Papers by Xiao Chen
Say What You Mean! Large Language Models Speak Too Positively about Negative Commonsense Knowledge (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been studied for their ability to store and utilize positive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a constrained keywords-to-sentence generation task and a Boolean question answering task to probe large language models on negative commonsense knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks show that LLMs fail to generate valid sentences grounded in negative commonsense knowledge, yet they can correctly answer yes-or-no questions. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
Sample Design Engineering: An Empirical Study on Designing Better Fine-Tuning Samples for Information Extraction with LLMs (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Prompt Engineering (PE) is renowned for improving IE performance through prompt modifications, but the realm of sample design for downstream fine-tuning remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a methodical approach to enhancing LLMs’ post-tuning performance by refining input, output, and reasoning designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms heuristic design strategies on three complex IE tasks with four additional LLMs. |
KnowledgeBerg: Evaluating Systematic Knowledge Coverage and Compositional Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack systematic coverage of a bounded knowledge universe and compositional set-based reasoning over that universe. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multiple-choice questions based on 1,183 enumeration seeds . they use knowledge width, cardinality of required universe, reasoning depth to formalize the challenge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks achieve only 5.26–36.88 F1 on universe enumeration and 16.00–44.19 accuracy on knowledge-grounded reasoning. |
CogBERT: Cognition-Guided Pre-trained Language Models (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods fine-tune pre-trained models on cognitive data, ignoring the semantic gap between texts and cognitive signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into pre-trained language models by adaptively adjusting the weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate them into BERT by adaptively adjusting weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. |
Learning What to Share: Leaky Multi-Task Network for Text Classification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-task learning suffer from the interference between tasks because they lack selection mechanism for feature sharing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task convolutional neural network with the Leaky Unit which has memory and forgetting mechanism to filter the feature flows between tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can filter feature flows between tasks and improve performance on five datasets. |
Lattice-Based Transformer Encoder for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) takes deterministic sequences for source representations. However, word-level or subword-level segmentation has multiple choices to split a source sequence with different word segmentors or different subword vocabulary sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose lattice-based encoders to explore effective word or subword representations in an automatic way during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoders can explore effective word or subword representation in an automatic way during training. |
DGST: a Dual-Generator Network for Text Style Transfer (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on text style transfer focus on altering sentiment words to preserve attribute-independent information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Generator network architecture for text Style Transfer using two generators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models on Yelp and IMDb datasets. |
Beyond Single-Event Extraction: Towards Efficient Document-Level Multi-Event Argument Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Wanlong Liu, Li Zhou, DingYi Zeng, Yichen Xiao, Shaohuan Cheng, Chen Zhang, Grandee Lee, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen
| Challenge: | mainstream event argument extraction methods process each event in isolation, resulting in inefficient inference and ignoring correlations among multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-event argument argument extraction model which extracts arguments from all events simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on four public datasets while saving time. |
Test-time Backdoor Mitigation for Black-Box Large Language Models with Defensive Demonstrations (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on backdoor defense have focused on training phase, overlooking critical aspect of testing time defense. |
| Approach: | They propose to use demonstrations as a defense mechanism against backdoor attacks in black-box LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing defense baselines across most evaluation scenarios. |
Improving End-to-End Speech Processing by Efficient Text Data Utilization with Latent Synthesis (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Latent Synthesis is an efficient textual data utilization framework for end-to-end speech processing models . labeled speech data are scarcer and more expensive for collection compared to textual ones . |
| Approach: | They propose a textual data utilization framework for E2E speech processing models . they train a latent synthesizer to convert textual information into an intermediate latent representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on low-resource speech recognition and spoken language understanding tasks. |
AGrail: A Lifelong Agent Guardrail with Effective and Adaptive Safety Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defense agencies fail to adaptively and effectively mitigate these risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a lifelong agent guardrail that enhances LLM agent safety by enabling adaptive safety check generation, effective safety check optimization, and tool compatibility & flexibility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent guardrail achieves strong performance against task-specific and systemic risks and is transferable across different LLM agents’ tasks. |
WikiDiverse: A Multimodal Entity Linking Dataset with Diversified Contextual Topics and Entity Types (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) is an essential task for many multimodal applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-annotated Wikipedia-based multimodal entity linking dataset to improve the quality of existing MEL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model uses the visual information of images more effectively than existing models. |
DynamixSFT: Dynamic Mixture Optimization of Instruction Tuning Collections (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Several studies rely on additional models to optimize mixtures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically optimizes instruction-tuning dataset mixtures by prior-scaled Boltzmann Exploration and a multi-armed bandit setup. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the TÜLU-2-mixture and TÜLO-3-mixtures across 10 benchmarks while introducing minimal computational overhead over naive sampling. |
SELFGOAL: Your Language Agents Already Know How to Achieve High-level Goals (2025.naacl-long)
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Ruihan Yang, Jiangjie Chen, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Aili Chen, Kyle Richardson, Yanghua Xiao, Deqing Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the performance of language agents without training are not available. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic approach to break down high-level goals into tree structure of more practical subgoals during interaction with environments while identifying the most useful subgoal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the performance of language agents across various tasks, including competitive, cooperative, and deferred feedback environments. |
The “Knowledge–Behavior Gap” in Cultural Taboo Safety of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Ying He, Sihang Jiang, Xingzhou Chen, Zhouhong Gu, Yiwei Gu, Minggui HE, Shimin Tao, null Mahongxia, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing cultural benchmarks assess cultural knowledge or values biases, but ignore cultural taboos. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate and improve the cultural taboo safety of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark spans 77 countries and regions, and includes over 2,020 taboos. |
Modality Adaption or Regularization? A Case Study on End-to-End Speech Translation (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation models have limited training data and are often inefficient due to the inconsistency of length and representation between speech and text. |
| Approach: | They find that the "modality gap" between speech and text data is not a major problem in E2E ST . they decouple the encoder to speech encoder and text encoder, and they find that there is a 'capacity gap' |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 29.0 for en-de and 40.3 for fr on the MuST-C dataset. |
Velocitune: A Velocity-based Dynamic Domain Reweighting Method for Continual Pre-training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimise pretraining performance have not addressed the complexities of domain-adaptive continual pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically assesses learning velocity and adjusts data proportions accordingly, favouring slower learning domains while de-emphasising faster learning ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance gains in math and code reasoning tasks and command-line generation benchmarks. |
TrInk: Ink Generation with Transformer Network (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zezhong Jin, Shubhang Desai, Xu Chen, Biyi Fang, Zhuoyi Huang, Zhe Li, Chong-Xin Gan, Xiao Tu, Man-Wai Mak, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for handwriting generation capture global dependencies and can generate high-quality handwritten samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based model for ink generation, TrInk, which captures global dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces character error rate and word error rate by 35.56% on the IAM-OnDB dataset compared to previous models. |
Pruning Adatperfusion with Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive to fine-tune and require large storage. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify the influence of each adapter module and a way to prune adapters based on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces size significantly while keeping performance intact. |
Learning Geometry-Aware Representations for New Intent Discovery (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for intent classification fail to distinguish new intents due to intertwined centers . a novel framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a new intent discovery framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarking datasets. |
OpenWebAgent: An Open Toolkit to Enable Web Agents on Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Iat Long Iong, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Chen, Hanyu Lai, Shuntian Yao, Pengbo Shen, Hao Yu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | OpenWebAgent integrates large language models and large multimodal models to improve web automation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate large language models and large multimodal models into an open toolkit to optimize web automation. |
| Outcome: | The open toolkit integrates both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) it enables the development of powerful, task-oriented web agents, significantly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency on the web. |
Gated Multi-Task Network for Text Classification (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multitask learning share the features without distinguishing the usefulness of the features, generating undesired interference between tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a gate mechanism into multi-task CNN and propose a new gated sharing unit which can filter the feature flows between tasks and greatly reduce the interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can learn selection rules automatically and gain a great improvement over strong baselines. |
Text Fluoroscopy: Detecting LLM-Generated Text through Intrinsic Features (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing because of their excellent performance on various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box method with better generalizability for detecting LLM-generated text by mining the intrinsic features of the text to be detected. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 7.36% and 2.84% improvement in detection performance compared to baselines in detecting texts from different domains generated by GPT-4 and Claude3 respectively. |
SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wei Shi, Shuang Li, Kerun Yu, Jinglei Chen, Zujie Liang, Xinhui Wu, Yuxi Qian, Feng Wei, Bo Zheng, Jiaqing Liang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that increase context window do not guarantee robust performance across long input tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables language models to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The framework improves performance on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks. |
Guided Knowledge Generation with Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved notable success in commonsense reasoning tasks, benefiting from extensive world knowledge acquired through extensive pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate knowledge explanations and to automatically assign labels based on the probability of correct answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on four widely-used commonsense reasoning benchmarks and shows that it can generate high quality knowledge leading to correct answers. |
FastKASSIM: A Fast Tree Kernel-Based Syntactic Similarity Metric (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing syntactic similarity metrics are computationally expensive and inconsistent when faced with syntaktically dissimilar documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric which pairs and averages the most similar constituency parse trees between a pair of documents based on tree kernels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric is more robust to syntactic dissimilarities and runs up to 5.32 times faster than its predecessor over documents in the r/ChangeMyView corpus. |
MCapsNet: Capsule Network for Text with Multi-Task Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-task learning has been frustrated by the interference among tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule-based multi-task learning architecture which is unified, simple and effective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can cluster features for each task in the network, which helps reduce the interference among tasks. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
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. |
Distract Large Language Models for Automatic Jailbreak Attack (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Commercial large language models (LLMs) have made great progress in various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box jailbreak framework for automated red teaming of Large language models using an iterative optimization algorithm to conceal malicious content and memory reframing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing jailbreak defense methods and highlights the need to develop more effective and practical defense strategies. |
Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on table-based reasoning distillation has focused on smaller models with limited performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based reasoning distillation approach to distill LLMs into smaller models . their results show that a 220 million parameter model fine-tuned using distilled data improves performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a scientific table-to-text generation dataset and surpasses specific LLMs. |
HAUSER: Towards Holistic and Automatic Evaluation of Simile Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Similes are a crucial part of creative writing, but there is still a lack of evaluation metrics for simile generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use similes as a tool to evaluate simile generation metrics . they propose to combine five criteria and automatic metrics for each criterion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics are significantly more correlated with human ratings from each perspective compared with prior automatic metrics. |
GAPO: Learning Preferential Prompt through Generative Adversarial Policy Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Zhouhong Gu, Xingzhou Chen, Xiaoran Shi, Tao Wang, Suhang Zheng, Tianyu Li, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for achieving this require a limited understanding of constraints and can be hallucinating or brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines adversarial training dynamics with an encoder-only reward model to progressively learn and adapt to increasingly complex constraints. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that GAPO significantly outperforms existing methods like PPO, DPO, and KTO in fine-grained constraints. |
Training LLMs for Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning Elevates Test-Time Scalability (2026.acl-long)
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Xiao Liang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zhenghao Lin, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Yeyun Gong, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities through step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but their strictly sequential nature constrains test-time scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework to enhance LLMs' DAC-style reasoning capacity by decomposing a problem into subproblems and solving them sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses CoT by 8.6% and 6.3% on competition-level benchmarks and is available at the [github.com/MasterVito/DAC-RL]. |
LLaVA Steering: Visual Instruction Tuning with 500x Fewer Parameters through Modality Linear Representation-Steering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhance visual tasks by integrating visual representations into large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to re-balance modalities by steering visual representations . they propose LLaVA Steering, a platform that enables rapid customization of MLLMs a component-based architecture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model re-balances the modalities of visual representations in large language models . the model requires 500 times fewer trainable parameters than LoRA while maintaining comparable performance . |
Zero-Shot Information Extraction as a Unified Text-to-Triple Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of information extraction tasks require task-specific training. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-triple translation framework for information extraction tasks . they propose enabling task-agnostic translation by leveraging latent knowledge of a pre-trained language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing methods on open information extraction tasks. |
SQUiD: Synthesizing Relational Databases from Unstructured Text (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Relational databases are central to modern data management, but most data exists in unstructured forms like text documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes the task into four stages, each with specialized techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across diverse datasets. |
DEMO: A Statistical Perspective for Efficient Image-Text Matching (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Image-text matching is a problem that seeks to connect vision and language through semantic understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep unsupervised hashing-based approach for image-text matching . they characterize each image using multiple augmented views, which are considered as samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior performance on image-text matching datasets compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
C2KD: Cross-layer and Cross-head Knowledge Distillation for Small Language Model-based Recommendation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise but their size and high inference costs limit deployment on resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to transfer task-relevant knowledge from two complementary dimensions to Large Language Models (LLMs) Large Language models (LLMS) have demonstrated great potential in sequential recommendation tasks . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across diverse model families show that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance compared to LLMs. |
Incomplete In-context Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Wenqiang Wang, Wen Yujia, Yan Xiao, Zhifeng Chen, Yangshijie Zhang, Peng Chen, Mingbo Yang, Xiaochun Cao
| Challenge: | Existing in-context learning assumes the retrieval dataset contains demonstrations for all output label spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework with train-free and train-based variants to address IICL . they propose to integrate a dataset with labeled demonstrations for each output space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods under incomplete retrieval datasets and even outperformed ICL with complete labels. |
Distantly-Supervised Joint Extraction with Noise-Robust Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identifying entity pairs and relations with a single model are noisy . Existing methods only consider one source of noise or make decisions using external knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns entity mentions with corresponding tags for joint extraction . they propose DENRL, which employs a lightweight transformer backbone for joint tagging . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two benchmark datasets with better interpretability. |
Uncertainty-Aware Bootstrap Learning for Joint Extraction on Distantly-Supervised Data (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract entity pairs and their relations from labeled data are noisy and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a bootstrap learning approach that is motivated by intuition that the higher the uncertainty of an instance, the more likely the model confidence is inconsistent with the ground truths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and related methods on two large datasets. |
Cognitive Overload: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Overloaded Logical Thinking (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated increasing power, but they also have vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack that targets the cognitive structure and processes of large language models (LLMs) they propose defending cognitive overload attacks from three perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is a black-box attack with no need for knowledge of model architecture or access to model weights. |
Global Structure Knowledge-Guided Relation Extraction Method for Visually-Rich Document (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on manipulating entity features to find pairwise relations, yet neglect the more fundamental structural information that links disparate entity pairs together. |
| Approach: | They propose a Visual Relation Extraction framework that generates relation predictions on entity pairs extracted from scanned images and incorporates global structural knowledge into the representations of the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in fine-tuning setting and yields stronger data-efficient performance in the low-resource setting. |
Rethinking Multi-Modal Alignment in Multi-Choice VideoQA from Feature and Sample Perspectives (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to VideoQA focus on utilizing frame- or object-level visual representations, but they neglect visual-language interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to break down video into trajectories and first leverage trajectory feature in VideoQA to enhance alignment between two modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the NExT-QA benchmark. |
DEEPER Insight into Your User: Directed Persona Refinement for Dynamic Persona Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Aili Chen, Chengyu Du, Jiangjie Chen, Jinghan Xu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Zulong Chen, Liangyue Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating personas from static historical data fail to capture dynamic behaviors and evolving preferences in real-world interactive scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that iteratively updates personas using streaming user behavior data to continually enhance their quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach delivers 32.2% reduction in user behavior prediction error over four update rounds, outperforming the best baseline by 22.92%. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
Attention Mechanism with Energy-Friendly Operations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that attention mechanism can be improved from the energy consumption aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace multiplications with either selective operations or additions to reduce energy consumption. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitable accuracy while saving 99% and 66% energy during alignment calculation and the whole attention procedure. |
Towards Bridging the Reward-Generation Gap in Direct Alignment Algorithms (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, including instruction following, mathematical problem solving, and coding generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that truncates both preferred and dispreferred responses to match the shorter one’s length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves over standard implementations and achieves 11.8 points in AlpacaEval 2 and overall improvements across downstream tasks. |
Can LLMs Learn to Map the World from Local Descriptions? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks such as code generation and mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models can construct coherent global spatial cognition by integrating fragmented relational descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can generalize to unseen spatial relationships and exhibit latent representations aligned with real-world spatial distributions. |
i-Code V2: An Autoregressive Generation Framework over Vision, Language, and Speech Data (2024.findings-naacl)
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Ziyi Yang, Mahmoud Khademi, Yichong Xu, Reid Pryzant, Yuwei Fang, Chenguang Zhu, Dongdong Chen, Yao Qian, Xuemei Gao, Yi-Ling Chen, Robert Gmyr, Naoyuki Kanda, Noel Codella, Bin Xiao, Yu Shi, Lu Yuan, Takuya Yoshioka, Michael Zeng, Xuedong Huang
| Challenge: | i-Code V2 is one of the first models capable of generating natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data. |
| Approach: | They propose to create a model that can generate natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data. |
| Outcome: | i-Code V2 matches or outperforms state-of-the-art single- and dual-modality baselines on 7 multimodal tasks. |
Watermarking Large Language Models: An Unbiased and Low-risk Method (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the risk of misusing them, raising the need for accurate detection of LLM-generated content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to inject imperceptible identifiers into large language models (LLMs) this method is unbiased and preserves the original token distribution in expectation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves the original token distribution in expectation and has lower risk of producing unsatisfactory outputs in low-entropy scenarios compared to existing unbiased watermarks. |
EET: Experience-Driven Early Termination for Cost-Efficient Software Engineering Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are reshaping modern software development, but they often incur substantial monetary cost. |
| Approach: | They propose an experience-driven early termination approach that extracts structured experience from prior issue-resolution executions and leverages it to guide early termination during patch generation and selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces cost by 19%–55% with negligible loss in resolution rate (at most 0.2%) EET extracts structured experience from prior issue-resolution executions and leverages it to guide early termination during patch generation and selection. |
How Many Answers Should I Give? An Empirical Study of Multi-Answer Reading Comprehension (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite recent progress in multi-answer MRC, there is no systematic analysis of how this phenomenon arises and how to better address it. |
| Approach: | They develop a taxonomy to categorize commonly-seen multi-answer MRC instances and examine how well different paradigms deal with different types of multi-announced questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes commonly-seen multi-answer instances and analyzes how well different paradigms deal with different types of multi-announced instances. |
Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual learning in language models suffer catastrophic forgetting when learning sequential tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal low-rank adaptation approach for continual learning in language models that uses orthogons to learn sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on continual learning benchmarks and preserves generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks. |
E-KAR: A Benchmark for Rationalizing Natural Language Analogical Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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Jiangjie Chen, Rui Xu, Ziquan Fu, Wei Shi, Zhongqiao Li, Xinbo Zhang, Changzhi Sun, Lei Li, Yanghua Xiao, Hao Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose an explanation benchmark for analogical reasoning using a Civil Service exam . they use a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is very challenging for state-of-the-art models, it is found. |
GALA: Geometric Data Selection with Strategic Prospecting for Large Language Model Self-training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-training are based on reject sampling and lack quality reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-training using a generate-and-filter paradigm . they propose to identify diverse and informative samples from redundant data and exploit them more strategically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits informative samples from redundant data and improves reasoning trajectory prospecting. |
Med-SRAF: A Multi-Agent Framework for Medical Reasoning via Semantic Routing and Agentic Fusion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods suffer from a two-part problem: semantic drift and concatenation fallacy . et al.: rapid development of Large Language Models has led to a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent retrieval augmentation framework guided by medical domain knowledge to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing general RAG baselines on five widely used medical benchmarks. |
Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model (2023.findings-acl)
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Xiao Wang, Weikang Zhou, Qi Zhang, Jie Zhou, SongYang Gao, Junzhe Wang, Menghan Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use end-task knowledge to select a tiny subset of pretraining corpus to influence performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pretrained models on eight datasets covering four domains with 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost. |
CR-LLM: A Dataset and Optimization for Concept Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Nianqi Li, Jingping Liu, Sihang Jiang, Haiyun Jiang, Yanghua Xiao, Jiaqing Liang, Zujie Liang, Feng Wei, Jinglei Chen, Zhenghong Hao, Bing Han
| Challenge: | Existing concept reasoning related datasets suffer from modeledge leakage and context leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept reasoning for large language models with modeledge leakage prevention and context leakage preventive methods to improve the models' conceptual reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the existing models and reasoning methods, achieving a 7% increase in accuracy compared to CoT and showing better granularity. |
AutoScraper: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Scraper Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenhao Huang, Zhouhong Gu, Chenghao Peng, Jiaqing Liang, Zhixu Li, Yanghua Xiao, Liqian Wen, Zulong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for web scraping suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new website. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates web scrapers with large language models and a new executability metric to measure the performance of web scraper generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can handle diverse web environments more efficiently. |
DisastQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Question Answering in Disaster Management (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Chen, Kai Yin, Xiangjue Dong, Chengkai Liu, Xiangpeng Li, Bo Li, Junwei Ma, Yiming Xiao, Ali Mostafavi, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for question answering (QA) are lacking in a high-stakes environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a rigorously verified benchmark of 3,000 expert-annotated questions . they propose 'keypoint-based evaluation protocol' emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose models such as MMLU-Pro. |
Instructions as Backdoors: Backdoor Vulnerabilities of Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2021) show that instruction models can be trained on crowdsourced datasets with task instructions to achieve superior performance. |
| Approach: | They examine security concerns of emergent instruction tuning paradigm that models are trained on crowdsourced datasets with task instructions to achieve superior performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve 90% success rate across four commonly used datasets. |
OctoBench: Benchmarking Scaffold-Aware Instruction Following in Repository-Grounded Agentic Coding (2026.acl-long)
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Deming Ding, Shichun Liu, Enhui Yang, Jiahang Lin, Ziying Chen, Shihan Dou, Honglin Guo, Weiyu Cheng, Pengyu Zhao, Chengjun Xiao, Qunhong Zeng, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qidi Xu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | coding scaffolds that follow heterogeneous instructions remain under-examined in software engineering . coding models are capable software agents, but their ability to follow constraints remains under-explored . |
| Approach: | They introduce OctoBench, which benchmarks scaffold-aware instruction following in agentic coding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to accelerate the development of more scaffold-aware agents. |
Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yi Feng, Jiaqi Wang, Wenxuan Zhang, Zhuang Chen, Shen Yutong, Xiyao Xiao, Minlie Huang, Liping Jing, Jian Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mental health support lack realism and capture therapeutic progression over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that simulates expert narrative therapists by planning therapeutic stages, guiding reflection levels, and generating contextually appropriate responses through retrieval-augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard methods in quality and depth on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants. |
Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training. |
Let’s Rectify Step by Step: Improving Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Diffusion Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations conducted on eight benchmark datasets underscore the compelling advantages offered by DiffusionABSA when compared against robust baseline models. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion model which extracts aspects step by step and learns a denoising process that progressively restores them in a reverse manner. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations on eight benchmark datasets underscore the compelling advantages offered by DiffusionABSA when compared against robust baseline models. |
Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show language agents lack human-level planning abilities . limitations and mechanisms to address them remain insufficiently understood . |
| Approach: | They apply a feature attribution study to identify key factors hindering agent planning . they identify the limited role of constraints and diminishing influence of questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 15.6% on a real-world planning benchmark. |
Translation or Recitation? Calibrating Evaluation Scores for Machine Translation of Extremely Low-Resource Languages (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that performance across low-resource settings is variable, resulting in a significant barrier for the MT community. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FRED Difficulty Metrics to contextualize reported performance across different language pairs to determine whether breakthroughs reported in other contexts are artifacts of benchmark collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics explain a significant portion of result variability rather than model capability. |
Revisiting Interpolation Augmentation for Speech-to-Text Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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Chen Xu, Jie Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qian Dong, Chunliang Zhang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Dapeng Man, Wu Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to speech-to-text generation tasks are limited by the lack of extensive labeled datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use interpolation augmentation to construct virtual training samples by transforming inputs and labels to enhance generalization in other domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves performance across diverse tasks, architectures, and data scales, offering a promising avenue for more robust S2T systems in resource-constrained settings. |
Bridging the Granularity Gap for Acoustic Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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Chen Xu, Yuhao Zhang, Chengbo Jiao, Xiaoqian Liu, Chi Hu, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Huizhen Wang, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Despite the success of speech recognition, how to encode the speech features effectively remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a Progressive Down-Sampling technique which compresses acoustic features into coarser-grained units containing more complete semantic information, like text-level representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields comparable or better results on the speech recognition task and inference speedups ranging from 1.20x to 1.47x. |
M3CoT: A Novel Benchmark for Multi-Domain Multi-step Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MCoT requires models to leverage knowledge from both textual and visual modalities for step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to address the challenges of MCoT, and evaluate it using vision large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark addresses the above challenges and shows that current models still struggle to reason in M3CoT. |
Past Meets Present: Creating Historical Analogy with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Nianqi Li, Siyu Yuan, Jiangjie Chen, Jiaqing Liang, Feng Wei, Zujie Liang, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Historical analogies are important abilities that help people make decisions and understand the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a historical analogy acquisition task that uses large language models to acquire historical analogies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates hallucinations and stereotypes when LLMs generate historical analogies. |
EmotionQueen: A Benchmark for Evaluating Empathy of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) focus on basic sentiment analysis tasks, such as emotion recognition, which is not enough to evaluate LLMs’ overall emotional intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluating the emotional intelligence of large language models (LLMs) that includes four distinct tasks: Key Event Recognition, Mixed Event Recognition and Implicit Emotional Recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework includes four distinct tasks: Key Event Recognition, Mixed Event Recognition and Implicit Emotional Recognition. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chuhao Jin, Yutao Zhu, Lingzhen Kong, Shijie Li, Xiao Zhang, Ruihua Song, Xu Chen, Huan Chen, Yuchong Sun, Yu Chen, Jun Xu
| Challenge: | Persuasive dialogue models rely on utterance semantic matching and a key aspect has been ignored . compared with utterrance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model conversation semantics and strategies to match them using a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves state-of-the-art by 5% on a small and 37% on 'large' datasets. |
MAGI: Multi-Agent Guided Interview for Psychiatric Assessment (2025.findings-acl)
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Guanqun Bi, Zhuang Chen, Zhoufu Liu, Hongkai Wang, Xiyao Xiao, Yuqiang Xie, Wen Zhang, Yongkang Huang, Yuxuan Chen, Libiao Peng, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) do not align with psychiatric diagnostic protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview into automatic computational workflows through coordinated multi-agent collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms the gold-standard Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) into automatic computational workflows through coordinated multi-agent collaboration. |
M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce a new embedding model for semantic retrieval of more than 100 working languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a new embedding model that supports multi-lingual, cross-lingual and long-document retrieval . they propose integrating relevance scores from different retrieval functionalities into the teacher signal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits superior performance on multilingual, cross-lingual, and long-document retrieval benchmarks. |
FEDKIM: Adaptive Federated Knowledge Injection into Medical Foundation Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing foundation models are limited in access to diverse modalities and privacy regulations restrict the development of comprehensive foundation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge injection approach to extract and inject healthcare knowledge into medical foundation models to enhance their ability to handle multiple tasks and modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves privacy and enhances the model’s ability to handle complex medical tasks involving multiple modalities. |
GhostBERT: Generate More Features with Cheap Operations for BERT (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that some parameters in pre-trained language models can be pruned away without severe accuracy degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates more features with very cheap operations from the remaining features and can be applied to unpruned BERT models to enhance their performance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results on the GLUE benchmark on three backbone models (i.e., BERT, RoBERTa and ELECTRA) verify the efficacy of the proposed method. |
Token-level Inference-Time Alignment for Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Kejia Chen, Junjun Zheng, Jiawen Zhang, Manxi Lin, Xiao Pan, Jiacong Hu, Jian Lou, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often prioritize linguistic fluency over visual fidelity . despite widespread adoption, VLMs often exhibit a critical failure mode: hallucination . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Token-level Inference-Time Alignment that steers the decoding process without updating the base model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on 13 benchmarks across architectures . it boosts LLaVA-1.5-7B by 8.6% on MMVet and achieves a 74.0 MMStar score . |
Improving Continual Relation Extraction through Prototypical Contrastive Learning (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to extract relations towards the continuous and iterative arrival of new data, of which the major challenge is the catastrophic forgetting of old tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual Relation Extraction framework with Contrastive Learning which is built with a classification network and a prototypical contrastive network to achieve incremental-class learning of CRE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets and proves its effectiveness on improving performance. |
MENTOR: Efficient Autoregressive Image Generation with Balanced Multimodal Control (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent text-to-image models achieve impressive visual quality but still face challenges in precise controllability, balancing multimodal inputs, and high training cost for multimodal image generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an autoregressive framework with a two-stage training paradigm for controllable multimodal image generation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on DreamBench++ and DreamBech show that the proposed framework achieves a strong balance between textual and visual guidance for controllable image generation. |
Text-Attributed Graph Learning with Coupled Augmentations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on either the text attribute or the graph structure, neglecting the other aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that combines the strengths of both text-learning and graph-learning models in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on diverse datasets. |
Drivel-ology: Challenging LLMs with Interpreting Nonsense with Depth (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite excelling at many natural language processing tasks, large language models fail to grasp the layered semantics of Drivelological text. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark dataset of over 1,200+ carefully curated and diverse examples across English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean to examine their Drivelological characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models lack conceptual understanding and lack conceptual and semantic accuracy. |
CompassVerifier: A Unified and Robust Verifier for LLMs Evaluation and Outcome Reward (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shudong Liu, Hongwei Liu, Junnan Liu, Linchen Xiao, Songyang Gao, Chengqi Lyu, Yuzhe Gu, Wenwei Zhang, Derek F. Wong, Songyang Zhang, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack robustness to handle complex edge cases and generalizability across different domains. |
| Approach: | They develop an accurate and lightweight verifier model for evaluation and outcome reward that matches unstructured outputs against standard answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process multiple answer types including multi-subproblems, formulas, and sequence answers while identifying abnormal/invalid responses. |
HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongbo Zhang, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Fei Yu, Zhihong Chen, Guiming Chen, Jianquan Li, Xiangbo Wu, Zhang Zhiyi, Qingying Xiao, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the distilled language model outperforms its teacher model (ChatGPT) in most cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM) that leverages both distilled data from **ChatGPT** and real-world data from**doctors** in the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model in most cases by using additional real-world data and RLMF to align the language model with the merits of both sources. |
DyLex: Incorporating Dynamic Lexicons into BERT for Sequence Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)
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Baojun Wang, Zhao Zhang, Kun Xu, Guang-Yuan Hao, Yuyang Zhang, Lifeng Shang, Linlin Li, Xiao Chen, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate lexical knowledge into deep learning models are limited by large-scale dynamic lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA even with large scale lexicons, the authors show . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
DCFEE: A Document-level Chinese Financial Event Extraction System based on Automatically Labeled Training Data (P18-4)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract events from documents are limited due to the high cost of labeling . Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of a document-level Chinese financial event extraction system. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level Chinese financial event extraction framework which detects event mentions and extracts events from financial news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects event mentions and extracts events from financial news . it can generate large scale labeled data and extract events from entire document . |
Anti-Length Shift: Dynamic Outlier Truncation for Training Efficient Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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Wei Wu, Liyi Chen, Congxi Xiao, Tianfu Wang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Hui Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing efficient reasoning methods rely on explicit length penalties for excessive verbosity on simple queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time intervention that selectively suppresses redundant tokens . they find length shift occurs when models generate unnecessary reasoning on trivial inputs - a phenomenon that is often unexplored . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces inference token usage by 78% while increasing accuracy compared to the initial policy and surpasses state-of-the-art efficient reasoning methods. |
Dangling-Aware Entity Alignment with Mixed High-Order Proximities (2022.findings-naacl)
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Juncheng Liu, Zequn Sun, Bryan Hooi, Yiwei Wang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Xiaokui Xiao, Muhao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dangling-aware entity alignment are underexplored but important problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses high-order proximities to detect dangling entities and align matchable entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects dangling entities and aligns matchable entities better than existing methods. |
On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a data-centric solution to alleviate limitations of real-world data with synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic workflow for LLM-driven synthetic data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflows highlight gaps in existing research and outline avenues for future studies. |
OpenSLU: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Toolkit for Spoken Language Understanding (2023.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a task-oriented dialogue system . open-source toolkit provides a unified, modularized, and extensible toolkit for SLU . |
| Approach: | They introduce an open-source toolkit to provide a unified toolkit for spoken language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit unifies 10 models for both single-intent and multi-intention scenarios. |
Skeletons Matter: Dynamic Data Augmentation for Text-to-Query (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on a single query language, resulting in limited generalizability . a new task paradigm is proposed to unify semantic parsing tasks across different query languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a task paradigm that unifies parsing tasks across query languages . they identify query skeletons as a shared optimization target of Text-to-Query tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance using only a small amount of synthesized data. |
From Shortcuts to Triggers: Backdoor Defense with Denoised PoE (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor defense methods focus on specific triggers, leaving a universal defense unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose an ensemble-based backdoor defense framework that denies backdoor attacks by capturing backdoor shortcuts and preventing learning them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves defense performance against backdoor attacks . it is also effective under a more challenging but practical setting . |
BiTIIMT: A Bilingual Text-infilling Method for Interactive Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing IMT systems relying on lexical constrained decoding (LCD) are limited in translation efficiency and quality due to LCD. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel interactive neural machine translation system that uses lexical constraints to decode missing words in a manually revised translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs significantly better and faster than state-of-the-art IMT on three translation tasks. |
Sentipolis: Emotion-Aware Agents for Social Simulations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning and long-context memory are making large language models (LLMs) appear increasingly human-like, which has led researchers to adopt LLM agents as a substrate for social simulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for emotionally stateful agents that integrates continuous Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance representation, dual-speed emotion dynamics, and emotion–memory coupling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves emotional grounded behavior, boosting communication, and emotional continuity across thousands of interactions over multiple base models and evaluators. |
LegalGraphRAG: Multi-Agent Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Legal Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Zerui Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Zhishang Xiang, Zhimin Wei, Linfeng Gao, Xiao Huang, Zhihong Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) is a new approach to document retrieval, but it is not suitable for legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for reliable legal reasoning that structures knowledge as relational graphs and uses a multi-agent system to verify validity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing GraphRAG models in accurate and trustworthy legal analysis. |
JARVIS or Ultron? A Survey on the Safety and Security Threats of Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Ada Chen, Yongjiang Wu, Junyuan Zhang, Jingyu Xiao, Shu Yang, Jen-tse Huang, Kun Wang, Wenxuan Wang, Shuai Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in computer-using agents have created new safety and security risks . despite the impressive capabilities of CUAs, there are still significant security risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematization of knowledge on the safety and security threats of Computer-Using Agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a framework for assessing the safety and security risks of computer-using agents. |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
Why Did Apple Fall: Evaluating Curiosity in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating curiosity-like behaviors in large language models lack curiosity-inspired features. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychology-inspired framework to evaluate curiosity in large language models . they adapt the Five-Dimensional Curiosity scale Revised (5DCR) to LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates curiosity in large language models using questionnaires and behavioral studies. |
Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on neural machine translation (NMT) has demonstrated impressive performance improvements and became the de-facto standard. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic curriculum learning method to reorder training samples in training using a Transformer-based system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three low-resource machine translation benchmarks and different sized data of WMT’16 En-De. |
HyperText: Endowing FastText with Hyperbolic Geometry (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirically, we show that HyperText outperforms FastText on a range of text classification tasks with much reduced parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses hyperbolic geometry to model tree-like hierarchies in natural language sentences by embedding words or ngrams in hyperbolical space. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed model outperforms FastText on a range of text classification tasks with much reduced parameters. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
Bypassing Neural Evaluations for Fast Audio Editing via Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaoqian Liu, Zhengkun Ge, Jianjin Wang, Haoran Zhang, Yuan Ge, Kaiyan Chang, Chen Xu, Tong Xiao, Zhengtao Yu, Linfeng Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-audio editing via inversion techniques, but these models typically rely on dense, fixed-step sampling trajectories to maintain structural integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation framework that accelerates inversion-based editing process by dynamically evaluating only the most critical generative phases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a 3.9 speedup with negligible loss in fidelity. |
Exploring Logically Dependent Multi-task Learning with Causal Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical multi-task learning models can utilize task dependencies by stacking encoders and outperform democratic ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that utilizes the labels of all lower-level tasks and a Gumbel sampling model to deal with cascading errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms democratic models on six out of seven subtasks and achieves state-of-the-art on the two English and one Chinese datasets. |
S^4: Operationalizing Speech Act Theory for Strategic Semi-Structured Psychiatric Interview (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for psychiatric interviewing degenerate into rigid interrogation or aimless chitchat due to a lack of strategic planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for psychiatric interviewing grounded in Speech Act Theory that integrates a large-scale dataset with fine-grained psychic speech act annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in psychiatric interviewing. |
Praetor: A Fine-Grained Generative LLM Evaluator with Instance-Level Customizable Evaluation Criteria (2025.acl-long)
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Yongqi Leng, Renren Jin, Yue Chen, Zhuowen Han, Ling Shi, Jianxiang Peng, Lei Yang, Juesi Xiao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods are inadequate to evaluate large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained generative LLM evaluator with instance-level customazable evaluation criteria that can be used to evaluate large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing LLM evaluators and instruction-tuned LLMs on multiple benchmarks and sets new SOTA results. |
EvoBench: Towards Real-world LLM-Generated Text Detection Benchmarking for Evolving Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect LLM-generated texts rely on static benchmarks that neglect the evolving nature of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the generalization of LLM-generated text detection methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures generalization of 14 detection methods across LLMs. |
OVEL: Online Video Entity Linking (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Multi-modal Entity Linking focus on linking textual and visual mentions or offline videos’ mentions to entities in multi-modal knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called Online Video Entity Linking to establish connections between online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can establish connections between mentions in online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
Merge then Realign: Simple and Effective Modality-Incremental Continual Learning for Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enhanced their versatility as they integrate a growing number of modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple MCL paradigm that addresses forgetting and misalignment . they propose 'MErge then ReAlign' to extend existing models to more modalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm is easy to deploy and highly reusable in the MLLM community. |
From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)
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Lei Yang, Leiyu Pan, Bojian Xiong, Renren Jin, Shaowei Zhang, Yue Chen, Ling Shi, Jiang Zhou, Junru Wu, Zhen Wang, Jianxiang Peng, Juesi Xiao, Tianyu Dong, Zhuowen Han, Zhuo Chen, Yuqi Ren, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks. |
Automatic Construction of Sememe Knowledge Bases via Dictionaries (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sememe knowledge bases (SKBs) are used to analyze natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to build sememe knowledge bases from an existing dictionary . they propose to use existing dictionaries to build an English and a French SKB . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to HowNet, the most widely used SKB that takes decades to build manually. |
Improving Variational Autoencoder for Text Modelling with Timestep-Wise Regularisation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been widely used in text modelling but posterior collapse is a problem when RNN-based models are employed. |
| Approach: | They propose a timestep-wise regularisation VAE architecture which can effectively avoid posterior collapse when used in text modelling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model avoids posterior collapse and can be applied to any RNN-based VAE model. |
DetectBench: Can Large Language Model Detect and Piece Together Implicit Evidence? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhouhong Gu, Lin Zhang, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Jiangjie Chen, Wenhao Huang, Yikai Zhang, Shusen Wang, Zheyu Ye, Yan Gao, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs' abilities to detect evidence in long contexts are far inferior to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' abilities in evidence and multi-step commonsense reasoning within a long context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of LLMs in evidence detection and commonsense reasoning. |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Xiaoqian Liu, Xiaowen Liu, Qingxuan Sun, Yuhao Zhang, Murun Yang, Qianqian Dong, Tom Ko, Mingxuan Wang, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (E2E ST) and non-autoregressive (NAR) generation are promising in language and speech processing for their advantages of less error propagation and low latency. |
| Approach: | They develop a model that uses connectionist temporal classification to predict the source and target texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average BLEU score of 29.5 with a speed-up of 5.67. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
PHMOSpell: Phonological and Morphological Knowledge Guided Chinese Spelling Check (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | False gram and phonological errors make Chinese spelling check difficult . a novel end-to-end trainable model outperforms existing methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a trainable Chinese spelling check model that integrates phonological and visual information into a pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
Are Your LLMs Capable of Stable Reasoning? (2025.findings-acl)
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Junnan Liu, Hongwei Liu, Linchen Xiao, Ziyi Wang, Kuikun Liu, Songyang Gao, Wenwei Zhang, Songyang Zhang, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation protocols and metrics do not capture the full spectrum of LLM capabilities, especially in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation metric that continuously assesses model performance across multiple sampling attempts, quantifying both the model’s potential capabilities and operational consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric measures model performance across multiple sampling attempts and provides comprehensive insights into their potential capabilities and operational consistency. |
Revisiting Scaling Laws for Language Models: The Role of Data Quality and Training Strategies (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws suggest augmenting model size and training data results in enhanced performance, but recent studies reveal deviations, particularly in large language models, where performance improvements decelerate—a phenomenon known as sub-scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a sub-optimal scaling law that better predicts performance in sub-scaling regimes by examining data quality and training strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling law better predicts performance in sub-scaling regimes, highlighting the importance of data quality and diversity. |
Landmark Embedding: A Chunking-Free Embedding Method For Retrieval Augmented Long-Context Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmentation work with chunked contexts, which leads to poor quality of semantic representation and incomplete retrieval of useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for retrieval augmentation of long-context language modeling using landmark embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing retrieval methods with a notable advantage. |
Evaluating Entity Disambiguation and the Role of Popularity in Retrieval-Based NLP (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that retrievers underperform on rarer entities that share a name . open-domain tasks require a knowledge source to perform reasoning and produce an answer . |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation benchmark for retrieving entities that share a name . they define Ambiguous Entity Retrieval sets as a collection of entities that have a common name - and query about those entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed sets underperform on rarer entities that share a name . the retrievers exhibit popularity bias, and are twice as likely to retrieve erroneous documents . |
The Magic of IF: Investigating Causal Reasoning Abilities in Large Language Models of Code (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | entailment a) |
| Approach: | entailment : We want to explore whether Code-LLMs with code prompts are better . encoding a code prompt is better than text-only LLMs, they say . |
| Outcome: | entailment : Our results show that Code-LLMs with code prompts are better compared to text-only LLMs. |
From Long Videos to Engaging Clips: A Human-Inspired Video Editing Framework with Multimodal Narrative Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Xiao Li, Yadong Wei, null Songxueyu, Yang Song, null Xiaxiaoqiang, Fangrui Zeng, Zaiyi Chen, null Liuliu, Gu Xu, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video editing rely on textual cues from ASR transcripts and segment selection, often neglecting rich visual context. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-inspired automatic video editing framework that leverages multimodal narrative understanding to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines across general and advertisement-oriented editing tasks. |
Toward Automated Robustness Evaluation of Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutao Hou, Zeguan Xiao, Fei Yu, Yihan Jiang, Ma Shuguang, Zhaoqian Dai, Hailiang Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen
| Challenge: | Existing robustness evaluations rely on hand-crafted templates or a limited set of perturbation rules, resulting in model failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework inspired by software stress testing that generates adversarial variants via a multi-round rewrite-verify loop, ensuring semantic consistency while successfully inducing model failure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates adversarial variants dynamically for each LLM, minimizing the risk of data contamination. |
AutoBreach: Universal and Adaptive Jailbreaking with Efficient Wordplay-Guided Optimization via Multi-LLMs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak research exhibits limitations in universality, validity, and efficiency . Existing methods for jailbreaking LLMs have limited validity and effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box approach that uses wordplay-guided mapping rule sampling to create universal adversarial prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method efficiently identifies security vulnerabilities across various LLMs, achieving an average success rate of over 80% with fewer than 10 queries. |
MARK: Multi-agent Collaboration with Ranking Guidance for Text-attributed Graph Clustering (2025.findings-acl)
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Yiwei Fu, Yuxing Zhang, Chunchun Chen, JianwenMa JianwenMa, Quan Yuan, Rong-Cheng Tu, Xinli Huang, Wei Ye, Xiao Luo, Minghua Deng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cluster graphs with GNNs are limited due to label scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage large language models to enhance text-attributed graph clustering by using three LLMs as ranking-based supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates reliable guidance using collaboration of three LLM-based agents as ranking-based supervision signals. |
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Chen, Haoze Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Lirong Gao, Qi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads. |
MobiLoRA: Accelerating LoRA-based LLM Inference on Mobile Devices via Context-aware KV Cache Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MobiLoRA focuses on optimizing the key-value (KV) caches due to the limited computing and memory resources of mobile devices. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize the key-value caches due to limited computing resources . they propose similarity-aware delta encoding for semantic-level contexts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model accelerates LoRA-based LLM inference by 57.6% on mobile devices. |
Geo-BERT Pre-training Model for Query Rewriting in POI Search (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve the word mismatch between queries and documents are often inadequate to integrate geographic information into the pre-training model. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a pre-training model to integrate semantics and geographic information in the pre-trained representations of POIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves excellent accuracy on a wide range of real-world datasets of map services. |
Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding: Integrating the Pre-trained Models into Speech Translation Encoders (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end Speech Translation (E2E ST) encoders lack global context representation, whereas MT encoder lacks it. |
| Approach: | They propose a Stacked Acoustic-and-Textual Encoding method for speech translation . they propose an adaptor module to alleviate representation inconsistency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art BLEU scores of 18.3 and 25.2 on two ST tasks. |
P4: Plug-and-Play Discrete Prompting for Large Language Models Personalization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in following instructions, but manually prompting them to exhibit certain personalities may result in sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play prompting method to manipulate Large Language Models with distinct human-like personality traits by appending discrete personalized suffixes to query or dialog histories and focusing exclusively on influential tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other prompting methods and model editing methods on four models ranging from 1.1B to 13B and achieves 79.9% accuracy in customizing LLMs’ personalities. |
HOTVCOM: Generating Buzzworthy Comments for Videos (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on generating descriptive comments in English . hot-comments are important for video marketing and branding, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate hot-comments on a Chinese video dataset . they use a combination of visual, auditory, and textual data to generate them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it generates hot-comments on both the new and existing datasets. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Goal-oriented Dialogue Policy Planning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Optimal policy planning is a difficult task, authors say . many goal-oriented conversations require subjective strategies, they say - a problem in goal-orientated settings . |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to perform goal-oriented dialogue policy planning without model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs goal-oriented dialogue policy planning without model training. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods that ignore contextual knowledge fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual knowledge to update and correct LLMs' knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on a dataset that contains irrelevant questions. |
Dr.Academy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Questioning Capability in Education for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recognizing LLMs’ capability to generate educational content can lead to advances in automated and personalized learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the questioning capability in education as a teacher of large language models by evaluating their generated educational questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate educational content that aligns with human perspectives and is more apt as an interdisciplinary teacher. |
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. |
Read it in Two Steps: Translating Extremely Low-Resource Languages with Code-Augmented Grammar Books (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using code rules improves rule retrieval and application of grammar books in low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose a grammar rule retrieval and application step into two steps . they propose to represent grammar rules as code functions to facilitate LLM reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts rule retrieval and application, resulting in 13.1% BLEU improvement. |
A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English . MRC is a new field of research that aims to comprehend the context of articles and answer the questions based on them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities to existing reading comprehension datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is composed of 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. |
Natural Language Video Localization with Learnable Moment Proposals (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video moment localization have poor performance due to predefined rules. |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a fixed set of learnable moment proposals with 'border-aware loss' they propose to localize the video moment corresponding to the query by locating the start and end timestamps in an untrimmed video. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two challenging benchmarks. |
Exploring Label Hierarchy in a Generative Way for Hierarchical Text Classification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification are lacking in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware T5 model with path-adaptive attention mechanism to exploit hierarchical dependency across different levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models especially in Macro-F1 and low Macro. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification with Document-level Sentiment Preference Modeling (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies consider Aspect Sentiment Classification (ASC) as an independent sentence-level classification problem aspect by aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cooperative Graph Attention Networks approach for cooperatively learning aspect-related sentence representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in document-level sentiment classification. |
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. |
AdaLoGN: Adaptive Logic Graph Network for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and limitations for machine reading comprehension are insufficient for logical reasoning over text. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic approach which passes messages over a graph representing logical relations between text units to predict an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on ReClor and LogiQA. |
Curse of Knowledge: Your Guidance and Provided Knowledge are biasing LLM Judges in Complex Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has focused on simple settings, but their reliability in complex tasks remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as judges to evaluate reliability in complex tasks . they use a challenge benchmark to expose and quantify Auxiliary Information Induced Biases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exposes and quantifies Auxiliary Information Induced Biases across 12 basic and 3 advanced scenarios. |
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate character fidelity of role-playing agents with psychological scales . they propose to use psychological scale to measure personality traits of RPAs based on personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reproduces character fidelity with psychological scales and shows that it is effective in measuring personality traits. |
A Semantically Consistent and Syntactically Variational Encoder-Decoder Framework for Paraphrase Generation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Paraphrase generation is a longstanding problem in natural language processing (NLP) Neural network-based methods have shown great progress on paraphrase generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates variational inference on a target-related latent variable to introduce the diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the metrics based on n-gram matching and semantic similarity, and it can generate multiple different paraphrases by assembling different syntactic variables. |
Representation-Guided Parameter-Efficient LLM Unlearning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to unlearning large language models often memorize sensitive or harmful information, but they struggle with the forget-retain trade-off due to the polysemantic nature of LLMs parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-guided low-rank unlearning approach that leverages the geometric properties of representation spaces to achieve robust and precise unlearning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on TOFU and WMDP benchmarks while maintaining higher model utility. |
SeqAR: Jailbreak LLMs with Sequential Auto-Generated Characters (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the potential misuse of large language models (LLMs) however, the ability to align LLMs with human values is still vulnerable to malicious attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a red-teaming strategy to enhance LLM safety by using a framework to design jailbreak prompts automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves attack success rates of 88% and 60% in cold-start scenarios. |
GeoAgent: To Empower LLMs using Geospatial Tools for Address Standardization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to address address standardization are lacking in the current field. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates spatial knowledge into address texts and achieves efficient address standardization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates spatial knowledge into address texts and achieves efficient address standardization. |
Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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Paiheng Xu, Gang Wu, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Chang Xiao, Franck Dernoncourt, Tianyi Zhou, Wei Ai, Viswanathan Swaminathan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, but runtime code generation is limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset by exploiting large language models and publicly available scripting guides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. |
Hyperbolic Capsule Networks for Multi-Label Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for classification of labels are limited by feature aggregation and encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use hyperbolic capsule networks to capture fine-grained label information . they also propose a new routing method to adaptively adjust capsule number during routing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of multi-label classification on tail labels. |
Predicting Entity Salience in Extremely Short Documents (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | False positive: ES is a natural language understanding task that determines which entities are most salient to a passage . Falsity: Popsicle, Frank Epperson and San Francisco are salient entities . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and data-efficient approach for entity salience detection on short documents . they propose he use of a human-labeled dataset to evaluate entity salient on short questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves competitive performance over state-of-the-art models at significant cost and latency advantages. |
Task-Agnostic Detector for Insertion-Based Backdoor Attacks (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for textual backdoor detection are task-specific and less effective beyond sentence classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic method for backdoor detection that leverages final layer logits and an efficient pooling technique. |
| Outcome: | TABDet can jointly learn from diverse task-specific models, demonstrating superior detection efficacy over traditional methods. |
Non-Autoregressive Translation by Learning Target Categorical Codes (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive text generation models still fall behind in translation quality . authors propose a model that learns implicitly categorical codes as latent variables . |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive Transformer model that implicitly categorizes latent variables into decoding . they find it improves translation quality by introducing more informative decoder inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or better performance in machine translation tasks than strong baselines. |
Task-Related In-Context Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Standard in-context learning assumes identical output spaces between test and retrieval datasets . however, in practice, these datasets can be fully aligned, partially alignes, or fully disjoint in label space . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for in-context learning under output-space mismatch . they identify demonstrations relevant to the test label space via a Bayesian probabilistic criterion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results across three LLMs, three task types, and four datasets. |
Self-supervised Cross-modal Pretraining for Speech Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal speech emotion recognition and sentiment analysis have not improved results due to their relatively simple fusion mechanisms and lack of proper cross-modal pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep-fused audio-text bi-modal transformer with carefully designed cross-modal fusion mechanism and stage-wise cross-mod pretraining scheme to facilitate cross-modulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exceeds benchmarks on public IEMOCAP emotion and CMU-MOSEI sentiment datasets by a large margin. |
SgSum:Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive multi-document summarization methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel framework for extractive multi-document summarization that selects a sub-graph as the summary instead of selecting salient sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods on multi-document datasets and human evaluations show it produces more coherent and informative summaries. |
InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Contrastive Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity . existing methods for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropic-based ranking. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that InstructDiff outperforms baseline training on reasoning tasks while using only 10% of the data. |
KERAG: Knowledge-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Advanced Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods rely on semantic parsing to retrieve knowledge strictly necessary for answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-filtering-summarization pipeline that enhances QA coverage by retrieving a broader subgraph likely to contain relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses state-of-the-art solutions by about 7% in quality and exceeds GPT-4o (Tool) by 10-21%. |
ANALOGYKB: Unlocking Analogical Reasoning of Language Models with A Million-scale Knowledge Base (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ANALOGYKB is a million-scale analogy knowledge base based on existing knowledge graphs (KGs) based upon relational knowledge triples, we can discover new analogies using the corresponding relations between concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a million-scale analogy knowledge base derived from existing knowledge graphs (KGs) ANALOGYKB identifies analogies of the same relations and analogies from analogous relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables both smaller LMs and LLMs to gain better analogical reasoning capabilities. |
Multi-Task Label Embedding for Text Classification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work treats labels of each task as independent and meaningless one-hot vectors, which cause a loss of potential label information. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine multi-task learning with semantic vectors to convert labels into vectors . their results are based on extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets based in chinese . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can improve performance on five benchmark datasets on text classification tasks. |
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
How Do Large Language Models Perform in Dynamical System Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent data-driven methods often use graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn interactions between objects. |
| Approach: | They propose prompting techniques for dynamical system modeling and evaluate their performance . they find that large language models demonstrate competitive performance without training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show competitive performance without training compared to state-of-the-art methods in dynamical system modeling. |
LEAF: Large Language Diffusion Model for Time Series Forecasting (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has applied large language models (LLMs) into time series forecasting, but they lack an understanding of holistic temporal patterns with potential error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that marries Larg e Langu age Diffusion Model with time series forecasting (LEAF) they propose converting time series into tokens and adopting language diffusion models to capture temporal dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates future predictions with a diffusion model from a holistic view. |
Tucker Decomposition with Frequency Attention for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for temporal knowledge graph completion only consider the combination of one relation with one timestamp, ignoring the global nature of the embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge Graph Completion model that captures global temporal dependencies between one relation and the entire timestamp. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three standard TKGC datasets on several metrics. |
AgentReview: Exploring Peer Review Dynamics with LLM Agents (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of peer review analysis do not address multivariate nature of the process, account for latent variables, and are constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model based peer review simulation framework which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses privacy concerns. |
AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evaluation benchmarks based on predefined domains and human-labeled data face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated information retrieval benchmark based on predefined domains and human-labeled data . AIR-Bench is automated and Heterogeneous with three key features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data. |
Diagnosing the First-Order Logical Reasoning Ability Through LogicNLI (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on diagnosing LMs' reasoning abilities in natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic method for first-order logic reasoning with a proposed benchmark, LogicNLI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method disentangles the target FOL reasoning from commonsense inference and can be used to diagnose LMs from four perspectives: accuracy, robustness, generalization, and interpretability. |
TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Transformer-based pre-training models like BERT are computationally expensive and limited to resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which ternarizes the weights in a fine-tuned BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the other methods on the GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks while being 14.9x smaller. |
ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haiquan Zhao, Lingyu Li, Shisong Chen, Shuqi Kong, Jiaan Wang, Kexin Huang, Tianle Gu, Yixu Wang, Jian Wang, Liang Dandan, Zhixu Li, Yan Teng, Yanghua Xiao, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application for reducing stress and providing emotional guidance. |
| Approach: | They re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards to define roles of role-players . they train a specific role- playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4, and the model performs better than GPLs. |
TimeArena: Shaping Efficient Multitasking Language Agents in a Time-Aware Simulation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | e.g., GPT-4 still lag behind humans in effective multitasking, a study finds . current textual simulations do not adequately address the notion of time . |
| Approach: | They propose a textual simulated environment that incorporates complex temporal dynamics and constraints that better reflect real-life planning scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates complex temporal dynamics and constraints that better reflect real-life planning scenarios. |
CoMeT: Collaborative Memory Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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Runsong Zhao, Shilei Liu, Jiwei Tang, Langming Liu, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yujin Yuan, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity is a major barrier to long-context processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that enables LLMs to handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can handle arbitrarily long sequences with constant memory usage and linear time complexity. |
Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Generating accurate SQL queries for user questions rely on the capability of large language models (LLMs) however, some knowledge is not explicitly included in the database schema and user question or has been learned by LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-to-SQL framework that employs tailored Data Expert LLM (DELLM) to provide helpful knowledge for all text-to SQL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the state-of-the-art approaches for text-to-SQL tasks by leveraging a data expert LLM (DELLM) to provide useful knowledge for all text- to-SqL models. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
BERT4GCN: Using BERT Intermediate Layers to Augment GCN for Aspect-based Sentiment Classification (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Aspect-based sentiment classification ignore sequential features of context and lack syntactic knowledge of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which integrates sequential grammatical features from context and syntactic knowledge from dependency graphs to augment GCN to better encode dependency graph outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models when equipped with contextual word embedding from pre-training language models. |
MAPO: Boosting Large Language Model Performance with Model-Adaptive Prompt Optimization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yuyan Chen, Zhihao Wen, Ge Fan, Zhengyu Chen, Wei Wu, Dayiheng Liu, Zhixu Li, Bang Liu, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing research emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to specific tasks, rather than specific LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-adaptive prompt optimizer method that optimizes original prompts for each LLM in downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can optimize prompts for an LLM in downstream tasks. |
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Li, Rui Xu, Jian Yang, Junnan Liu, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Likang Xiao, Ming LI, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that modulates the contribution of each source model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model merging framework outperforms strong baselines on multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages. |
Neighbors Are Not Strangers: Improving Non-Autoregressive Translation under Low-Frequency Lexical Constraints (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lexically constrained neural machine translation suffer from high latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in algorithm for non-autoregressive translation for this problem . they propose ACT to familiarize the model with the source-side context of constraints . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over the backbone constrained NAT model in constraint preservation and translation quality, especially for rare constraints. |
Semantic-Space Exploration and Exploitation in RLVR for LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fanding Huang, Guanbo Huang, Xiao Fan, Yi He, Xiao Liang, Xiao Chen, Qinting Jiang, Faisal Nadeem Khan, Jingyan Jiang, Zhi Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that balances exploration and exploitation in the hidden-state space of response trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields consistent improvements across models, algorithms and reasoning benchmarks. |
CMB: A Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)
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Xidong Wang, Guiming Chen, Song Dingjie, Zhang Zhiyi, Zhihong Chen, Qingying Xiao, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great breakthrough in medicine, says a new study . existing studies on LLMs leverage subjective evaluation, but evaluation in medicine is professional . |
| Approach: | They propose a localized medical benchmark in Chinese rooted in native Chinese . they propose to use traditional Chinese medicine to evaluate large-scale LLMs . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark is developed to evaluate large-scale LLMs in china . the proposed model is rooted in the native Chinese linguistic and cultural framework . |
StrucText-Eval: Evaluating Large Language Model’s Reasoning Ability in Structure-Rich Text (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Structured data has been central to corporate data strategies for decades . however, with the advancement of large language models (LLMs), there has been a significant shift towards the effective utilization of unstructured data. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic evaluation data generation method to assess LLMs’ reasoning capabilities on structure-rich text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method supports 8 structured languages and 29 tasks, generating data with adjustable complexity through controllable nesting and structural width. |
Enhancing Legal Case Retrieval via Scaling High-quality Synthetic Query-Candidate Pairs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on case-to-case retrieval using lengthy queries, which does not match real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct query-candidate pairs and build the largest LCR dataset to date, LEAD. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the method can provide ample training signals for LCR models. |
Do Large Language Models have Problem-Solving Capability under Incomplete Information Scenarios? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing games such as "Who is undercover" are subjective and difficult to evaluate . |
| Approach: | They propose a game called BrainKing that evaluates LLMs' problem-solving capability under incomplete information scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game requires LLMs to identify target entities with limited yes-or-no questions and potential misleading answers. |
LLaSE-G1: Incentivizing Generalization Capability for LLaMA-based Speech Enhancement (2025.acl-long)
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Boyi Kang, Xinfa Zhu, Zihan Zhang, Zhen Ye, Mingshuai Liu, Ziqian Wang, Yike Zhu, Guobin Ma, Jun Chen, Longshuai Xiao, Chao Weng, Wei Xue, Lei Xie
| Challenge: | Recent advances in language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in semantic understanding and contextual modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLaMA-based language model that incentivizes generalization capabilities for speech enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model outperforms prior task-specific discriminative and generative models in acoustic enhancement tasks. |
MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-Agent Inner Dialogue (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujia Chen, Changsong Li, Yiming Wang, Tianjie Ju, Qingqing Xiao, Nan Zhang, Zifan Kong, Peng Wang, Binyu Yan
| Challenge: | Mental health issues are worsening in today’s competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent inner dialogue paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
RLHFPoison: Reward Poisoning Attack for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to poison large language models by using annotators to rank a set of collected responses to generate longer tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate longer tokens without harming the original safety alignment performance. |
Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are inherently dual-use and can be leveraged for both beneficial and harmful purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves tighter alignment on WMDP Bio and RWKU benchmarks. |
bert2BERT: Towards Reusable Pretrained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
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Cheng Chen, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Yujia Qin, Fengyu Wang, Zhi Wang, Xiao Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Pre-training large language models can be expensive and wasteful. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and a two-stage learning method to further accelerate the pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model. |
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo
| Challenge: | Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. |
Grammar-Based Code Representation: Is It a Worthy Pursuit for LLMs? (2025.findings-acl)
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Qingyuan Liang, Zhao Zhang, Zeyu Sun, Zheng Lin, Qi Luo, Xiao Yueyi, Yizhou Chen, Yuqun Zhang, Haotian Zhang, Lu Zhang, Chenbin Chenbin, Yingfei Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing research demonstrates the effectiveness of grammar-based code representations in small-scale models, showing their ability to reduce syntax errors and enhance performance. |
| Approach: | They develop a series of billion-scale grammar-based code representations that incorporate grammar rules into the code generation process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that grammar-based representations reduce syntax errors and improve performance even in billion-scale models. |
Finding the Sweet Spot: Preference Data Construction for Scaling Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate unintended outputs due to their unsupervised nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct preference pairs of selected and rejected LLMs by repeated random sampling to improve alignment performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance as the sample size increases. |
Improving Diversity of Demographic Representation in Large Language Models via Collective-Critiques and Self-Voting (2023.emnlp-main)
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Preethi Lahoti, Nicholas Blumm, Xiao Ma, Raghavendra Kotikalapudi, Sahitya Potluri, Qijun Tan, Hansa Srinivasan, Ben Packer, Ahmad Beirami, Alex Beutel, Jilin Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on diversity in large language models focus on the understudied class of fairness and inclusion concern in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to measure diversity in generated responses along people and culture axes by collective-critique and self-voting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods and human evaluations with human and automated evaluations. |
Empirical Analysis of Decoding Biases in Masked Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Pengcheng Huang, Tianming Liu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Tong Xiao, Zulong Chen, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing MDMs employ uncertainty-based decoding strategies that limit their reasoning ability and ultimately degrade generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that regularizes uncertainty-based decoding by incorporating two complementary priors to shape global decoding trajectories and promote content informativeness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing decoding strategies by more than 7% while achieving comparable performance to autoregressive models of similar parameter scales. |
Train in Vain: Functionality-Preserving Poisoning to Prevent Unauthorized Use of Code Datasets (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuan Xiao, Jiaming Wang, Yuchen Chen, Wei Song, Jun Sun, Shiqing Ma, Yanzhou Mu, Juan Zhai, Chunrong Fang, Jin Song Dong, Zhenyu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dataset poisoning require full-dataset poison, which breaks code compilability. |
| Approach: | They propose a functionality-preserving poisoning approach that injects short, compilable weak-use fragments into executed code paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method contaminates 10% of the dataset while maintaining 100% compilability and functional correctness. |
SciMMIR: Benchmarking Scientific Multi-modal Information Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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Siwei Wu, Yizhi Li, Kang Zhu, Ge Zhang, Yiming Liang, Kaijing Ma, Chenghao Xiao, Haoran Zhang, Bohao Yang, Wenhu Chen, Wenhao Huang, Noura Al Moubayed, Jie Fu, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Multi-modal information retrieval (MMIR) is a rapidly evolving field . current benchmarks for image-text pairings overlook the scientific domain . |
| Approach: | They develop a scientific domain-specific MMIR benchmark to evaluate image-text pairings using open-access research paper corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 530K image-text pairs extracted from scientific documents with detailed captions. |
Controllable Mixed-Initiative Dialogue Generation through Prompting (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Mixed initiative dialogue systems allow all interacting agents to initiate actions to control the interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose to prompt large language models as a drop-in replacement for fine-tuning on conditional generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prompts improve fine-tuning and ground truth responses . the results show that generated responses are high . |
Efficient Hyperparameter Optimization for LLM Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing hyperparameter optimization methods are inefficient in reinforcement learning due to model scale and resource-intensive training cycles. |
| Approach: | They propose a hyperparameter optimization method that adapts both model size and training budget as fidelity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the computational efficiency of each trial (up to 14.9) over existing HPO methods. |
DMIN: A Discourse-specific Multi-granularity Integration Network for Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on enhancing token-level interactions, but lack sufficient modeling of discourse structure information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a discourse structure called "thread" to enhance token interaction among different utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two datasets. |
FashionKLIP: Enhancing E-Commerce Image-Text Retrieval with Fashion Multi-Modal Conceptual Knowledge Graph (2023.acl-industry)
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Xiaodan Wang, Chengyu Wang, Lei Li, Zhixu Li, Ben Chen, Linbo Jin, Jun Huang, Yanghua Xiao, Ming Gao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in visual-language pre-trained (VLP) models have greatly improved cross-modal retrieval performance . however, the fine-grained interactions between objects from different modalities are far from well-established . e-commerce domain lacks sufficient training data and fine-granular cross-modulal knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-language pre-trained (VLP) image-text retrieval model that integrates cross-modal knowledge into the model to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on e-commerce image-text retrieval task by a large margin. |
Jailbreaking Attacks vs. Content Safety Filters: How Far Are We in the LLM Safety Arms Race? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the models, neglecting the full deployment pipeline . previous studies have underestimated the practical success of these attacks . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the effectiveness of jailbreak attacks targeting LLM safety alignment . they highlight critical gaps and call for further refinement of detection accuracy and usability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks can detect at least one safety filter across the entire deployment pipeline. |
Crafting Customisable Characters with LLMs: A Persona-Driven Role-Playing Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bohao Yang, Dong Liu, Chenghao Xiao, Kun Zhao, Chen Tang, Chao Li, Lin Yuan, Yang Guang, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating human-like text, but the potential for freely customisable characters remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which employs Large Language Models to create freely customisable characters through personalised characteristic feature injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights for developing more accurate and customisable human simulacra. |
Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Geometry Solving with Efficient Heuristic Auxiliary Constructions (2026.acl-long)
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Boyan Duan, Xiao Liang, Shuai Lu, Yaoxiang Wang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Mao Yang, Weizhu Chen, Yeyun Gong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for geometry theorem proving in Euclidean geometry are challenging and require a neural network to perform. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for adding auxiliary points in geometry that runs on CPUs without relying on neural network-based inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves silver-medal-level human performance on IMO-30 benchmark. |
Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yijia Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Yushi Bai, Yue Wu, Xianjun Yang, Xiao Luo, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Quanquan Gu, Haifeng Chen, Wei Wang, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic comprehension and generation capability, but when applied to specialized industries, they face challenges such as hallucination, insufficient domain knowledge, and failing to incorporate the latest domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model protects private data while enhancing the model's knowledge. |
Instructional Fingerprinting of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) require considerable cost to train from scratch . fingerprinting is essential to protect intellectual property and to ensure downstream users and developers adhere to their license terms. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for fingerprinting Large language models that implants a private key into the model to generate specific text when the key is present. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method prevents publisher overclaim and maintains robustness against fingerprint guessing and parameter-efficient training. |
Enhancing Explainable Rating Prediction through Annotated Macro Concepts (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models learn user and item embeddings and generate reasons based on these embedds. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based explanation framework that leverages macro concepts to bridge the gap between the user/item embeddings and the recommendation reasons. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three datasets prove the proposed model is superior to existing models. |
Taming Language Models for Text-attributed Graph Learning with Decoupled Aggregation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning text-attributed graphs neglect interaction between textual and structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates textual and structural information into TAG learning . they propose combining semantic aggregation and structural aggregations to improve learning a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art learning methods while requiring less resources. |
A General Framework for Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation to Simultaneous Translation (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite the success of neural machine translation, simultaneous neural machine translators are challenging due to syntactic structure difference and simultaneity requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adapting neural machine translation to translate simultaneously . they propose 'prefix translation' that utilizes a consecutive NMT model to translate source prefixes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework balancing quality and latency on three translation corpora and two language pairs shows that it performs well. |
TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive and difficult to efficiently execute on resource-restricted devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer distillation method that performs Transformer distillations at pre-training and task-specific learning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method accelerates inference and reduces model size while maintaining accuracy. |
Can LLMs Estimate Student Struggles? Human-AI Difficulty Alignment with Proficiency Simulation for Item Difficulty Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Accurate estimation of item (question or task) difficulty suffers from the cold start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale empirical analysis to examine human-AI Difficulty Alignment . they find that models struggle to simulate the capability limitations of students . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model size is not reliably helpful for human-AI alignment . high performance often impedes accurate difficulty estimation, the authors say . |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
GumbelSoft: Diversified Language Model Watermarking via the GumbelMax-trick (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate human-like content, but they also pose a problem with generation diversity, negatively impacting generation diversity and user experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logits-Addition watermark and three variants that aim to enhance diversity to overcome generation diversity challenges. |
| Outcome: | The Logits-Addition watermark outperforms the Logits+Trick-based watermark in diversity tests and outperformed other decoding-based methods by 0.1 to 0.3. |
Teaching Large Language Models an Unseen Language on the Fly (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models struggle to support numerous low-resource languages . Existing models lack sufficient training data for effective parameter updating . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adapting LLMs to unseen languages by in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Chinese-to-Zhuang translation performance and Zhuan-to Chinese translation performance. |
FreeAL: Towards Human-Free Active Learning in the Era of Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern machine learning models require a huge collection of precisely labeled data, which can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative learning framework that interactively distills and filters the task-specific knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves zero-shot performance on eight benchmark datasets without human supervision. |
LogicPoison: Logical Attacks on Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yilin Xiao, Jin Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Yujing Zhang, Chuang Zhou, Longhao Yang, Lingfei Ren, Xin Yang, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) however, traditional RAG attacks are difficult to pose an effective threat to GraphRAg systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack framework that targets logical reasoning rather than injecting false contents into GraphRAG systems by grounding their responses in structured knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on GraphRAG systems in both effectiveness and stealth. |
FUSE: Measure-Theoretic Compact Fuzzy Set Representation for Taxonomy Expansion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work models taxonomy concepts as vectors or geometric objects, but fuzzy sets are efficient for concept modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a set representation learning task based on fuzzy set approximation . they demonstrate remarkable improvements in taxonomy expansion using FUSE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves taxonomy expansion performance by 23% over baselines. |
The GaoYao Benchmark: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Multilingual and Multicultural Abilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yilun Liu, Chunguang Zhao, Mengyao Piao, Lingqi Miao, Shimin Tao, Minggui HE, Chenxin Liu, Zhang Li, null Mahongxia, Jiaxin Guo, Chen Liu, Liqun Deng, Jiansheng Wei, Xiaojun Meng, Fanyi Du, Daimeng Wei, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual evaluation benchmarks neglect cultural nuances and lack language coverage in subjective tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that categorizes evaluation tasks into three cultural layers and nine cognitive sub-layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses prior coverage by up to 111% on 20+ LLMs. |
Don’t be Contradicted with Anything! CI-ToD: Towards Benchmarking Consistency for Task-oriented Dialogue System (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Consistency Identification has been used for preventing inconsistent response generation, but few efforts have been made to task-oriented dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for Consistency Identification in task-oriented dialog system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is based on a single label and provides fine-grained labels to encourage model to know what inconsistent sources lead to it. |
Learning from Textual Radiology Reports: A Benchmark Dataset for Coronary CT Angiography (2026.acl-industry)
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Sudharshan Balaji, Zhiyu Liu, Zhengyuan Jiang, Shuo Lei, Yimin Chen, Yang Xiao, Shone O. Almeida, Mathew Joseph Karivelil, Christopher Malanga, Ning Wang
| Challenge: | CCTA reports provide an assessment of coronary disease severity to guide patient management. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that decouples structuring from classification by an LLM-based parser . CCTA-RADS is the largest publicly available dataset of CCDA reports . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the F1-score by 6%-13% compared with direct methods. |
Label-Specific Document Representation for Multi-Label Text Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to classify documents using labels only assign one label to document . multi-label text classification is a challenging task because of the huge amount of documents, words and labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a Label-Specific Attention Network (LSAN) to learn a label-specific document representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four datasets . it can predict low-frequency labels, and it can be used in sentimental analysis . |
Multi-Grained Knowledge Distillation for Named Entity Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained big models have delivered top performance in Seq2seq modeling, but their deployments in real-world applications are often hindered by excessive computations and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation scheme to efficiently transfer knowledge from big models to their cheaper counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme maximizes the assimilation of knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jacob Dineen, Aswin Rrv, Qin Liu, Zhikun Xu, Xiao Ye, Ming Shen, Zhaonan Li, Shijie Lu, Chitta Baral, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | QA-LIGN decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . scalar rewards obscure which objectives drive the training signal . |
| Approach: | a new method decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . |
| Outcome: | QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . the results outperform DPO and GRPO with state-of-the-art reward models given equivalent training . |
Query-Aware Knowledge Retrieval via Hyperbolic Structuring (2026.acl-long)
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Chuang Zhou, Junnan Dong, Yilin Xiao, Shengyuan Chen, Su Dong, di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhaozhuo Xu, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus primarily on retrieving isolated factual knowledge entities while neglecting the critical reasoning relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-centric retrieval framework that explicitly integrates structured knowledge graphs to support complex reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that HyperRAG outperforms baselines. |
APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Dongliang Chen, Xinlin Zhuang, Junjie Xu, Luojian Xie, Zehui Wang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Haolin Yang, Liang Dou, Xiao He, Xingjiao Wu, Ying Qian
| Challenge: | APEX optimizes for text-to-image generation by combining learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that stabilizes heterogeneous rewards and dynamically schedules objectives . they propose a method that achieves better Pareto trade-offs across four heterogenous objectives based on P3 Adaptive Priorities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves better pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy. |
GuiLoMo: Allocating Experts and Ranks for LoRA-MoE via Bilevel Optimization with GuidedSelection Vectors (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xinrong Chen, Hengyuan Zhang, Yingmin Qiu, Xiao Liang, Ziyue Li, Guanyu Wang, Weiping Li, Tong Mo, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) methods are efficient for a large language model with reduced computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise expert numbers and ranks allocation strategy with GuidedSelection Vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior or comparable performance to all baselines on three backbone models. |
PsychePass: Calibrating LLM Therapeutic Competence via Trajectory-Anchored Tournaments (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | evaluating therapeutic competence of large language models remains challenging due to unstructured and longitudinal nature of counseling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that calibrates the therapeutic competence of LLMs via trajectory-anchored tournaments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework calibrates the therapeutic competence of LLMs via trajectory-anchored tournaments. |
Dialect-SQL: An Adaptive Framework for Bridging the Dialect Gap in Text-to-SQL (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Text-to-SQL research focuses on specific database systems, limiting adaptability to different dialects. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs Object Relational Mapping (ORM) code as an intermediate language to bridge this gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods that generate SQL queries directly. |
Anchoring the Cache: Mitigating Contextual Hallucination in KV-Compressed Long-Context Summarization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that KV cache compression can increase hallucination scores in LLMs . modern LLM models support extremely long sequences, but their impact on model hallucinosity remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-phase strategy that selectively removes generated KV pairs from retrieval heads responsible for retrieving critical information from source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination across multiple models and datasets while preserving computational efficiency. |
Improving Visual-Semantic Embedding with Adaptive Pooling and Optimization Objective (2023.eacl-main)
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Zijian Zhang, Chang Shu, Ya Xiao, Yuan Shen, Di Zhu, Youxin Chen, Jing Xiao, Jey Han Lau, Qian Zhang, Zheng Lu
| Challenge: | Recent VSE models combine simple pooling methods with hard triplet loss to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive pooling strategy that allows the model to learn how to aggregate features through a combination of simple pooling methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms current state-of-the-art systems on image-to-text and text-toimage retrieval. |
RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shengyu Mao, Yong Jiang, Boli Chen, Xiao Li, Peng Wang, Xinyu Wang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved to enhance document retrieval by reformulating queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training query rewriting models that leverages a reranker framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides ranking feedback aligned well with the rewriting objectives without needing signals from annotations and supports both online and offline training models. |
Towards More Accurate Uncertainty Estimation In Text Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
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Jianfeng He, Xuchao Zhang, Shuo Lei, Zhiqian Chen, Fanglan Chen, Abdulaziz Alhamadani, Bei Xiao, ChangTien Lu
| Challenge: | Existing models of uncertainty score depend on winning score, which is the maximum probability in a semantic vector. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate accurate uncertainty score by improving the confidence of winning scores by reducing the effect of overconfidence of winning score and considering the impact of different categories simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the effect of overconfidence of winning score and considers impact of different categories of uncertainty simultaneously. |
Investigating Inference-time Scaling for Chain of Multi-modal Thought: A Preliminary Study (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Inference-time scaling of chain-of-thought (CoT) has been demonstrated as a promising approach for addressing multi-modal reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate visual and textual modalities within the reasoning process . they adopt a consistency-enhanced verifier to ensure effective guidance for both methods across different thought paradigms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms text-only reasoning on 10 tasks spanning diverse domains and requires higher token consumption for processing richer visual inputs. |
Rethinking and Improving Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | auxiliary tasks are highly consistent with end-to-end speech translation (ST) but their effectiveness has not been thoroughly studied. |
| Approach: | They propose an improved multi-task learning approach for the ST task that bridges the modal gap by mitigating the difference in length and representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the MuST-C dataset with 20.8% of training time required by the current SOTA method. |
Semi-supervised Fine-tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs require labeled data, which can be costly in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can fully exploit labeled and unlabeled data for LLM fine-tuning . they conducted experiments using GPT-4o-mini and Llama-3.1 on seven general or domain-specific datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can fully exploit labeled and unlabeled data for LLM alignment from a propagate-and-select manner. |
Pi-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Fine-Grained Guidance from Pivot Programming Languages (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based methods craft meticulous text guidelines and examples to facilitate SQL generation, but their accuracy is hindered by the large semantic gap between the texts and the low-resource SQL programs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Python as a pivot to bridge between natural language query and SQL program. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the execution accuracy of the best-performing baseline by up to 3.20. |
Topic-DPR: Topic-based Prompts for Dense Passage Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior research focused on optimizing a single prompt as a continuous prompt, but this approach leads to a semantic space collapse, preventing differentiation between relevant and irrelevant passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a dense passage retrieval model that uses topic-based prompts and propose 'positive and negative sampling strategies' to boost dense retrieval efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art retrieval techniques and improves space uniformity. |
Competition-Level Problems are Effective LLM Evaluators (2024.findings-acl)
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Yiming Huang, Zhenghao Lin, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Shuai Lu, Fangyu Lei, Yaobo Liang, Yelong Shen, Chen Lin, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet there is ongoing debate about their capabilities and the potential data contamination problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in solving recent competition-level programming problems in Codeforces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has experienced a cliff-like decline in problems after September 2021, which shows the potential data contamination and the challenges for any existing LLM to solve unseen complex reasoning problems. |
Polymorphic Universal Transformer (2026.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Zitian Gao, Yihao Xiao, Jason Klein Liu, Xinyu Yang, Yifan Luo, Haoming Luo, Zhengmao Ye, Tingwen Liu, Ran Tao, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Compute Distribution Skew is a pathological phenomenon in ultra-deep recurrent models . it causes over-smoothing, representation rank collapse, and degraded reasoning performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic architecture that redefines recursive computation by decoupling parameter count from depth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves representation rank and reasoning robustness while reducing computation by 64.7%. |
SudoLM: Learning Access Control of Parametric Knowledge with Authorization Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing preference alignment is a one-size-fits-all alignment mechanism, where the part of the large language model parametric knowledge with non-preferred features is uniformly blocked to all the users. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that lets LLMs learn access control over parametric knowledge for users with different credentials via authorization alignment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two application scenarios show that the proposed framework effectively controls the user’s access to parametric knowledge and maintains its general utility. |
Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automated feature generation rely on predefined operator libraries and do not incorporate feature semantics, limiting their ability to produce high-quality features. |
| Approach: | They propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MALMAS) that decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. |
Beneath Surface Similarity: Large Language Models Make Reasonable Scientific Analogies after Structure Abduction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on word analogies, but they neglect structures that underpin analogical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to abduct structures that form an analogy between two systems to evaluate their analogical reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on 400 scientific analogies from 13 different fields and is compared with a standard SCAR benchmark. |
Concise and Organized Perception Facilitates Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experimental results on several popular logical benchmarks (ProofWriter, PrOntoQA, PrONtoQA-OOD, and FOLIO) and mathematical benchmark (DI-GSM) show that COP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning approach called Concise and Organized Perception (COP) that carefully analyzes the given statements to identify the most pertinent information while eliminating redundancy efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several popular logical benchmarks and mathematical benchmarks. |
Enhancing Visual-Language Modality Alignment in Large Vision Language Models via Self-Improvement (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xiyao Wang, Jiuhai Chen, Zhaoyang Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Yiyang Zhou, Huaxiu Yao, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein, Parminder Bhatia, Taha Kass-Hout, Furong Huang, Cao Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual and language alignment depend on external models or data, leading to uncontrollable and unstable results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances visual and language alignment without external dependencies by incorporating an in-context self-critic mechanism that constructs preference pairs for tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and improves performance on 14 hallucination and comprehensive benchmarks. |
DeepStruct: Pretraining of Language Models for Structure Prediction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models perform structural understanding tasks that focus on understanding one aspect of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models by pretraining them to generate structures from the text on task-agnostic corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on 21 of 28 datasets. |
Fine-Grained and Multi-Dimensional Metrics for Document-Level Machine Translation (2025.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in machine translation, but most studies focus on sentence-level translation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs as a judge paradigm to evaluate document-level translations by directly prompting them to translate entire documents in a single pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality even without document-level fine-tuning compared to translating sentences separately . |
SOLAR-RL: Semi-Online Long-horizon Assignment Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jichao Wang, Liuyang Bian, Yufeng Zhou, Han Xiao, Yue Pan, Guozhi Wang, Hao Wang, Zhaoxiong Wang, Yafei Wen, Xiaoxin Chen, Shuai Ren, Lingfang Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training GUI agents on dynamic tasks are based on SFT or Behavior Cloning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates global trajectory insights directly into offline learning . they reconstruct diverse rollout candidates from static data and detect first failure point . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves long-horizon task completion rates and robustness compared to baselines. |
Generative Personality Simulation via Theory-Informed Structured Interview (2026.eacl-long)
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Pengda Wang, Huiqi Zou, Han Jiang, Hanjie Chen, Tianjun Sun, Xiaoyuan Yi, Ziang Xiao, Frederick L. Oswald
| Challenge: | Personality structured interviews are often lacking in advancing social science research. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate psychological insights into LLM simulations . they use a measure theory grounded evaluation procedure to evaluate reliability and validity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves human-like heterogeneity in LLM-simulated personality data and predicts personality-related behavioral outcomes. |
Natural Evolution-based Dual-Level Aggregation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models ignore asynchronous characteristics of event evolution, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Natural Evolution-based Dual-level Aggregation framework for TKG reasoning that incorporates asynchronous characteristics of event evolution into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates the asynchronous characteristics of event evolution for representation computation, thus improving prediction performance. |
Modeling Semantic Compositionality with Sememe Knowledge (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic compositionality (SC) is defined as the phenomenon that the meaning of a complex linguistic unit can be composed of the meanings of its constituents. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate sememes into SC models and employ them in learning multiword expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve significant performance boost compared to baseline methods without sememe knowledge. |
Exploring and Mitigating Shortcut Learning for Generative Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have incredible instruction-following capabilities while maintaining strong task completion ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to encourage LLMs to Forget Spurious correlations and Learn from In-context information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can mitigate shortcut learning by forging spurious correlations and learning from in-context information. |
Gen-SQL: Efficient Text-to-SQL By Bridging Natural Language Question And Database Schema With Pseudo-Schema (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shifted paradigms and leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle the challenging task of Text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate SQL queries . they exploit prior knowledge from the LLM to enhance embedding-based retriever . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves embedding-based retriever and reduces cost. |
AutoTinyBERT: Automatic Hyper-parameter Optimization for Efficient Pre-trained Language Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically searches architecture hyper-parameters in BERT . they use one-shot learning and the search space to provide an adaptive development way . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms both the baseline and distillation-based methods on GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks. |
Ensuring Readability and Data-fidelity using Head-modifier Templates in Deep Type Description Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative methods overlook grammatical structure or make factual mistakes in generated texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based method to ensure the readability of generated type descriptions . they also propose measurable metrics to measure the readibility of the generated type description . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves substantially compared with baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. |
scRAG: Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Cross-Tissue Single-Cell Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive potential in a wide range of fields, including biology, genomics and healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates advanced LLM-based RAG techniques into cross-tissue single-cell annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models, generalist models, domain-specific methods, and trained classifiers on a cross-tissue dataset. |
DEBUG: A Dense Bottom-Up Grounding Approach for Natural Language Video Localization (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language video localization are top-down and bottom-up . however, both approaches suffer several limitations, leading to performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a top-down approach for localizing a natural language description in a video sequence . they propose 'DEnse Bottom-Up Grounding' which uses the temporal boundaries of each video frame . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches the speed of top-down models while surpassing the state-of-the-art models. |
Exploring Contextual Word-level Style Relevance for Unsupervised Style Transfer (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to unsupervised style transfer lack fine-grained control of the influence from the target style. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that exploits the relevance of each output word to the target style . they pretrain a style classifier and train an attentional Seq2seq model to reconstruct input sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of transfer accuracy and content preservation. |
Distilling Script Knowledge from Large Language Models for Constrained Language Planning (2023.acl-long)
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Siyu Yuan, Jiangjie Chen, Ziquan Fu, Xuyang Ge, Soham Shah, Charles Jankowski, Yanghua Xiao, Deqing Yang
| Challenge: | Existing work exploits language models to plan for abstract goals of stereotypical activities, but leaves more specific goals with multi-facet constraints understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose an over-generate-then-filter approach to improve large language models on constrained language planning task by distilling a constrained script dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the constrained language planning ability of large language models on constraint faithfulness and also in smaller LMs. |
Explaining Length Bias in LLM-Based Preference Evaluations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhengyu Hu, Linxin Song, Jieyu Zhang, Zheyuan Xiao, Tianfu Wang, Zhengyu Chen, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Jianxun Lian, Kaize Ding, Hui Xiong
| Challenge: | a preference evaluation metric is often biased towards longer responses, revealing a reliability problem . a decomposition of the preference evaluation into two components is needed to understand this bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the preference evaluation metric into two key components . the first component is length-dependent and related to trustworthiness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric is based on two components: desirability and information mass. |
Character is Destiny: Can Persona-assigned Language Models Make Personal Choices? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Rui Xu, Xintao Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Siyu Yuan, Xinfeng Yuan, Jiaqing Liang, Zulong Chen, null Xiaoqingdong, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent research has demonstrated the potential of using LLMs to develop role-playing language agents (RPLAs) however, imitative decision-making necessitates a more nuanced understanding of personas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses persona-based memory retrieval to improve RPLAs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances RPLAs on this task. |
Combating Security and Privacy Issues in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | a tutorial aims to provide a summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . a number of studies have focused on security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Approach: | This tutorial seeks to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . authors will discuss security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . it will also outline emerging challenges in security, privacy and reliability of LLMs . |
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Jian Yang, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
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Ke Xu, Siyang Xiao, Ming Liang, Yichen Yu, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing parallel code localization agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate . specialized localization agent that operate as dedicated search components is needed to achieve high localization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel code localization system that reframes parallel code execution as a quality–efficiency co-optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches SOTA performance while being 93.6% faster. |