and analyze existing work from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can comprehend user intentions and context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. |
Feedback-Driven Tool-Use Improvements in Large Language Models via Automated Build Environments (2026.findings-acl)
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Junjie Ye, Changhao Jiang, Zhengyin Du, Yufei Xu, Xuesong Yao, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Jiecao Chen
| Challenge: | Currently, there are no efficient reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks specifically designed for tool use. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated environment construction pipeline that incorporates scenario decomposition, document generation, function integration, complexity scaling, and localized deployment to enable high-quality training environments without external tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the models’ tool-use performance without degrading their general capabilities. |
MatchPrompt: Prompt-based Open Relation Extraction with Semantic Consistency Guided Clustering (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for open relation extraction (OpenRE) focus on labeled and pre-defined instances, which are costly to acquire in reality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can extract relations without pre-defined types from open-domain corpus with efficient knowledge transfer from a few pre-determined relational instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the new SOTA results for OpenRE on different datasets. |
CritiQ: Mining Data Quality Criteria from Human Preferences (2025.acl-long)
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Honglin Guo, Kai Lv, Qipeng Guo, Tianyi Liang, Zhiheng Xi, Demin Song, Qiuyinzhe Zhang, Yu Sun, Kai Chen, Xipeng Qiu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train language models rely on manual design, perplexity, or careful prompt engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically mines criteria from human preferences for data quality with only 30 human-annotated pairs and performs efficient data selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on human-annotated test sets and shows high accuracy on code, math, and logic domains. |
Self-supervised Preference Optimization: Enhance Your Language Model with Preference Degree Awareness (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised preference optimization framework that replaces the reward model with a preference loss and alignment loss to improve LLMs' ability to understand human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be integrated with existing preference optimization methods and significantly boost their performance. |
From Scores to Preferences: Redefining Evaluation Paradigm for Speech Quality Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Cao, Changhao Jiang, Jiabao Zhuang, Jiajun Sun, Ming Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Hui Li, Shihan Dou, Yuran Wang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
| Approach: | They propose a MOS-aware reward model that incorporates MOS gap into reward function during reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination. |
Easy and Efficient Transformer: Scalable Inference Solution For Large NLP Model (2022.naacl-industry)
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Gongzheng Li, Yadong Xi, Jingzhen Ding, Duan Wang, Ziyang Luo, Rongsheng Zhang, Bai Liu, Changjie Fan, Xiaoxi Mao, Zeng Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that transformer-based models are effective over many tasks, but they are expensive to deploy in the industrial application. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based inference solution that optimizes kernels for long inputs and large hidden sizes and a flexible CUDA memory manager to reduce the memory footprint when deploying a large model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution achieves an average speedup of 1.40-4.20x on the transformer decoder layer with an A100 GPU. |
Unraveling the Mystery of Artifacts in Machine Generated Text (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that human-written text is not distinguishable from synthetic text because of semantic errors or logical contradictions. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze the forms of artifacts left by neural Text Generation Models by corrupting texts and replacing them with linguistic or statistical features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method replaces text with linguistic or statistical features and improves the accuracy of the model. |
HopRAG: Multi-Hop Reasoning for Logic-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional retrieval systems focus on lexical or semantic similarity rather than logical relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a new RAG framework that augments retrieval with logical reasoning . hopRAG uses a retrieve-reason-prune mechanism to explore multi-hop neighbors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms conventional retrieval systems and state-of-the-art benchmarks on multi-hop QA tasks. |
ToolHop: A Query-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Hop Tool Use (2025.acl-long)
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Junjie Ye, Zhengyin Du, Xuesong Yao, Weijian Lin, Yufei Xu, Zehui Chen, Zaiyuan Wang, Sining Zhu, Zhiheng Xi, Siyu Yuan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Jiecao Chen
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that provides rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 49.04% accuracy across five model families. |
SynWorld: Virtual Scenario Synthesis for Agentic Action Knowledge Refinement (2025.acl-short)
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Runnan Fang, Xiaobin Wang, Yuan Liang, Shuofei Qiao, Jialong Wu, Zekun Xi, Ningyu Zhang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Using Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents can enhance their understanding of environments and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows agents to synthesize possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and perform Monte Carlo Tree Search exploration to refine their action knowledge in the current environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and performs Monte Carlo Tree Search exploration to refine action knowledge in the current environment. |
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuo Li, Jiajun Sun, Guodong Zheng, Xiaoran Fan, Yujiong Shen, Yi Lu, Zhiheng Xi, Yuming Yang, Wenming Tan, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures. |
Distill Visual Chart Reasoning Ability from LLMs to MLLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Wanxu Zhao, Xiaoran Fan, Yiwen Ding, Zifei Shan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | a new method for generating chart annotations is proposed to improve visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a code-as-intermediary translation method for distilling visual reasoning abilities from LLMs to MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is cost-effective, efficient and scalable. |
Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries (2026.acl-long)
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Ki Sen Hung, Xi Yang, Chang Liu, Haoran Li, Kejiang Chen, Changxuan Fan, Tsun On Kwok, Weiming Zhang, Xiaomeng Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | a goal of LLM alignment is to balance usefulness with harmlessness, but this conflictes when knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines safety-research contexts with adversarial interactions to exploit a vulnerability in Jargon queries. |
| Outcome: | a framework outperforms existing methods in analyzing Jargon queries, a study shows . it achieves 93% of attacks across seven models, while remaining useful, the authors say . |
Are LLMs Rational Investors? A Study on the Financial Bias in LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuhang Zhou, Yuchen Ni, Zhiheng Xi, Zhangyue Yin, Yu He, Gan Yunhui, Xiang Liu, Zhang Jian, Sen Liu, Xipeng Qiu, Yixin Cao, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai
| Challenge: | Existing studies on biases within specific domains, such as finance, remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to detect, detect, analyze and mitigate financial biases in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces bias by 68% for the most biased model, according to key metrics. |
SampleMix: A Sample-wise Pre-training Data Mixing Strategy by Coordinating Data Quality and Diversity (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiangyu Xi, Deyang Kong, Jian Yang, Jiawei Yang, Zhengyu Chen, Wei Wang, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye
| Challenge: | Existing methods for pretraining data mixing for large language models neglect significant inter-domain overlaps and commonalities, failing to control the global diversity of the constructed training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a sample-wise data mixture approach that performs global cross-domain sampling by systematically evaluating the quality and diversity of each sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exceeds existing domain-based methods in multiple downstream tasks and perplexity assessments. |
TrendFact: A Benchmark Towards Hotspot Perception in Automatic Fact-Checking (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaocheng Zhang, Xi Wang, Yifei Lu, Jianing Wang, Zhuangzhuang Ye, Mengjiao Bao, Peng Yan, Xiaohong Su
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack social metadata and evaluation framework to meet this urgent evaluation needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark capable of evaluating HPA and three fact-checking tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves HPA and computational efficiency for RLM-driven systems. |
Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words (2022.coling-1)
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Haochun Wang, Chi Liu, Nuwa Xi, Sendong Zhao, Meizhi Ju, Shiwei Zhang, Ziheng Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Pre-trained models perform poorly with limited data and rare biomedical words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompt to fine-tune pre-trained models for biomedical domain tuning with a simple approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings. |
The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Using long-term memory, large language models can embed social hierarchies into their emotional reasoning. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 15 large language models on validated emotional intelligence tests to examine how user memory affects emotional intelligence. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the models with advantaged profiles receive more accurate emotional interpretations. |
HoLLMwood: Unleashing the Creativity of Large Language Models in Screenwriting via Role Playing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jing Chen, Xinyu Zhu, Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Yadong Xi, Yuxiang Zhang, Junjie Wang, Jiashu Pu, Tian Feng, Yujiu Yang, Rongsheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Generative AI has demonstrated unprecedented creativity in the field of computer vision, yet such phenomena have not been observed in the realm of literary creation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for unleashing the creativity of large language models (LLMs) they assign LLMs to different roles involved in real-world scenario, they write . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in terms of coherence, relevance, interestingness and overall quality on automatically generated screenplays. |
Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Deep Research Agents (DRAs) treat report generation as a single-shot writing task. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation suite that establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. |
LoRACoE: Improving Large Language Model via Composition-based LoRA Expert (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that the Mixture of Experts architecture improves performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to build static experts using LoRA parameters . they propose to use rank-level parameters to build experts based on rank-based parameters based in LoRA module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves task performance across a broader range of tasks. |
Beyond Scaling: Measuring and Predicting the Upper Bound of Knowledge Retention in Language Model Pre-Training (2026.acl-long)
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Changhao Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yifei Cao, Junjie Ye, Xiaoran Fan, Shihan Dou, Zhiheng Xi, Jiajun Sun, Yi Dong, Yujiong Shen, Jingqi Tong, Baoyu Fan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict performance of large language models are lacking . authors propose a size-dependent mutual information predictor for closed-book question answering accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose a size-dependent mutual information predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models and achieves R2 > 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy without additional training. |
QuadrupletBERT: An Efficient Model For Embedding-Based Large-Scale Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large-scale query-document retrieval are expensive and require sparse handcrafted features. |
| Approach: | They propose a quadrupletBERT model for effective and efficient retrieval using pre-trained language models like BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves retrieval phase and leverages distances between simple negative and hard negative instances to obtain better embeddings. |
Specializing Large Models for Oracle Bone Script Interpretation via Component-Grounded Multimodal Knowledge Augmentation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for deciphering ancient Chinese Oracle Bone Script (OBS) treat deciphering as a closed-set image recognition problem, which fails to bridge the "interpretation gap" . |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language model framework that integrates a VLM and an LLM to automate a reasoning chain of component identification and knowledge retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields more detailed and precise decipherments compared to baseline methods. |