Papers by Xiao Han

mPresenter: An Agentic Framework for Generating Multilingual Presentation Videos from Scientific Papers (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Wenhan Han, Xiao Xiao, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Meng Fang

Visual Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing Paper2Video systems are monolingual and often rely on single-pass pipelines.
Approach:	They propose a multilingual agentic Paper2Video system that decomposes the task into planning, audience-oriented critique, layout-aware slide generation, and multilingual figure interpretation.
Outcome:	The proposed system improves question-answering accuracy relative to previous systems while maintaining affordable cost and latency.

Modality Adaption or Regularization? A Case Study on End-to-End Speech Translation (2023.acl-short)

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Yuchen Han, Chen Xu, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu

Multilinguality

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.

HermEs: Interactive Spreadsheet Formula Prediction via Hierarchical Formulet Expansion (2023.acl-long)

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Wanrong He, Haoyu Dong, Yihuai Gao, Zhichao Fan, Xingzhuo Guo, Zhitao Hou, Xiao Lv, Ran Jia, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang

Challenge:	HermEs is a spreadsheet formula prediction language that is difficult for Excel users without programming experience to master.
Approach:	They propose a hierarchical approach to formula prediction via HiEraRchical forMulet ExpanSion . they propose generating formulas in a fixed order using hierarchically generated formulas .
Outcome:	The proposed approach improves formula prediction accuracy by guaranteeing correct grammar and streamlining token-level decoding with high-level Formulet.

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

Green & Sustainable NLP

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.

MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

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Ke Wang, Junting Pan, Linda Wei, Aojun Zhou, Weikang Shi, Zimu Lu, Han Xiao, Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li

Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction (2022.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LMMs) struggle with simple tasks such as geometry, e.g., arithmetic, and reasoning.
Approach:	They propose to leverage code as supervision for cross-modal alignment . they propose to use FigCodifier and ImgCode-8.6M to synthesize novel mathematical figures .
Outcome:	The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the geometry problem-solving subset of MathVista, achieving improvements of 8.9% and 9.2%.

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Yaojie Lu, Qing Liu, Dai Dai, Xinyan Xiao, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hua Wu

More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)

Challenge:	Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas.
Approach:	They propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources.
Outcome:	The proposed framework can model different IE tasks, generate targeted structures, and learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources.

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Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun

Reaction Miner: An Integrated System for Chemical Reaction Extraction from Textual Data (2023.emnlp-demo)

Challenge:	Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically .
Approach:	They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE .
Outcome:	The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field.

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Ming Zhong, Siru Ouyang, Yizhu Jiao, Priyanka Kargupta, Leo Luo, Yanzhen Shen, Bobby Zhou, Xianrui Zhong, Xuan Liu, Hongxiang Li, Jinfeng Xiao, Minhao Jiang, Vivian Hu, Xuan Wang, Heng Ji, Martin Burke, Huimin Zhao, Jiawei Han

Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Reaction Miner is a system designed to extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs.
Approach:	They propose a system that extracts chemical reactions directly from raw scientific PDFs.
Outcome:	The proposed system can extract chemical reactions from raw scientific PDFs.

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Xiao Wang, Tianze Chen, Qiming Ge, Han Xia, Rong Bao, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang

CR-LLM: A Dataset and Optimization for Concept Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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.

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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

s3: You Don’t Need That Much Data to Train a Search Agent via RL (2025.emnlp-main)

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.

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Pengcheng Jiang, Xueqiang Xu, Jiacheng Lin, Jinfeng Xiao, Zifeng Wang, Jimeng Sun, Jiawei Han

APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to optimize retrieval using search-only metrics ignore downstream utility and fine-tune entire LLM to jointly reason and retrieve limit retrieval utility and compatibility with frozen or proprietary models.
Approach:	They propose a lightweight, model-agnostic framework that decouples the searcher from the generator and trains the search user using a Gain Beyond RAG reward.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines trained on over 70 more data with 2.4k training samples.

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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck.
Approach:	They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance.

Open-Domain Question Answering with Pre-Constructed Question Spaces (2021.naacl-srw)

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Jinfeng Xiao, Lidan Wang, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Tong Sun, Jiawei Han

TriSum: Learning Summarization Ability from Large Language Models with Structured Rationale (2024.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Open-domain question answering aims at locating answers to user-generated questions in massive collections of documents.
Approach:	They propose an algorithm with a novel reader-retriever design that differs from both families of algorithms.
Outcome:	The proposed algorithm outperforms retrieval-based methods with two large-scale datasets and is state-of-the-art.

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Pengcheng Jiang, Cao Xiao, Zifeng Wang, Parminder Bhatia, Jimeng Sun, Jiawei Han

Summarization

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have advanced tasks like text summarization, but their size and computational demands limit their use in resource-constrained and privacy-centric settings.
Approach:	They propose a framework for distilling LLMs’ text summarization abilities into a compact, local model using a curriculum learning strategy that evolves from simple to complex tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on CNN/DailyMail, XSum, and ClinicalTrial, and improves interpretability by providing insights into the summarization rationale.

Topic-Oriented Open Relation Extraction with A Priori Seed Generation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Linyi Ding, Jinfeng Xiao, Sizhe Zhou, Chaoqi Yang, Jiawei Han

CDS: Data Synthesis Method Guided by Cognitive Diagnosis Theory (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for open relation extraction give sub-optimal results on specific topics.
Approach:	They propose a method that leverages the built-in knowledge of large language models to maintain a dynamic seed relation dictionary for the topic.
Outcome:	The proposed approach empowers better topic-oriented control over the generated relations and improves ORE performance along the five dimensions, especially on specialized and narrow topics.

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Haokun Zhao, Jinyi Han, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao, Xiaojun Meng, Jiansheng Wei

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, but the complexity of emerging tasks and higher performance demands highlight the need for continuous improvement.
Approach:	They propose a method that refines evaluation results and characterizes model profiles at the knowledge component level.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves performance across multiple benchmarks and academic exams.

AnaMeta: A Table Understanding Dataset of Field Metadata Knowledge Shared by Multi-dimensional Data Analysis Tasks (2023.findings-acl)

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Xinyi He, Mengyu Zhou, Mingjie Zhou, Jialiang Xu, Xiao Lv, Tianle Li, Yijia Shao, Shi Han, Zejian Yuan, Dongmei Zhang

Ouroboros: Generating Longer Drafts Phrase by Phrase for Faster Speculative Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Tabular data analysis is performed everyday across various domains.
Approach:	They propose to use a dataset of 467k tables with supervision labels for four types of field metadata.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves the understanding capability of tabular models by incorporating distribution and knowledge information.

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Weilin Zhao, Yuxiang Huang, Xu Han, Wang Xu, Chaojun Xiao, Xinrong Zhang, Yewei Fang, Kaihuo Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Challenge:	Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) drafting efficiency has become a bottleneck in the final speedup of speculative drafting, therefore generating longer drafts at less cost can lead to better speedup.
Approach:	They propose a method that uses existing model to drafting and target LLM to verify draft in a low-cost parallel manner.
Outcome:	The proposed method can achieve speedups of up to 2.4 over speculative decoding and 3.9 over vanilla decoding without fine-tuning draft and target models.

Emergent Modularity in Pre-trained Transformers (2023.findings-acl)

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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

SAIS: Supervising and Augmenting Intermediate Steps for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2022.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Existing studies on pre-trained Transformers show that they learn fine-grained neuron functions.
Approach:	They examine the presence of modularity in pre-trained Transformers . they focus on Mixture-of-Experts, a promising candidate for modularity .
Outcome:	The proposed structure stabilizes at the early stage, which is faster than neuron stabilization.

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Yuxin Xiao, Zecheng Zhang, Yuning Mao, Carl Yang, Jiawei Han

Don’t Tell the Answer, Truly Guide the Reasoning During RL Rollouts (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for relation extraction only implicitly learn to model relevant contexts and entity types while being trained for RE.
Approach:	They propose to explicitly teach the model to capture relevant contexts and entity types by supervising and augmenting intermediate steps (SAIS) for RE.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the runner-up method on three benchmarks by 5.04% . textual contexts and entity types are the major information sources that lead to the success of previous approaches.

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Xinyi Wang, Jinyi Han, Zishang Jiang, Tingyun li, Jiaqing Liang, Sihang Jiang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao

Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing methods such as GRPO often break down when task difficulty exceeds the model’s capacity, resulting in sparse rewards and inefficient training.
Approach:	They propose to measure the compatibility between external guidance and a model's intrinsic policy by introducing an adaptive framework to enhance reasoning performance while explicitly preserving high Affinity.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while maintaining high Affinity.

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.

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

Leveraging Bidding Graphs for Advertiser-Aware Relevance Modeling in Sponsored Search (2021.findings-emnlp)

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.

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Shuxian Bi, Chaozhuo Li, Xiao Han, Zheng Liu, Xing Xie, Haizhen Huang, Zengxuan Wen

ChemNER: Fine-Grained Chemistry Named Entity Recognition with Ontology-Guided Distant Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing relevance models rely on query-keyword pairs but keywords are usually short texts with scarce semantic information, which may not accurately reflect the underlying advertising purposes.
Approach:	They propose a bidding-graph augmented triple-based relevance model with three towers to deeply fuse the bidding graphs and semantic textual data.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms existing models on a large industry dataset and consistently outperformed existing models.

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Xuan Wang, Vivian Hu, Xiangchen Song, Shweta Garg, Jinfeng Xiao, Jiawei Han

Knowledge Representation

Challenge:	Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental step in scientific literature analysis to build AI-driven systems for molecular discovery, synthetic strategy designing, and manufacturing.
Approach:	They propose an ontology-guided method for fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) it leverages the chemistry type ontologies to generate distant labels with flexible KB-matching .
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a .25 absolute F1 improvement.

APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)

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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu

ADaPT: Token-Level Decoupling for Efficient Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos .
Approach:	They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss.

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Tingyun li, Zishang Jiang, Jinyi Han, Xinyi Wang, Sihang Jiang, Han Xia, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Existing efficiency-oriented methods attempt to shorten or mix reasoning strategies, yet often degrade reasoning capability.
Approach:	They propose a token-level dual-process framework that explicitly decouples efficiency and correctness signals during training.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces inference cost while maintaining strong reasoning ability across multiple benchmarks.

AMEX: Android Multi-annotation Expo Dataset for Mobile GUI Agents (2025.findings-acl)

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Yuxiang Chai, Siyuan Huang, Yazhe Niu, Han Xiao, Liang Liu, Guozhi Wang, Dingyu Zhang, Shuai Ren, Hongsheng Li

Challenge:	a new dataset is being developed to improve the capabilities of mobile GUI-control agents.
Approach:	They propose a dataset designed for generalist mobile GUI-control agents . they use screenshots from popular mobile applications to create a detailed GUI-annotated dataset .
Outcome:	The Android Multi-annotation EXpo (AMEX) is a large-scale dataset for generalist mobile GUI-control agents . it includes screenshots from popular mobile applications, which are annotated at multiple levels .

HiFi: High-Information Attention Heads Hold for Parameter-Efficient Model Adaptation (2023.acl-long)

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Anchun Gui, Han Xiao

Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing paradigm to fine-tune parameters of pre-trained language models poses problems in data-scarce and resource-limited scenarios.
Approach:	They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method HiFi that fine-tails only the highly informative and strongly correlated attention heads for the specific task.
Outcome:	The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art over the prior benchmarks on the GLUE benchmark.

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Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun

A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents with Essential-State Procedural Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

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.

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Yuxiang Chai, Shunye Tang, Han Xiao, Weifeng Lin, Hanhao Li, Jiayu Zhang, Liang Liu, Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Guozhi Wang, Shuai Ren, Rongduo Han, Haining Zhang, Siyuan Huang, Hongsheng Li

Syntactic and Semantic-driven Learning for Open Information Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation methods for mobile GUI agents rely on static frame assessments or offline static apps.
Approach:	They propose an evaluation system that leverages large language models as reward models to verify task completion and process achievement.
Outcome:	The proposed system addresses the limitations of traditional function based evaluation methods on online dynamic apps.

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Jialong Tang, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Xinyan Xiao, Hua Wu

RiTeK: A Dataset for Large Language Models Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs in Medicine (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the supervised counterparts, and can even achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art (SoA) model.
Approach:	They propose a syntactic and semantic-driven learning approach that can learn open IE models without human-labelled data by leveraging syntakic and semantic knowledge as noisier, higher-level supervision.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms supervised counterparts and can achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art models.

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Jiatan Huang, Mingchen Li, Zonghai Yao, Dawei Li, Yuxin Zhang, Zhichao Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Feiyun Ouyang, Xiaohan Li, Shuo Han, Hong yu

Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for retrieving medical textual knowledge Graphs struggle to perform well, a study finds . existing methods struggle to provide accurate answers to complex questions, he says .
Approach:	They synthesize user queries integrating diverse topological structures, relational information, and complex textual descriptions.
Outcome:	a new dataset for medical textual knowledge graphs shows that existing methods struggle to perform well . main bottlenecks lie in the scarcity of existing medical TKGs and the limited expressiveness of their topological structures .

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Zhengyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Deming Ye, Chaojun Xiao, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

A Unified Knowledge Graph Augmentation Service for Boosting Domain-specific NLP Tasks (2023.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing knowledge injection methods are not suitable for enhancing pre-trained language models with external knowledge bases.
Approach:	They propose a plug-and-play knowledge injection method where knowledge bases are injected into frozen existing downstream models by a knowledge plugin.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves the performance of knowledge injection on knowledge-driven tasks while keeping model parameters frozen.

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Ruiqing Ding, Xiao Han, Leye Wang

Self-supervised Cross-modal Pretraining for Speech Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing domain-specific pre-trained language models lack domain knowledge in domain-focused training.
Approach:	They propose a unified domain language model development service to inject domain knowledge into the PLM fine-tuning stage.
Outcome:	Experiments on domain-specific text classification and QA tasks verify the effectiveness and generalizability of KnowledgeDA.

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Iek-Heng Chu, Ziyi Chen, Xinlu Yu, Mei Han, Jing Xiao, Peng Chang

Dynosaur: A Dynamic Growth Paradigm for Instruction-Tuning Data Curation (2023.emnlp-main)

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.

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Da Yin, Xiao Liu, Fan Yin, Ming Zhong, Hritik Bansal, Jiawei Han, Kai-Wei Chang

HealMe: Harnessing Cognitive Reframing in Large Language Models for Psychotherapy (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for instruction tuning do not include associating instructions with existing datasets.
Approach:	They propose a dynamic growth paradigm for the automatic curation of instruction-tuning data . they use existing datasets to automatically construct instruction-uning datasets .
Outcome:	The proposed model reduces the API cost for generating instructions and provides high-quality data.

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Mengxi Xiao, Qianqian Xie, Ziyan Kuang, Zhicheng Liu, Kailai Yang, Min Peng, Weiguang Han, Jimin Huang

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used in psychotherapy to overcome challenges such as shame, distrust, and resource scarcity.
Approach:	They propose a cognitive reframing therapy method that uses empathetic dialogue to address deep-rooted negative thoughts and fosters rational, balanced perspectives.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms other models in terms of empathy, guidance, and logical coherence, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential positive impact on psychotherapy.

AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)

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Jianlyu Chen, Nan Wang, Chaofan Li, Bo Wang, Shitao Xiao, Han Xiao, Hao Liao, Defu Lian, Zheng Liu

Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)

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.

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Yijia Xiao, Wanjia Zhao, Junkai Zhang, Yiqiao Jin, Han Zhang, Zhicheng Ren, Renliang Sun, Haixin Wang, Guancheng Wan, Pan Lu, Xiao Luo, Yu Zhang, James Zou, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang

SoftDedup: an Efficient Data Reweighting Method for Speeding Up Language Model Pre-training (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing studies focus on specific aspects or applications, but this study provides a comprehensive overview of Protein-specific large language models.
Approach:	This paper proposes a structured taxonomy of state-of-the-art ProteinLLMs . they analyze how they leverage large-scale protein sequence data for improved accuracy .
Outcome:	The proposed model covers their architectures, training datasets, evaluation metrics, and diverse applications.

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Nan He, Weichen Xiong, Hanwen Liu, Yi Liao, Lei Ding, Kai Zhang, Guohua Tang, Xiao Han, Yang Wei

Variator: Accelerating Pre-trained Models with Plug-and-Play Compression Modules (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Current methods focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication.
Approach:	They propose a method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly improves training efficiency on deduplicated datasets and improves downstream accuracy by 1.77%.

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Chaojun Xiao, Yuqi Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Pengle Zhang, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhengyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

Language Model Adaption for Reinforcement Learning with Natural Language Action Space (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have been successful on NLP tasks but require huge parameter sizes and computational resources.
Approach:	They propose a parameter-efficient acceleration method that enhances computational efficiency through plug-and-play compression plugins.
Outcome:	The proposed method saves 53% computational costs using only 0.9% additional parameters with a performance drop of less than 2%.

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Jiangxing Wang, Jiachen Li, Xiao Han, Deheng Ye, Zongqing Lu

Denoising Relation Extraction from Document-level Distant Supervision (2020.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Previous research has focused on reducing the size of the natural language action space due to the combinatorial nature of the language.
Approach:	They propose mutual-information regularized policy optimization to reduce the action space by dynamically adjusting the prior provided by the pretrained model.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves monotonically on the mutual-information regularized RL objective.

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Chaojun Xiao, Yuan Yao, Ruobing Xie, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Fen Lin, Leyu Lin

RAPO: An Adaptive Ranking Paradigm for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods to generate auto-labeled sentences for relation extraction (RE) are difficult to extend to document-level relation extraction as noise from DS may be even multiplied in documents.
Approach:	They propose a pre-trained model which de-emphasizes noisy DS data via multiple pre-training tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed model can capture useful information from noisy data and achieve promising results on the large-scale DocRE benchmark.

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Zhoujin Tian, Chaozhuo Li, Shuo Ren, Zhiqiang Zuo, Zengxuan Wen, Xinyue Hu, Xiao Han, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie

Multilinguality

Challenge:	Existing approaches focus on minimizing distances between words in aligned pairs, while suffering from low discriminative capability to distinguish the relative orders between positive and negative candidates.
Approach:	They propose a ranking-oriented induction model to learn personalized mapping function for each word.
Outcome:	The proposed model can learn personalized mapping function for each word on public datasets including rich-resource and low-resourced languages.

On the Zero-Shot Generalization of Machine-Generated Text Detectors (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Xiao Pu, Jingyu Zhang, Xiaochuang Han, Yulia Tsvetkov, Tianxing He

Fine-Grained Legal Argument-Pair Extraction via Coarse-Grained Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	rampant proliferation of large language models generates text indistinguishable from human-written language.
Approach:	They train neural detectors on outputs of a new generator and test their performance on held-out generators.
Outcome:	The proposed detectors can be built on training data from medium-sized models.

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Chaojun Xiao, Yutao Sun, Yuan Yao, Xu Han, Wenbin Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

RoCoIns: Enhancing Robustness of Large Language Models through Code-Style Instructions (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Current methods conceptualize LAE as a supervised sentence-pair classification problem and necessitate extensive manual annotations.
Approach:	They propose a model that focuses on fine-grained alignment of argument pairs building upon coarse-grain complaint-defense pairs.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baseline models by 3.7 and 2.4 points on average.

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Yuansen Zhang, Xiao Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Han Xia, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in following human instructions and solving NLU tasks.
Approach:	They propose to use code style instructions to replace typically natural language instructions to provide more precise instructions and strengthen the robustness of LLMs.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms natural language models on eight robustness datasets and achieves an improvement of 5.68% in test set accuracy and a reduction of 5.66 points in Attack Success Rate (ASR).

Fine-grained Entity Typing via Label Reasoning (2021.emnlp-main)

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Qing Liu, Hongyu Lin, Xinyan Xiao, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Hua Wu

Zero-Shot Open-Schema Entity Structure Discovery (2026.eacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to fine-grained entity typing are based on independent classification paradigms, which make them difficult to recognize inter-dependent, long-tailed and fine-granular entities.
Approach:	They propose a label reasoning network that exploits label dependencies knowledge entailed in the data.
Outcome:	The proposed network can model, learn and reason complex labels in a sequence-to-set, end-to end manner.

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Xueqiang Xu, Jinfeng Xiao, James Barry, Mohab Elkaref, Jiaru Zou, Pengcheng Jiang, Yunyi Zhang, Maxwell J Giammona, Geeth De Mel, Jiawei Han

Can LLMs Estimate Student Struggles? Human-AI Difficulty Alignment with Proficiency Simulation for Item Difficulty Prediction (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods based on large language models (LLMs) rely heavily on predefined entity attribute schemas or annotated datasets, often leading to incomplete extraction results.
Approach:	They propose a novel approach to entity structure extraction that does not require any schema or annotated datasets.
Outcome:	Experiments show that ZOES improves LLMs’ ability to extract more complete entity structures across three different domains, showcasing both the effectiveness and generalizability of the method.

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Ming Li, Han Chen, Yunze Xiao, Jian Chen, Hong Jiao, Tianyi Zhou

Cognitive Modeling

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 .

A Neural Transition-based Joint Model for Disease Named Entity Recognition and Normalization (2021.acl-long)

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Zongcheng Ji, Tian Xia, Mei Han, Jing Xiao

ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)

Challenge:	Existing models for disease recognition and normalization ignore text surface form of each candidate concept, causing boundary inconsistency.
Approach:	They propose a neural transition-based joint model to normalize disease entities from biomedical text.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves on two publicly available datasets.

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Dongling Xiao, Yu-Kun Li, Han Zhang, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang

Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to model coarse-grained linguistic information do not integrate coarse-gram information into pre-training.
Approach:	They propose an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance integration of coarse-grained linguistic information into pre-training.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing models on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tunes on 19 downstream tasks.

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Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiangyang Li, Zhonghua Li, Zhao Cao, Maosong Sun

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

Challenge:	Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering.
Approach:	They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM.
Outcome:	The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios.

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FengXian Dong, Zhi Zheng, Xiao Han, Wei Chen, Jingqing Ruan, Tong Xu, Yong Chen, Enhong Chen

BIPEFT: Budget-Guided Iterative Search for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Pretrained Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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.

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Aofei Chang, Jiaqi Wang, Han Liu, Parminder Bhatia, Cao Xiao, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma

SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning are limited by computational and storage requirements.
Approach:	They propose a budget-guided iterative search strategy to disentangle binary module and rank dimension search spaces and early selection strategies based on parameter budgets.
Outcome:	The proposed method significantly improves search efficiency on public benchmarks.

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Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang

SOLAR-RL: Semi-Online Long-horizon Assignment Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences.
Approach:	They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs.

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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

FinMME: Benchmark Dataset for Financial Multi-Modal Reasoning Evaluation (2025.acl-long)

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.

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Junyu Luo, Zhizhuo Kou, Liming Yang, Xiao Luo, Jinsheng Huang, Zhiping Xiao, Jingshu Peng, Chengzhong Liu, Jiaming Ji, Xuanzhe Liu, Sirui Han, Ming Zhang, Yike Guo

Shall We Team Up: Exploring Spontaneous Cooperation of Competing LLM Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced rapid development in recent years, but there is a notable lack of effective and specialized multimodal evaluation datasets in the financial domain.
Approach:	They introduce FinMME, a multimodal large language model with 11,000 financial research samples and 20 annotators.
Outcome:	The proposed model performs better than state-of-the-art models, highlighting its challenging nature.

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Zengqing Wu, Run Peng, Shuyuan Zheng, Qianying Liu, Xu Han, Brian Kwon, Makoto Onizuka, Shaojie Tang, Chuan Xiao

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in social simulations, where they are guided by carefully crafted instructions to exhibit human-like behaviors.
Approach:	They propose to use Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents to simulate the gradual transition from non-cooperative to cooperative behaviors of agents.
Outcome:	The proposed model can simulate the gradual transition from non-cooperative to cooperative behaviors in three competitive scenarios.

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

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

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.

SEARCH-R: Structured Entity-Aware Retrieval with Chain-of-Reasoning Navigator for Multi-hop Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)

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FU Yuqing, Yimin Deng, Wanyu Wang, Yuhao Wang, Yejing Wang, Hongshi Liu, Yiqi Wang, Xiao Han, Maolin Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Yi Chang, Xiangyu Zhao