Papers by Xiao Ma
Leveraging Unit Language Guidance to Advance Speech Modeling in Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuhao Zhang, Xiangnan Ma, Kaiqi Kou, Peizhuo Liu, Weiqiao Shan, Benyou Wang, Tong Xiao, Yuxin Huang, Zhengtao Yu, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing textless speech-to-speech translation models have two main challenges: 1) learning cross-modal features and 2) learning alignment of difference languages in long sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unit language to overcome two main modeling challenges . they propose task prompt modeling to utilize the unit language in guiding the modeling process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language improves over a strong baseline and achieves comparable performance to models trained with text. |
Unity in Diversity: Collaborative Pre-training Across Multimodal Medical Sources (2024.acl-long)
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Xiaochen Wang, Junyu Luo, Jiaqi Wang, Yuan Zhong, Xiaokun Zhang, Yaqing Wang, Parminder Bhatia, Cao Xiao, Fenglong Ma
| Challenge: | Current pre-training techniques rely on a limited scope of medical data, limiting the range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training strategy that unifies patient data within individual sources and captures explicit and implicit correlations between patients across different sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy bridges the gap between multimodal medical sources by aggregating patient data within individual sources and capturing explicit and implicit correlations between patients across sources. |
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)
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Ying He, Zhouhong Gu, Zhecheng Hu, Yubo Zhou, Hao Shen, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao, Zhixu Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models. |
JiraiBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Detection of Human risky health behavior Content in Jirai Community (2026.eacl-long)
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Yunze Xiao, Tingyu He, Lionel Z. Wang, Yiming Ma, Xingyu Song, Xiaohang Xu, Mona T. Diab, Irene Li, Ka Chung Ng
| Challenge: | a cross-lingual dataset captures a transnational cultural phenomenon . risky health behaviors (RHB) are often linked to complex mental health conditions . |
| Approach: | They present the first cross-lingual dataset that captures a transnational cultural phenomenon . their dataset of more than 15,000 annotated social media posts forms the core of JiraiBench . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that cultural context can be more influential than linguistic similarity . the study also shows that the Japanese prompts better handle Chinese content . |
I2E: From Image Pixels to Actionable Interactive Environments for Text-Guided Image Editing (2026.acl-long)
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Jinghan Yu, Junhao Xiao, Chenyu Zhu, Jiaming Li, Jia Li, HanMing Deng, Xirui Wang, Guoli Jia, Jianjun Li, Xiang Bai, Bowen Zhou, Zhiyuan Ma
| Challenge: | Existing text-guided image editing methods rely on end-to-end pixel-level inpainting paradigm . existing models lack such intermediate representations and Reasoning-then-action process . |
| Approach: | They propose a "Decompose-then-Action" paradigm that revisits image editing as an actionable interaction process within a structured environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing methods in compositional editing tasks. |
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 . |
Paper2Rebuttal: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transparent Author Response Assistance (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to writing effective rebuttals are limited by the direct-to-text generation problem . authors must accurately decipher reviewer intent while ensuring every response is firmly anchored in verifiable manuscript details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes rebuttal generation as an evidence-centric planning task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in coverage, faithfulness, and strategic coherence. |
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. |
Multi-Path Transformer is Better: A Case Study on Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on 12 WMT tasks show that shallower multi-path models can achieve similar or even better performance than the deeper model. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a parameter-efficient multi-path structure to fuse features extracted from different paths to achieve better performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve better performance with the same number of parameters than the deeper model. |
PsyScam: A Benchmark for Psychological Techniques in Real-World Scams (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | PTs are employed by scammers to manipulate victims and cause lasting psychological trauma. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to capture the PTs employed in real-worldscam reports and investigate how LLMs can be utilized to generate variants of scams based on the pts and the contexts provided by thesescams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate variants of scams based on the PTs employed in real-world scam reports and the contexts provided by these scams. |
Pause or Fabricate? Training Language Models for Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiwen Qiu, Linjuan Wu, Yizhou Liu, Yuchen Yan, Jin Ma, Xu Tan, Yao Hu, Daoxin Zhang, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Large language models implicitly fabricate information when inputs are incomplete, causing confidence but unreliable conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for grounded reasoning under incomplete information that decomposes reasoning into two stages . they propose stage-specific rewards to penalize hallucinations, enabling models to detect gaps, stop proactively, and resume reasoning after clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves premise detection and task success by 30% . it also reduces average response length by over 20% . |
iMOVE : Instance-Motion-Aware Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiaze Li, Yaya Shi, Zongyang Ma, Haoran Xu, Yandong.bai Yandong.bai, Huihui Xiao, Ruiwen Kang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Di Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Video Large Language Models have led to rapid development, significantly enhancing the capture of overall video semantics and achieving remarkable performance in general video understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instance-motion-aware video instruction-tuning dataset iMOVE that utilizes Event-awful Spatiotemporal Efficient Modeling to retain informative instance spatiotemporal motion details while maintaining computational efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels in video temporal understanding and general video understanding. |
Learning Dialogue Representations from Consecutive Utterances (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Dialogue Sentence Embedding (DSE) is a self-supervised contrastive learning method that learns effective dialogue representations suitable for a wide range of dialogue-oriented tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised contrastive learning method that learns dialogue representations suitable for a wide range of dialogue tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on five dialogue tasks on a few-shot and zero-shot datasets. |
A Confidence-based Partial Label Learning Model for Crowd-Annotated Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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Limao Xiong, Jie Zhou, Qunxi Zhu, Xiao Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Jin Ma, Ying Shan
| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) are based on large-scale labeled datasets, which always obtain using crowdsourcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a CONfidence-based partial Label Learning method to integrate prior and posterior confidences for crowd-annotated named entity recognition models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on real-world and synthetic datasets compared with baselines. |
Mitigating Posterior Salience Attenuation in Long-Context LLMs with Positional Contrastive Decoding (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Current solutions incur prohibitive training costs, leaving statistical behaviors and cost-effective approaches underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a positional contrast decoding technique that contrasts long-aware attention with designed local-awn attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-context benchmarks. |
RankPrompt: Step-by-Step Comparisons Make Language Models Better Reasoners (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to reasoning tasks require extensive human annotations or fail in scenarios with inconsistent responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method that enables LLMs to self-rank their responses without additional resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves reasoning performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 with 13% improvement over existing methods. |
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. |
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. |
Is LLM an Overconfident Judge? Unveiling the Capabilities of LLMs in Detecting Offensive Language with Annotation Disagreement (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models' ability to handle disagreement cases. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the performance of large language models in detecting offensive language at varying levels of agreement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves detection accuracy and model alignment with human judgment by using disagreement samples in training. |
End-to-End Conversational Search for Online Shopping with Utterance Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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Liqiang Xiao, Jun Ma, Xin Luna Dong, Pascual Martínez-Gómez, Nasser Zalmout, Chenwei Zhang, Tong Zhao, Hao He, Yaohui Jin
| Challenge: | a new study proposes a conversational search system that integrates product attributes and dialog with search . but it faces two real world challenges: imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data . |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end conversational search system that integrates search with text . they propose an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterations from other domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the best tested baseline in a conversational search dataset for online shopping. |
From AR to Diffusion: Efficiently Adapting Large Language Models with Strictly Causal and Elastic Horizons (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) models rely on bidirectional attention, creating a structural mismatch with pre-trained Autoregression models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that efficiently adapts autoregressive (AR) models to the diffusion paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training costs by orders of magnitude while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. |
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. |
3R: Enhancing Sentence Representation Learning via Redundant Representation Reduction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve sentence representations lack fine-grained guidance on reducing redundant information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically identifies redundant information from a dimensional perspective and trains the SRL model to redistribute semantics on different dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves sentence representations on seven semantic text similarity benchmarks. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
Alleviating Hallucinations from Knowledge Misalignment in Large Language Models via Selective Abstention Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Yuchun Fan, Xiachong Feng, Yuxuan Gu, Yangfan Ye, Liang Zhao, Weihong Zhong, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Xiao, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) suffer from severe hallucination issues due to the knowledge misalignment between the pre-training stage and the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a training objective with an abstention mechanism that selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token. |
CAMO: An Agentic Framework for Automated Causal Discovery from Micro Behaviors to Macro Emergence in LLM Agent Simulations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | LLM-empowered agent simulations generate rich, adaptive, and often nonlinear interaction patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated Causal discovery framework for LLM agent simulations that converts mechanistic hypotheses into computable factors and learns a compact causal representation centered on an emergent target. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across four emergent settings demonstrate the promise of CAMO. |
RankNAS: Efficient Neural Architecture Search by Pairwise Ranking (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods require training millions of architectures to estimate the accuracy of the search results. |
| Approach: | They propose a performance ranking method (RankNAS) that uses pairwise ranking and search space pruning to enlarge the search space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly accelerates NAS through pairwise ranking and search space pruning. |
Logical Consistency is Vital: Neural-Symbolic Information Retrieval for Negative-Constraint Queries (2025.findings-acl)
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Ganlin Xu, Zhoujia Zhang, Wangyi Mei, Jiaqing Liang, Weijia Lu, Xiaodong Zhang, Zhifei Yang, Xiaofeng Ma, Yanghua Xiao, Deqing Yang
| Challenge: | Current dense retrieval methods compute similarities between dense vectors but overlook the real query intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic information retrieval method that leverages first-order logic to optimize the embeddings of naive natural language by considering the logical consistency between queries and documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on negative-constraint queries under zero-shot and low-resource retrieval tasks. |
Don’t Tell the Answer, Truly Guide the Reasoning During RL Rollouts (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinyi Wang, Jinyi Han, Zishang Jiang, Tingyun li, Jiaqing Liang, Sihang Jiang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao
| 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. |
Focus on What Matters: Enhancing Medical Vision-Language Models with Automatic Attention Alignment Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on inference-time interventions, which are limited in attention adaptation or require additional supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatic attention alignment tuning that leverages weak labels from SAM and selectively modifies visually-critical attention heads to improve alignment while minimizing interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on medical VQA and report generation benchmarks. |
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. |
Exploiting Target Language Data for Neural Machine Translation Beyond Back Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) encounters challenges when translating in new domains and low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a variant of k-nearest neighbor machine translation that utilizes target language data by constructing a pseudo datastore. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits strong domain adaptation capability in both high-resource and low-resourced machine translation. |
ADaPT: Token-Level Decoupling for Efficient Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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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
| 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. |
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. |
From Script to Stage: Automating Experimental Design for Social Simulations with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2024): multi-agent simulations based on large language models are a new paradigm for social science research . traditional experimental design relies on interdisciplinary expertise and technical barriers . Xiaoping and Xin eli argue that LLM-driven agents are unreliable for rigorous experimental design due to hallucinations and limited verifiability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-agent experiment design based on script generation . Script Composition, Script Finalization, and Actor Generation are the core phases of the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework lowers the barrier for social science experimental design and provides scientifically grounded decision support for policy-making. |
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. |
PersonaTrace: Synthesizing Realistic Digital Footprints with LLM Agents (2026.eacl-industry)
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Minjia Wang, Yunfeng Wang, Xiao Ma, Dexin Lv, Qifan Guo, Lynn Zheng, Benliang Wang, Lei Wang, Jiannan Li, Yongwei Xing, Junzhe Xu, Zheng Sun
| Challenge: | Publicly available corpora cover only slivers of human activity, such as email threads, chat logs, purchase histories, sensor traces, and provide large-scale supervision for data-hungry machine-learning pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for synthesizing realistic digital footprints using large language model agents from a structured user profile. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse sequences of user events, producing corresponding digital artifacts such as emails, messages, calendar entries, reminders, etc. |
ProcWorld: Benchmarking Large Model Planning in Reachability-Constrained Environments (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for embodied spatial reasoning and long-term planning are non-trivial due to the combinatorial complexity of long-horizon abstract reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark for partially observable embodied spatial reasoning and long-term planning with large language models and vision language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in 16 task types, 5,000 rooms, and over 10 million evaluation trajectories with diverse data distribution. |
BabelDOC: Better Layout-Preserving PDF Translation via Intermediate Representation (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing document translation pipelines face a tension between linguistic processing and layout preservation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for layout-preserving PDF translation that decouples visual layout metadata from semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves layout fidelity, visual aesthetics, and terminology consistency over representative baselines while maintaining competitive translation precision. |
Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yongxin Xu, Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Yujie Feng, Yuzhen Xiao, Xinyu Ma, Runchuan Zhu, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating internal and external knowledge lack effective control mechanisms for generating hallucinations and dealing with outdated knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. |
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. |
CAST: Corpus-Aware Self-similarity Enhanced Topic modelling (2025.naacl-long)
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Yanan Ma, Chenghao Xiao, Chenhan Yuan, Sabine N Van Der Veer, Lamiece Hassan, Chenghua Lin, Goran Nenadic
| Challenge: | Existing topic modelling methods encode contextual information of documents while ignoring contextual details of candidate centroid words. Existing methods are limited by the contextualization gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic modelling method that builds upon candidate centroid word embeddings contextualized on the dataset and a self-similarity-based method to filter out less meaningful tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly enhances the coherence and diversity of generated topics, and handles noisy data, outperforming strong baselines. |
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. |
UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengxi Lu, Fei Tang, Guangyi Liu, Jin Ma, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UITARS-1.5-7B. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B on MemGUI-Bench and delivers 17.1% improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model. |
LongWeave: A Long-Form Generation Benchmark Bridging Real-World Relevance and Verifiability (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zikai Xiao, Fei Huang, Jianhong Tu, Jianhui Wei, Wen Ma, Yuxuan Zhou, Jian Wu, Bowen Yu, Zuozhu Liu, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for long-form generation assess real-world queries with hard-to-verify metrics or use synthetic setups that overlook real-life intricacies. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that balances verifiable and real-world assessment with Target-Anchored Evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model balances real-world and verifiable assessment with Target-Anchored Evaluation (TAE) it generates queries, textual materials, and anchors based on verifier targets within real-life scenarios . |
Saber: Efficient Sampling with Adaptive Acceleration and Backtracking Enhanced Remasking for Diffusion Language Model in Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer advantages in parallel generation and bidirectional context modeling, but they face a critical trade-off between inference speed and output quality for tasks with strict structural constraints such as code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient sampling algorithm that reduces the number of tokens unmasked per step based on the model’s evolving confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves Pass@1 accuracy by 1.9% while achieving 251.4% inference speedup. |
Zero-Resource Hallucination Prevention for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations post-generation suffer from inconsistent performance due to the influence of instruction format and model style. |
| Approach: | They propose a new technique that evaluates the model’s familiarity with the concepts present in the input instruction and withholding the generation of response in case of unfamiliar concepts under the zero-resource setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique shows superior performance across four different large language models and demonstrates that it can be used to mitigate hallucinations in LLMs. |
Jailbreaking Prompt Attack: A Controllable Adversarial Attack against Diffusion Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) models can be used to generate harmful content such as sexually explicit, unfaithful, and misleading or Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images. |
| Approach: | They propose a more practical and universal attack that does not require the presence of a target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack bypasses both text and image safety checkers while preserving high semantic alignment with the target prompt. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)
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Guangwei Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Cheng Qian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Rada Mihalcea, Zhaozhuo Xu, Jingrui He, Jiaqi W. Ma, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Dongwon Lee, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | **Copyright Detective** is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
On Vision Features in Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on multimodal machine translation (MMT) has focused on the way of incorporating vision features into translation but little attention is given to the quality of vision models. |
| Approach: | They develop a selective attention model to study the patch-level contribution of an image in multimodal machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to learn translation from the visual modality on probing tasks and is compared with existing models. |
SWING: Balancing Coverage and Faithfulness for Dialogue Summarization (2023.findings-eacl)
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Kung-Hsiang Huang, Siffi Singh, Xiaofei Ma, Wei Xiao, Feng Nan, Nicholas Dingwall, William Yang Wang, Kathleen McKeown
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to dialogue summarization rely on features of conversation data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use natural language inference models to improve coverage and faithfulness . they use fine-grained training signals to encourage model to generate missing content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves higher faithfulness and coverage while maintaining conciseness compared to prior methods. |
Benchmarking Automated Clinical Language Simplification: Dataset, Algorithm, and Evaluation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies to translate medical jargon into layperson-understandable language focus on accuracy and readability aspects of clinical language. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a dataset to support automated clinical language simplification and propose a model that mimics the human annotation procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches human annotation procedures and achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with baselines. |
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. |
ConFit v2: Improving Resume-Job Matching using Hypothetical Resume Embedding and Runner-Up Hard-Negative Mining (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model resume-job fit are sparse since job seekers apply to only a few jobs. |
| Approach: | They propose two techniques to enhance the encoder’s contrastive training process by augmenting job data with hypothetical reference resume generated by a large language model and creating high-quality hard negatives from unlabeled resume/job pairs using a novel hard-negative mining strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms ConFit and prior methods on two real-world datasets and achieves an average improvement of 13.8% in recall and 17.5% in nDCG across job-ranking and resume-ranker tasks. |
SlideCoder: Layout-aware RAG-enhanced Hierarchical Slide Generation from Design (2025.emnlp-main)
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Wenxin Tang, Jingyu Xiao, Wenxuan Jiang, Xi Xiao, Yuhang Wang, Xuxin Tang, Qing Li, Yuehe Ma, Junliang Liu, Shisong Tang, Michael R. Lyu
| Challenge: | Existing natural language-based LLM generation methods struggle to capture visual and structural nuances of slide designs. |
| Approach: | They propose a layout-aware framework for generating editable slides from reference images . they propose python code that translates NL instructions into Python code to construct each slide . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 40.5 points . it also outperformed open-source models with improved reverse-engineered data. |
FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the efficacy of workflow-guided agent planning by formalizing different formats of workflow knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to improve the planning reliability of LLM-based agents by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. |
BIPEFT: Budget-Guided Iterative Search for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Pretrained Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
DSRM: Boost Textual Adversarial Training with Distribution Shift Risk Minimization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial training methods require multi-step gradient ascents or word substitutions to obtain adversarials, which impairs the effectiveness of adversariarial training. |
| Approach: | They propose a procedure for instead adversarial training with only clean data that estimates the adversarials loss by perturbing the input data’s probability distribution rather than their embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure reduces time consumption by up to 70% compared to current best-performing adversarial training methods. |
Fusion: Towards Automated ICD Coding via Feature Compression (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to assign ICD codes from unstructured clinical notes are noisy and prone to errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature compressed ICD coding model called Fusion to address this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two widely used datasets. |
Virtual Augmentation Supported Contrastive Learning of Sentence Representations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite profound successes, contrastive representation learning relies on carefully designed data augmentations using domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual augmentation supported Contrastive Learning of sentence representations . they approximate the neighborhood of an instance via its K-nearest in-batch neighbors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on a wide range of downstream tasks. |