Papers by Xiao Wang
AdaMix: Adaptive Mixing for Short and Long Reasoning Adapters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large reasoning models have improved efficiency but still face limitations such as conflicting objectives and limited adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive reasoning framework that applies a uniform, computation-intensive deep reasoning strategy to all problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the average response length of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B by 54.9% while improving accuracy by up to 4.8% on five mathematical datasets. |
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
Multiview Clickbait Detection via Jointly Modeling Subjective and Objective Preference (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing clickbait detection models rely on analyzing the objective semantics of posts or correlating posts with article content only, but fail to identify and exploit the manipulation intention of clickbaiting from a user’s subjective perspective. |
| Approach: | They propose a multiview clickbait detection model to model subjective and objective preferences simultaneously to capture clickbaiting from a user's subjective perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two real-world datasets and shows that it integrates subjective and objective preferences simultaneously. |
Step-level Verifier-guided Hybrid Test-Time Scaling for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kaiyan Chang, Yonghao Shi, Chenglong Wang, Hang Zhou, Chi Hu, Xiaoqian Liu, Yingfeng Luo, Yuan Ge, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent training-based TTS methods, such as continued reinforcement learning, have surged in popularity, while training-free TTS approaches are gradually fading from prominence. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained sequential scaling method guided by process verification that integrates training-free TTS methods with other classical parallel scaling methods at the step level. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) show that training-free TTS methods can extend reasoning performance boundaries. |
Sample Design Engineering: An Empirical Study on Designing Better Fine-Tuning Samples for Information Extraction with LLMs (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Prompt Engineering (PE) is renowned for improving IE performance through prompt modifications, but the realm of sample design for downstream fine-tuning remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a methodical approach to enhancing LLMs’ post-tuning performance by refining input, output, and reasoning designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms heuristic design strategies on three complex IE tasks with four additional LLMs. |
KnowledgeBerg: Evaluating Systematic Knowledge Coverage and Compositional Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack systematic coverage of a bounded knowledge universe and compositional set-based reasoning over that universe. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multiple-choice questions based on 1,183 enumeration seeds . they use knowledge width, cardinality of required universe, reasoning depth to formalize the challenge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks achieve only 5.26–36.88 F1 on universe enumeration and 16.00–44.19 accuracy on knowledge-grounded reasoning. |
Transductive Learning for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for style transfer are based on an inductive learning approach, which represents the style as embeddings, decoder parameters, or discriminator parameters and directly applies these general rules to the test cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based context-aware style representation that involves top-K relevant sentences in the target style in the transfer process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several strong baselines and is general and effective to the task of unsupervised style transfer. |
Syntax-guided Contrastive Learning for Pre-trained Language Model (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on additional syntax-driven attention components to enhance the transformer, which require more parameters and additional syntactic parsing in downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-guided contrastive learning method which does not change the transformer architecture and does not alter the transformer structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent improvements in a variety of tasks including grammatical error detection, entity tasks, structural probing and GLUE. |
Too Long, Do Re-weighting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Zhong-Zhi Li, Xiao Liang, Zihao Tang, Lei Ji, Peijie Wang, Haotian Xu, Xing W, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Yeyun Gong, Zhijiang Guo, Xiao Liu, Fei Yin, Cheng-Lin Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks by leveraging extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses Extended Chain-of-Thought (EFT) to reduce the number of output tokens by nearly 40% while maintaining the accuracy of the reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the number of output tokens by nearly 40% while maintaining the accuracy of the reasoning. |
Learning What to Share: Leaky Multi-Task Network for Text Classification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-task learning suffer from the interference between tasks because they lack selection mechanism for feature sharing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task convolutional neural network with the Leaky Unit which has memory and forgetting mechanism to filter the feature flows between tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can filter feature flows between tasks and improve performance on five datasets. |
Lattice-Based Transformer Encoder for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) takes deterministic sequences for source representations. However, word-level or subword-level segmentation has multiple choices to split a source sequence with different word segmentors or different subword vocabulary sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose lattice-based encoders to explore effective word or subword representations in an automatic way during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoders can explore effective word or subword representation in an automatic way during training. |
Test-time Backdoor Mitigation for Black-Box Large Language Models with Defensive Demonstrations (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on backdoor defense have focused on training phase, overlooking critical aspect of testing time defense. |
| Approach: | They propose to use demonstrations as a defense mechanism against backdoor attacks in black-box LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing defense baselines across most evaluation scenarios. |
Automatic Table Union Search with Tabular Representation Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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Xuming Hu, Shen Wang, Xiao Qin, Chuan Lei, Zhengyuan Shen, Christos Faloutsos, Asterios Katsifodimos, George Karypis, Lijie Wen, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify uniability based on column representations are insufficient to reveal latent relational features to describe column relation between pair of columns. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised table union search framework called AutoTUS to learn column relational representations in a multi-stage manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the SOTA baseline and on real-world datasets. |
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. |
WikiDiverse: A Multimodal Entity Linking Dataset with Diversified Contextual Topics and Entity Types (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) is an essential task for many multimodal applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-annotated Wikipedia-based multimodal entity linking dataset to improve the quality of existing MEL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model uses the visual information of images more effectively than existing models. |
Weight Distillation: Transferring the Knowledge in Neural Network Parameters (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation is an effective method for model acceleration and compression. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parameters to distill knowledge from large neural networks to small ones . they propose to do this by using a parameter generator to transfer the knowledge to a small neural network . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method learns a small network 1.88 2.94x faster than the large network but with competitive BLEU points. |
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. |
RCL: Relation Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract relations require large-scale labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Relation Contrastive Learning framework to mitigate similar relations and similar entities problems by optimizing a contrastive instance loss with a relation classification loss on seen relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn subtle difference between instances and achieve better separation between different relation categories in the representation space simultaneously. |
Reason from Fallacy: Enhancing Large Language Models’ Logical Reasoning through Logical Fallacy Understanding (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated good performance in many reasoning tasks, but struggle with some more complex reasoning tasks including logical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose five concrete tasks from three cognitive dimensions of WHAT, WHY, and HOW to evaluate LLMs’ capability of logical fallacy understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to evaluate LLMs’ LFU capability and to fine-tune LLM models to obtain significantly enhanced performance on logical reasoning. |
Learning Geometry-Aware Representations for New Intent Discovery (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for intent classification fail to distinguish new intents due to intertwined centers . a novel framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a new intent discovery framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarking datasets. |
IFlyEA: A Chinese Essay Assessment System with Automated Rating, Review Generation, and Recommendation (2021.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Automated Essay Assessment (AEA) aims to judge students’ writing proficiency in an automatic way. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese AEA system IFlyEssayAssess to evaluate essays written by native Chinese students from primary and junior schools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system provides application services for essay scoring, review generation, recommendation, and explainable analytical visualization. |
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Yan Liu, Songyang Gao, Wei Shen, Limao Xiong, Yuhao Zhou, Xiao Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Xiaoran Fan, Shiliang Pu, Jiang Zhu, Rui Zheng, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting. |
When Correct Beliefs Collapse: Epistemic Resilience of LLMs under Clinical Pressure (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models exhibit severe multi-turn sycophancy in clinical dialogue . high initial diagnostic capability does not imply high belief stability . |
| Approach: | They propose a stress test framework that evaluates belief stability under escalating pressure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed stress test framework reduces the risk of multi-turn sycophancy in clinical dialogue . it eliminates belief change and improves robustness in training time . |
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 . |
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Zhang, Xu Yang, Xiao Yang, Bowen Xian, Qizheng Li, Shikai Fang, Jingyuan Li, Jian Wang, Minrui Xu, Yuge Zhang, Weiqing Liu, Jiang Bian
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering rely on tree search to rank candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent that operationalizes gradient-based optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves a state-of-the-art 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench with a limited budget on a single GPU. |
SKEP: Sentiment Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | sentiment knowledge is ignored in sentiment analysis, despite its use in pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sentiment knowledge to learn a unified sentiment representation for multiple sentiment analysis tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong pre-training baseline on three kinds of sentiment tasks. |
Immediate Inference: The Missing Foundation in Large Language Model Logical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on LLMs has focused on fine-grained skill decomposition and consistency probing at the propositional level. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark evaluating immediate inference that evaluates elemental operations over categorical propositions and proposes a model that uses immediate inferential reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that models lack robust operator grounding, oscillating between structural reasoning and surface pattern matching, inconsistent handling of quantifiers and negation. |
MINER: Improving Out-of-Vocabulary Named Entity Recognition from an Information Theoretic Perspective (2022.acl-long)
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Xiao Wang, Shihan Dou, Limao Xiong, Yicheng Zou, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Liang Qiao, Zhanzhan Cheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition models are feature-engineering and machine learning based. |
| Approach: | They propose a new NER learning framework that uses entity mentions to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance on OOV entities on various settings and datasets. |
The Confidence Dichotomy: Analyzing and Mitigating Miscalibration in Tool-Use Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a fundamental pillar of trustworthiness is calibration, which refers to an agent’s ability to express confidence that reliably reflects its actual performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes task accuracy and calibration, supported by a holistic benchmark of reward designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves calibration across tool types and shows that trained agents achieve superior calibration and exhibit robust generalization from local training environments to noisy web settings and to distinct domains such as mathematical reasoning. |
HacRED: A Large-Scale Relation Extraction Dataset Toward Hard Cases in Practical Applications (2021.findings-acl)
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Qiao Cheng, Juntao Liu, Xiaoye Qu, Jin Zhao, Jiaqing Liang, Zhefeng Wang, Baoxing Huai, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Relation extraction (RE) is an essential topic in natural language processing and has attracted extensive attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a case-oriented construction framework to build a hard case relation extraction dataset with 65,225 relational facts annotated from 9,231 documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a high 96% F1 score on data quality and is far lower than humans. |
MCapsNet: Capsule Network for Text with Multi-Task Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-task learning has been frustrated by the interference among tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule-based multi-task learning architecture which is unified, simple and effective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can cluster features for each task in the network, which helps reduce the interference among tasks. |
DrAgent: Empowering Large Language Models as Medical Agents for Multi-hop Medical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xin Liu, Zhengyang Wang, Xianfeng Tang, Shiyang Li, Xiang He, Ruijie Wang, Bing Yin, Xiao Gu, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton
| Challenge: | commercial LLMs can be difficult to use in real-world clinical decision-making . a lightweight LLM can be used to collaborate with diverse clinical tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight LLM that can be used to build medical LLMs as agents . they use recursive curriculum learning to optimize the LLM in an easy-to-hard progression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms human experts in medical examinations on diverse datasets. |
A Simple and Effective Approach to Robust Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has questioned the robustness of unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction methods on distant language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative dimension reduction method to bridge this gap . they propose a method that initializes and self-learning and inducing a dictionary . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 13.64 55.53% accuracy between English and four distant languages. |
GAPO: Learning Preferential Prompt through Generative Adversarial Policy Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Zhouhong Gu, Xingzhou Chen, Xiaoran Shi, Tao Wang, Suhang Zheng, Tianyu Li, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for achieving this require a limited understanding of constraints and can be hallucinating or brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines adversarial training dynamics with an encoder-only reward model to progressively learn and adapt to increasingly complex constraints. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that GAPO significantly outperforms existing methods like PPO, DPO, and KTO in fine-grained constraints. |
Incentivizing Strong Reasoning from Weak Supervision (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning-intensive tasks, but enhancing their reasoning abilities typically relies on expensive high-quality demonstrations and reinforcement learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to incentivize reasoning abilities of large language models without expensive demonstrations and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recover 94% of the gains of expensive RL at a fraction of the cost. |
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. |
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Pre-trained Large Language Models (2026.tacl-1)
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Yongyu Mu, Yuzhang Wu, Yuchun Fan, Chenglong Wang, Hengyu Li, Jiali Zeng, Qiaozhi He, Murun Yang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on compressing the Key-Value cache or grouping attention heads, while overlooking redundancy between layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs that uses feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces redundancy by sharing weights across layers while maintaining high response quality while reducing redundant calculations within 53% 84% of the total layers. |
Fine-grained Video Dubbing Duration Alignment with Segment Supervised Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Video dubbing systems use neural machine translation and text-to-speech technologies to translate original speech into visual media programs. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference optimization method to optimize video dubbing duration alignment . they propose combining segment-wise sampling and fine-grained loss to mitigate duration mismatches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance in duration alignment tasks. |
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
| 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%. |
Large Language Model-Enhanced Multi-Armed Bandits (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been used to sequential decision-making tasks like multi-armed bandits where an LLM is tasked with selecting arms in each iteration is often suboptimal. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine MAB and LLMs to leverage the in-context learning capability of LLM for reward prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms LLM-based direct arm selection on synthetic tasks where only preference feedback between arm pairs is available. |
A Survey on Efficient Large Language Model Training: From Data-centric Perspectives (2025.acl-long)
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Junyu Luo, Bohan Wu, Xiao Luo, Zhiping Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Rong-Cheng Tu, Nan Yin, Yifan Wang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | achieving data-efficient post-training of Large Language Models is a key research question. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of data-efficient LLM post-training methods from a data-centric perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods cover data selection, data quality enhancement, synthetic data generation, data distillation and compression, and self-evolving data ecosystems. |
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 . |
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Hengyuan Zhang, Zhihao Zhang, Ercong Nie, Mingyang Wang, Zunhai Su, Yiwei Wang, Qianli Wang, Shuzhou Yuan, Xufeng Duan, Qibo Xue, Zeping Yu, Chenming Shang, Xiao Liang, Jing Xiong, Hui Shen, Chaofan Tao, Zhengwu Liu, Senjie Jin, Zhiheng Xi, Dongdong Zhang, Sophia Ananiadou, Tao Gui, Ruobing Xie, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Hinrich Schuetze, Xuanjing Huang, Qi Zhang, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency. |
Zero-Shot Information Extraction as a Unified Text-to-Triple Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of information extraction tasks require task-specific training. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-triple translation framework for information extraction tasks . they propose enabling task-agnostic translation by leveraging latent knowledge of a pre-trained language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the existing methods on open information extraction tasks. |
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. |
Incomplete In-context Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Wenqiang Wang, Wen Yujia, Yan Xiao, Zhifeng Chen, Yangshijie Zhang, Peng Chen, Mingbo Yang, Xiaochun Cao
| Challenge: | Existing in-context learning assumes the retrieval dataset contains demonstrations for all output label spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework with train-free and train-based variants to address IICL . they propose to integrate a dataset with labeled demonstrations for each output space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods under incomplete retrieval datasets and even outperformed ICL with complete labels. |
Cognitive Overload: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Overloaded Logical Thinking (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated increasing power, but they also have vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack that targets the cognitive structure and processes of large language models (LLMs) they propose defending cognitive overload attacks from three perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is a black-box attack with no need for knowledge of model architecture or access to model weights. |
Cross-Lingual Document Retrieval with Smooth Learning (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual document search is an information retrieval task in which the queries’ language and the documents’ language are different. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust framework that measures the relevance and a loss function that is a novel objective function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant gains under commonly used ranking metrics on cross-lingual document retrieval task in a variety of languages. |
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 . |
Rethinking Multi-Modal Alignment in Multi-Choice VideoQA from Feature and Sample Perspectives (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to VideoQA focus on utilizing frame- or object-level visual representations, but they neglect visual-language interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to break down video into trajectories and first leverage trajectory feature in VideoQA to enhance alignment between two modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the NExT-QA benchmark. |
Reaction Miner: An Integrated System for Chemical Reaction Extraction from Textual Data (2023.emnlp-demo)
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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
| 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. |
TMFN: A Target-oriented Multi-grained Fusion Network for End-to-end Aspect-based Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis focus on fusing image regional information and textual words. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis method that integrates regional and global image information with global image data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
EXPLAIN: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Entity Summary (2025.acl-industry)
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Yaozhen Liang, Xiao Liu, Jiajun Yu, Zhouhua Fang, Qunsheng Zou, Linghan Zheng, Yong Li, Zhiwei Liu, Haishuai Wang
| Challenge: | Existing document question answering methods reduce inference costs and input tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that automatically extracts useful entities and generates summaries from documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context question answering (LC) methods achieve higher accuracy by processing entire documents, but at the cost of increased computational Corresponding authors. |
Do VLMs Have a Moral Backbone? A Study on the Fragile Morality of Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhining Liu, Tianyi Wang, Xiao Lin, Penghao Ouyang, Gaotang Li, Ze Yang, Hui Liu, Sumit Keswani, Vishwa Pardeshi, Huijun Zhao, Wei Fan, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal learning, driving progress in cross-modal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine moral robustness of vision-language models by analyzing their moral stances under multimodal perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic multimodal perturbations expose VLMs to a variety of moral vulnerabilities, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion. |
Unlocking Memorization in Large Language Models with Dynamic Soft Prompting (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhepeng Wang, Runxue Bao, Yawen Wu, Jackson Taylor, Cao Xiao, Feng Zheng, Weiwen Jiang, Shangqian Gao, Yanfu Zhang
| Challenge: | Pretrained large language models excel in a variety of natural language processing tasks . however, they pose significant security risks due to their tendency to memorize training data . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to estimate LLM memorization using dynamic, prefix-dependent soft prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve maximum relative improvement of 135.3% and 39.8% over baseline compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
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. |
PrinciplismQA: A Philosophy-Grounded Approach to Assessing LLM-Human Clinical Medical Ethics Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack systematic approaches to integrate philosophical frameworks and expert validation for ethical reasoning assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a philosophy-grounded approach to assess medical ethics alignment . PrinciplismQA comprises 3,648 expert-validated questions spanning knowledge assessment and clinical reasoning . |
| Outcome: | PrinciplismQA provides a philosophy-grounded approach to assessing medical ethics alignment. |
FinMaster: A Holistic Benchmark for Full-Pipeline Financial Management with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Junzhe Jiang, Chang Yang, Aixin Cui, Sihan Jin, Yujing Zhang, Yilin Xiao, Ruiyu Wang, Bo Li, Xiao Huang, Danny Dongning Sun, Xinrun Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack domain-specific data, realistic workflow-level task design, and standardized workflow- level evaluation. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates large language models on financial management workflows . the global financial services market is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for large language models on financial management workflows reveals critical capability gaps . accuracy drops from 90% on basic tasks to 40% on complex scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning . the global financial services market reached $25.8 trillion in 2022 and is projected to grow to $37 trillion by 2027 . |
Can LLMs Learn to Map the World from Local Descriptions? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks such as code generation and mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models can construct coherent global spatial cognition by integrating fragmented relational descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can generalize to unseen spatial relationships and exhibit latent representations aligned with real-world spatial distributions. |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios. |
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. |
Are Machines Better at Complex Reasoning? Unveiling Human-Machine Inference Gaps in Entailment Verification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evidence that humans make numerous inferences to understand discourse and text is not fully understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to use textual inference datasets with multi-sentence premises to solve the entailment verification problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-3.5 and rivals GPL-4 in EV tasks. |
Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding for Mitigating Context Faithfulness Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods, such as a n-terminal coding, do not provide accurate data for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that leverages attention distributions and uncertainty signals in a single-pass decoding. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on open-book QA datasets show that DAGCD improves faithfulness and robustness while preserving computational efficiency. |
Stumbling Blocks: Stress Testing the Robustness of Machine-Generated Text Detectors Under Attacks (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on this topic focus on the robustness of specific detectors or particular attack methods. |
| Approach: | They stress test the detectors’ robustness to malicious attacks under realistic scenarios using LLMs and metric-based detectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on a set of LLM-based models and their performance is compared under different budget levels. |
Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual learning in language models suffer catastrophic forgetting when learning sequential tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal low-rank adaptation approach for continual learning in language models that uses orthogons to learn sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on continual learning benchmarks and preserves generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks. |
AnaloBench: Benchmarking the Identification of Abstract and Long-context Analogies (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiao Ye, Andrew Wang, Jacob Choi, Yining Lu, Shreya Sharma, Lingfeng Shen, Vijay Murari Tiyyala, Nicholas Andrews, Daniel Khashabi
| Challenge: | Analogical reasoning is an important part of human communication, says a new study . a benchmark to determine analogical reasoning ability in language models is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark analogical reasoning ability in language models by collecting 340 analogies from human writings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to determine analogical reasoning ability in language models. |
Revealing the Attention Floating Mechanism in Masked Diffusion Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xin Dai, Pengcheng Huang, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Yukun Yan, Chaojun Xiao, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Masked diffusion models (MDMs) leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process. |
| Approach: | They investigate the attention behaviors of Masked diffusion models by revealing the phenomenon of Attention Floating. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model doubles the performance of autoregressive models in knowledge-intensive tasks. |
GALA: Geometric Data Selection with Strategic Prospecting for Large Language Model Self-training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-training are based on reject sampling and lack quality reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-training using a generate-and-filter paradigm . they propose to identify diverse and informative samples from redundant data and exploit them more strategically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits informative samples from redundant data and improves reasoning trajectory prospecting. |
Med-SRAF: A Multi-Agent Framework for Medical Reasoning via Semantic Routing and Agentic Fusion (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods suffer from a two-part problem: semantic drift and concatenation fallacy . et al.: rapid development of Large Language Models has led to a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent retrieval augmentation framework guided by medical domain knowledge to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing general RAG baselines on five widely used medical benchmarks. |
Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model (2023.findings-acl)
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Xiao Wang, Weikang Zhou, Qi Zhang, Jie Zhou, SongYang Gao, Junzhe Wang, Menghan Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use end-task knowledge to select a tiny subset of pretraining corpus to influence performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pretrained models on eight datasets covering four domains with 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost. |
CoMoL: Efficient Mixture of LoRA Experts via Dynamic Core Space Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Cao, Zhenxuan Fan, Zhuonan Wang, Tianwei Lin, Ziyuan Zhao, Rolan Yan, Wenqiao Zhang, Feifei Shao, Hongwei Wang, Jun Xiao, Siliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing PEFT methods suffer from limited parameter efficiency and coarse-grained adaptation due to proliferation of LoRA experts and instance-level routing. |
| Approach: | They propose a new MoE-LoRA framework that incorporates expert diversity, parameter efficiency, and fine-grained adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multiple tasks while maintaining parameter efficiency. |
Calibrated Speculative Decoding: Frequency-Guided Candidate Selection for Efficient Inference (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a powerful and efficient way to accelerate autoregressive generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that recovers valid tokens discarded by standard verification . they use online correction memory and Semantic Consistency Gating to analyze rejections . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves peak throughput speedup of 2.33x. |
AutoDetect: Towards a Unified Framework for Automated Weakness Detection in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jiale Cheng, Yida Lu, Xiaotao Gu, Pei Ke, Xiao Liu, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant but subtle weaknesses, such as mistakes in instruction-following or coding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically expose weaknesses in Large Language Models (LLMs) they use three LLM-powered agents to perform comprehensive weakness identification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is more effective than untargeted data augmentation methods like Self-Instruct to identify weaknesses in LLMs. |
LiGen: Active Lipid Generation via a Molecular Language Model (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) can deliver cargos to tumor and immune cells . traditional approaches rely on experimental screening and expert judgment . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate lipid molecules efficiently and actively using deep learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on multiple cell lines and achieves a 30% improvement over the current methods. |
s3: You Don’t Need That Much Data to Train a Search Agent via RL (2025.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
InsLogicBench: An Argumentation Logic Grounded Benchmark for Complex Insurance Claims Adjudication (2026.acl-long)
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Jin Liu, Yunpeng Liu, Keyi Wang, Jie Shi, Xiao Xu, Wenkang Huang, Xingzhong Xu, Xin Liang, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for insurance claims adjudication are limited to information retrieval or simple multiple-choice setups. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that provides complete reasoning traces linking factual inputs, relevant policy clauses, and final verdicts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that models often produce correct decisions but fail to provide precise justifications, highlighting a critical discrepancy between decision accuracy and logical reasoning capabilities. |
LLM Critics Help Catch Bugs in Mathematics: Towards a Better Mathematical Verifier with Natural Language Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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Bofei Gao, Zefan Cai, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Ce Zheng, Runji Lin, Keming Lu, Dayiheng Liu, Chang Zhou, Wen Xiao, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Existing mathematical verifiers are trained with binary classification labels, which are not informative enough for the model to accurately assess the solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language feedback-enhanced verifier that can validate the correctness of response generated by policy models by constructing automatically generated training data and a two-stage training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed verifier significantly improves in verification and reinforcement learning and alleviates data-demanding problems of the reward model. |
ProductResearch: Training E-Commerce Deep Research Agents via Multi-Agent Synthetic Trajectory Distillation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based agents lack the interaction depth and contextual breadth required for complex product research. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that synthesizes high-fidelity tool-use trajectories for training robust e-commerce shopping agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-fidelity, long-horizon tool-use trajectories for training robust e-commerce shopping agents. |
Better Simultaneous Translation with Monotonic Knowledge Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train offline MT models require generating target tokens before source sentence is fully consumed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages traditional translation models as teachers to generate monotonic yet accurate reference translations for sequence-level knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on strong baselines and on a monotonic version of the WMT15 De-En test set. |
UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal ones . large-scale pre- training has drawn much attention in both the community of Compute Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture which can adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn more generalizable representations with rich non-paired single-modal data. |
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. |
Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yi Feng, Jiaqi Wang, Wenxuan Zhang, Zhuang Chen, Shen Yutong, Xiyao Xiao, Minlie Huang, Liping Jing, Jian Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mental health support lack realism and capture therapeutic progression over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that simulates expert narrative therapists by planning therapeutic stages, guiding reflection levels, and generating contextually appropriate responses through retrieval-augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard methods in quality and depth on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants. |
Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training. |
EvolvR: Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning for Story Evaluation to Enhance Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, null Yanbingren, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang, Feng Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for story evaluation lack reasoning capabilities for open-source models . evolvR framework provides high-fidelity evaluators for story generation tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that self-synthesizes chain-of-thought data via a multi-persona strategy . they propose evolvR to provide a reward model for story generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three evaluation benchmarks . it also enhances the quality of generated stories, validating the superiority of the framework . |
Revisiting Interpolation Augmentation for Speech-to-Text Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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Chen Xu, Jie Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qian Dong, Chunliang Zhang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Dapeng Man, Wu Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to speech-to-text generation tasks are limited by the lack of extensive labeled datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use interpolation augmentation to construct virtual training samples by transforming inputs and labels to enhance generalization in other domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves performance across diverse tasks, architectures, and data scales, offering a promising avenue for more robust S2T systems in resource-constrained settings. |
Bridging the Granularity Gap for Acoustic Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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Chen Xu, Yuhao Zhang, Chengbo Jiao, Xiaoqian Liu, Chi Hu, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Huizhen Wang, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Despite the success of speech recognition, how to encode the speech features effectively remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a Progressive Down-Sampling technique which compresses acoustic features into coarser-grained units containing more complete semantic information, like text-level representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields comparable or better results on the speech recognition task and inference speedups ranging from 1.20x to 1.47x. |
Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multidisciplinary Professional Videos (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing video benchmarks do not evaluate the knowledge acquisition capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) existing video benchmark focuses on static, general visual understanding tasks, without evaluating whether models can acquire knowledge dynamically. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal, multi-discipline, multitrack benchmark that evaluates Large Multimodal Models’ ability to acquire knowledge from college-level, educational videos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals a substantial gap between human learners and current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and focuses on improving their learning efficiency. |
Negation Triplet Extraction with Syntactic Dependency and Semantic Consistency (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Negation understanding is crucial to many downstream tasks such as sentiment analysis, question answering, Web search and natural language inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel negation triplet extraction task which aims to extract negation subject along with negation cue and scope. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a generative pretrained language model with a multi-task learning framework and achieves the best performance compared to baselines. |
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. |
NUMINA: A Natural Understanding Benchmark for Multi-dimensional Intelligence and Numerical Reasoning Abilities (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Changyu Zeng, Yifan Wang, Zimu Wang, Wei Wang, Zhengni Yang, Muyi Bao, Jimin Xiao, Anh Nguyen, Yutao Yue
| Challenge: | Existing 3D benchmarks lack fine-grained numerical reasoning task annotations, limiting MLLMs’ ability to perform precise spatial measurements and complex numerical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a 3D-based benchmark to enhance indoor perceptual understanding by using multi-scale annotations and question-answer pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves indoor perceptual understanding by incorporating multi-scale annotations and question-answer pairs. |
Does Multi-Encoder Help? A Case Study on Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | In encoder-decoder neural models, multiple encoders are used to represent contextual information in addition to the individual sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multiple context encoders to encode the individual sentences in document-level neural machine translation (NMT) They propose a noisy dropout setup and a single-encoder approach to encode context sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach encodes the context and the current sentence without contexts. |
Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit translationese errors and generate unexpected unnatural translations . Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the dominant method in machine translation research . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the prevalence of translationese in LLM-generated translations and investigate its roots during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce translationese while improving translation naturalness . the proposed methods are validated by human evaluations and automatic metrics . |
GRASPrune: Global Gating for Budgeted Structured Pruning of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are expensive to serve because dense FFN blocks, multi-head attention, and KV caches dominate memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a global budgeted structured pruning framework that prunes FFN channels and attention KV head groups under a single global parameter budget. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model removes 50% of parameters and achieves 12.18 perplexity on WikiText-2 while maintaining competitive average zero-shot accuracy on five downstream benchmarks. |
SCALER: Synthetic Scalable Adaptive Learning Environment for Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is a principled way to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet its effectiveness hinges on training signals that remain informative as models evolve. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that sustains effective learning signals through adaptive environment design that transforms real-world programming problems into verifiable reasoning environments with controllable difficulty and unbounded instance generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across diverse reasoning benchmarks and exhibits more stable, long-horizon training dynamics. |
MAGI: Multi-Agent Guided Interview for Psychiatric Assessment (2025.findings-acl)
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Guanqun Bi, Zhuang Chen, Zhoufu Liu, Hongkai Wang, Xiyao Xiao, Yuqiang Xie, Wen Zhang, Yongkang Huang, Yuxuan Chen, Libiao Peng, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) do not align with psychiatric diagnostic protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview into automatic computational workflows through coordinated multi-agent collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms the gold-standard Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) into automatic computational workflows through coordinated multi-agent collaboration. |
Tool Zero: Training Tool-Augmented LLMs via Pure RL from Scratch (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yirong Zeng, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Li Du, Juyi Dai, Qiuyang Ding, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Weiwen Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that our models achieve over 7% performance improvement compared to both SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic generalization-guided reward design for rule-based RL that shifts rewards from exploratory to exploitative tool-use patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves over 7% performance improvement compared to SFT and RL-with-SFT models under the same experimental settings. |
CSLM: A Framework for Question Answering Dataset Generation through Collaborative Small Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Collecting high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs is vital for training large language models, but computational demands and associated costs often render such approaches prohibitive for the average researcher. |
| Approach: | They propose a small-scaled, open-source solution that generates QA pairs from documents or raw corpora using large-scale models like Llama-70B. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on domain-specific datasets show that the proposed model can generate high-quality QA pairs, making it accessible to a broader range of researchers. |
Large-Scale Multimodal Knowledge Graph about Classical Chinese Poetry: Fine-grained Method and Comprehensive Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on classical Chinese poetry are limited by modality constraints, dataset size, or the level of refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a large-scale and fine-grained multimodal knowledge graph of classical Chinese poetry using an informative ontology graph and a text-image alignment method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method collects knowledge about classical Chinese poetry from ontology graphs and performs four tasks that demonstrate its comprehensiveness and high quality. |
Memory-Guided Hard Data Augmentation for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinyu Liu, Kai fu, Yinghan Shi, Quanyou Chu, Ming Du, Hongya Wang, Xiaojun Meng, Jiansheng Wei, Yanghua Xiao, Bo Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Named Entity Recognition (NER) ignore the internal state of the target model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to repair model-specific errors by using a model-based approach . they employ cross-validation to identify model- specific Hard Data and a memory tree to induce macro-level error patterns from micro-level failures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields significant performance gains on Twitter and other platforms. |
Boosting Text-to-SQL through Multi-grained Error Identification (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for error identification often overlook validation of generated results . text-to-SQL is a technology that converts natural language questions into executable SQL queries . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a multi-grained error identification method into existing methods to detect SQL errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be integrated as a plugin into various methods, providing effective error identification and correction capabilities. |
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. |
Zero-shot Event Detection Using a Textual Entailment Model as an Enhanced Annotator (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work proposed to use a pre-trained textual entailment model for event detection . but, those methods treated the TE model as a frozen annotator . |
| Approach: | They propose to use TE models to annotate large-scale unlabeled text and annotated data to fine-tune the TE model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods by 15% on the ACE05 dataset. |
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Shengyuan Wang, Yue Huang, Andrew Feng, Bosi Wen, Jiale Cheng, Pei Ke, Yifan Xu, Weng Lam Tam, Xiaohan Zhang, Lichao Sun, Xiaotao Gu, Hongning Wang, Jing Zhang, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references. |
Open-Domain Question Answering with Pre-Constructed Question Spaces (2021.naacl-srw)
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| 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. |
AgentTuning: Enabling Generalized Agent Abilities for LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Open large language models (LLMs) with great performance in various tasks are far inferior to commercial models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 when acting as agents to tackle complex tasks in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the agent capabilities of LLMs while maintaining their general abilities. |
| Outcome: | The AgentLM-70B is comparable to GPT-3.5-turbo on unseen agent tasks, demonstrating generalized agent capabilities. |
EXCEEDS: Extracting Complex Events via Nugget-based Grid Modeling in Scientific Domain (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive event extraction research has been conducted in many domains, including news, finance, and biology. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end scientific event extraction framework for encoding nuggets into a grid matrix and simplifying complex event extraction as a nuggot-based grid modeling task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs well in scientific domain, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance. |
TriSum: Learning Summarization Ability from Large Language Models with Structured Rationale (2024.naacl-long)
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| 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. |
Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yongyu Mu, Peinan Feng, Zhiquan Cao, Yuzhang Wu, Bei Li, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kai Song, Tongran Liu, Chunliang Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel multilingual input to enhance the model's comprehension of the input and to examine how multilingual processing affects prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input, but previous studies focused on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning. |
Drivel-ology: Challenging LLMs with Interpreting Nonsense with Depth (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite excelling at many natural language processing tasks, large language models fail to grasp the layered semantics of Drivelological text. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark dataset of over 1,200+ carefully curated and diverse examples across English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean to examine their Drivelological characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models lack conceptual understanding and lack conceptual and semantic accuracy. |
MobileNMT: Enabling Translation in 15MB and 30ms (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on NMT models is limited in storage, memory, computation and power consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile machine translation system that can translate in 15MB and 30ms on devices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can translate in 15MB and 30ms on mobile devices. |
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. |
HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongbo Zhang, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Fei Yu, Zhihong Chen, Guiming Chen, Jianquan Li, Xiangbo Wu, Zhang Zhiyi, Qingying Xiao, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the distilled language model outperforms its teacher model (ChatGPT) in most cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM) that leverages both distilled data from **ChatGPT** and real-world data from**doctors** in the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model in most cases by using additional real-world data and RLMF to align the language model with the merits of both sources. |
Similarizing the Influence of Words with Contrastive Learning to Defend Word-level Adversarial Text Attack (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural language models are vulnerable to word-level adversarial text attacks . previous word-based search methods assume important words influence prediction . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for similarizing the influence of words with contrast learning that encourages model to learn sentence representations in which words of varying importance have a more uniform influence on prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with various training methods and improves model robustness against various adversarial attacks. |
TROVE: A Challenge for Fine-Grained Text Provenance via Source Sentence Tracing and Relationship Classification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated great potential in natural language generation, but their widespread adoption has raised concerns regarding content reliability and accountability. |
| Approach: | They propose a challenge to trace each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences within potentially lengthy or multi-document inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed challenge traces each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences . the dataset includes 11 scenarios covering QA and summarization in english and Chinese . |
Hybrid Alignment Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with instructions and preferences are conflicting . et al., 2023b) show that hybrid alignment training can outperform baselines . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid alignment training approach based on alternating alignment and modified elastic weight consolidation methods to achieve better collaboration between different alignment tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline alignment training methods on summarization and dialogue tasks. |
DyLex: Incorporating Dynamic Lexicons into BERT for Sequence Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)
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Baojun Wang, Zhao Zhang, Kun Xu, Guang-Yuan Hao, Yuyang Zhang, Lifeng Shang, Linlin Li, Xiao Chen, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate lexical knowledge into deep learning models are limited by large-scale dynamic lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA even with large scale lexicons, the authors show . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenglong Wang, Canjia Li, Xingzhao Zhu, Yifu Huo, Huiyu Wang, Weixiong Lin, Yun Yang, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate relevance judgments are limited due to dynamic nature of query distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving relevance model approach to generalize queries to practical search scenarios . they use a multi-agent sample miner and a relevance annotator to generate reliable labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve significant performance gains on a large-scale industrial platform, validated by offline multilingual evaluations and online testing. |
CoVerRL: Breaking the Consensus Trap in Label-Free Reasoning via Generator-Verifier Co-Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Teng Pan, Yuchen Yan, Zixuan Wang, Ruiqing Zhang, Guiyang Hou, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Label-free reinforcement learning enables large language models to improve reasoning capabilities . but as training maximizes self-consistency, output diversity collapses, authors say . authors propose a framework where a single model alternates between generator and verifier roles . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where a model alternates between generator and verifier roles, bootstrapping each other. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoVerRL outperforms label-free baselines on reasoning benchmarks . the framework can be used to improve reasoning abilities without ground-truth supervision . |
Anti-Length Shift: Dynamic Outlier Truncation for Training Efficient Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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Wei Wu, Liyi Chen, Congxi Xiao, Tianfu Wang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Hui Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing efficient reasoning methods rely on explicit length penalties for excessive verbosity on simple queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time intervention that selectively suppresses redundant tokens . they find length shift occurs when models generate unnecessary reasoning on trivial inputs - a phenomenon that is often unexplored . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces inference token usage by 78% while increasing accuracy compared to the initial policy and surpasses state-of-the-art efficient reasoning methods. |
Dangling-Aware Entity Alignment with Mixed High-Order Proximities (2022.findings-naacl)
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Juncheng Liu, Zequn Sun, Bryan Hooi, Yiwei Wang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Xiaokui Xiao, Muhao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dangling-aware entity alignment are underexplored but important problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses high-order proximities to detect dangling entities and align matchable entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects dangling entities and aligns matchable entities better than existing methods. |
Modeling Content Importance for Summarization with Pre-trained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on content importance do not consider semantics and context when evaluating importance. |
| Approach: | They apply information theory to pre-trained language models to define the concept of importance from the perspective of information amount. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on CNN/Daily Mail and New York Times show that the proposed model can model the importance of content better than previous methods based on F1 and ROUGE scores. |
On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a data-centric solution to alleviate limitations of real-world data with synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic workflow for LLM-driven synthetic data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflows highlight gaps in existing research and outline avenues for future studies. |
Compensate Quantization Errors: Make Weights Hierarchical to Compensate Each Other (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Emergent Large Language Models (LLMs) use extraordinary performance and powerful deduction capacity to discern from traditional language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses weights to compensate quantization error and learnable singular value incremental (LSI) LSI is a technique that helps weights compensate each other conditioned on activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in diverse quantization settings, no matter in weight-only, weight-activation or extremely low bit scenarios. |
MegaPairs: Massive Data Synthesis for Universal Multimodal Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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Junjie Zhou, Yongping Xiong, Zheng Liu, Ze Liu, Shitao Xiao, Yueze Wang, Bo Zhao, Chen Jason Zhang, Defu Lian
| Challenge: | despite the growing demand for multimodal retrieval, there is a lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis method that leverages vision language models and open-domain images to generate high-quality data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on 70 more datasets and can scale up. |
From Shortcuts to Triggers: Backdoor Defense with Denoised PoE (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor defense methods focus on specific triggers, leaving a universal defense unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose an ensemble-based backdoor defense framework that denies backdoor attacks by capturing backdoor shortcuts and preventing learning them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves defense performance against backdoor attacks . it is also effective under a more challenging but practical setting . |
A Simple yet Efficient Prompt Compression Method for Text Classification Data Annotation Using LLM (2025.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) are often impractical due to high costs and time consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses keyword extraction to reduce prompt tokens in text annotation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces prompt tokens while maintaining high accuracy. |
AutoTrial: Prompting Language Models for Clinical Trial Design (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Generative large language models (LLMs) are a popular tool for creating coherent and human-like documents for clinical trials. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate clinical eligibility criteria using language models by a hybrid of discrete and neural prompting and scalable knowledge incorporation via in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates high-quality criteria texts fluent and coherent with high accuracy against the GPT-3.5 baselines. |
ChatSOP: An SOP-Guided MCTS Planning Framework for Controllable LLM Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang, Yong Cao, Tianhao Shen, Minghui Zhang, Linxi Su, Shang Wu, Yihang Wu, YuQian Wang, Ye Wang, Wei Hu, Jianfeng Li, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing models that use Large Language Models (LLMs) show superior performance in various tasks, but lack of controllability leads to unfocused conversations or task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a standard operating procedure (SOP) framework to regulate dialogue flow by integrating Chain of Thought reasoning and supervised fine-tuning for SOP prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 27.95% improvement in action accuracy compared to baseline models based on GPT-3.5 and also shows notable gains for open-source models. |
JARVIS or Ultron? A Survey on the Safety and Security Threats of Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Ada Chen, Yongjiang Wu, Junyuan Zhang, Jingyu Xiao, Shu Yang, Jen-tse Huang, Kun Wang, Wenxuan Wang, Shuai Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in computer-using agents have created new safety and security risks . despite the impressive capabilities of CUAs, there are still significant security risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematization of knowledge on the safety and security threats of Computer-Using Agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a framework for assessing the safety and security risks of computer-using agents. |
Relation Logical Reasoning and Relation-aware Entity Encoding for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Current knowledge graph models focus on embedding entities and relations, overlooking the broader structure of the entire knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning model that embeds relation embeddings into the TKG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on five public datasets . it uses relation-aware attention mechanisms to learn relation embeddings based on query relations . |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
Why Did Apple Fall: Evaluating Curiosity in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating curiosity-like behaviors in large language models lack curiosity-inspired features. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychology-inspired framework to evaluate curiosity in large language models . they adapt the Five-Dimensional Curiosity scale Revised (5DCR) to LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates curiosity in large language models using questionnaires and behavioral studies. |
Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on neural machine translation (NMT) has demonstrated impressive performance improvements and became the de-facto standard. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic curriculum learning method to reorder training samples in training using a Transformer-based system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three low-resource machine translation benchmarks and different sized data of WMT’16 En-De. |
Ouroboros: Generating Longer Drafts Phrase by Phrase for Faster Speculative Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
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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
| 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. |
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingxuan Yang, Bo Huang, Siyuan Qi, Chao Feng, Haoyi Hu, Yuxuan Zhu, Jinbo Hu, Haoran Zhao, Ziyi He, Xiao Liu, ZongYu Wang, Muning Wen, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions? |
| Approach: | They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure. |
Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)
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Yuming Yang, Wantong Zhao, Caishuang Huang, Junjie Ye, Xiao Wang, Huiyuan Zheng, Yang Nan, Yuran Wang, Xueying Xu, Kaixin Huang, Yunke Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models struggle with complex entity taxonomies in open domains and lack NER capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to guide LLMs' generalization in Open NER under a universal entity taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 in 3 out-of-domain benchmarks across 15 datasets and 6 languages. |
Bypassing Neural Evaluations for Fast Audio Editing via Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaoqian Liu, Zhengkun Ge, Jianjin Wang, Haoran Zhang, Yuan Ge, Kaiyan Chang, Chen Xu, Tong Xiao, Zhengtao Yu, Linfeng Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-audio editing via inversion techniques, but these models typically rely on dense, fixed-step sampling trajectories to maintain structural integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation framework that accelerates inversion-based editing process by dynamically evaluating only the most critical generative phases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a 3.9 speedup with negligible loss in fidelity. |
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. |
Neural-based Mixture Probabilistic Query Embedding for Answering FOL queries on Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to embed entities and first-order logical queries in a vector space are often violated in real applications and limit their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Neural-based Mixture Probabilistic Query Embedding Model that embeds entities and first-order logical queries in a vector space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
Lunar-Bench: Towards Evaluating Task-Oriented Reasoning of LLMs in Lunar Exploration Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on static, context-independent reasoning tasks and fail to capture constraints and dependencies of lunar missions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the task-oriented reasoning and decision-making performance of large language models through 3,000 tasks derived from mission procedures and documentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 47.8% accuracy compared with 65.1% for human experts on 36 representative missions. |
RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengzuo Wu, Yuhang Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Chao Ye, Hong Gu, Xu Lu, Ruixuan Xiao, Bowen Bao, Yijing He, Liangyu Zha, Wentao Ye, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models focus on simple, flat table structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of both Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of LLMs and Multimodal LLM models across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. |
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages. |
Measuring Data Diversity for Instruction Tuning: A Systematic Analysis and A Reliable Metric (2025.acl-long)
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Yuming Yang, Yang Nan, Junjie Ye, Shihan Dou, Xiao Wang, Shuo Li, Huijie Lv, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored various diversity-aware data selection methods to construct high-quality datasets and enhance model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data diversity to measure instruction tuning of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed diversity metric outperforms existing methods on simulated and real-world data and shows that it captures diversity variations and achieves a 0.97 correlation with instruction tuning. |
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. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
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Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
Glyph: Scaling Context Windows via Visual-Text Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Jiale Cheng, Yusen Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Yulin Fei, Wenyi Hong, Ruiliang Lyu, Weihan Wang, Zhe Su, Xiaotao Gu, Xiao Liu, Yushi Bai, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) traditionally represent text as sequences of discrete tokens . a long-context scaling problem requires processing more tokens more efficiently . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that renders long texts into compact visual pages and processes them with a vision-language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework renders long texts into compact visual pages and processes them with a vision-language model. |
OVEL: Online Video Entity Linking (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Multi-modal Entity Linking focus on linking textual and visual mentions or offline videos’ mentions to entities in multi-modal knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called Online Video Entity Linking to establish connections between online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can establish connections between mentions in online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
Merge then Realign: Simple and Effective Modality-Incremental Continual Learning for Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enhanced their versatility as they integrate a growing number of modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple MCL paradigm that addresses forgetting and misalignment . they propose 'MErge then ReAlign' to extend existing models to more modalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm is easy to deploy and highly reusable in the MLLM community. |
Towards Transferable Personality Representation Learning based on Triplet Comparisons and Its Applications (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kai Tang, Rui Wang, Renyu Zhu, Minmin Lin, Xiao Ding, Tangjie Lv, Changjie Fan, Runze Wu, Haobo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for personality analysis treat corpus as a single unit for classification, but this approach presents several challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a task paradigm for text-based personality representation learning that uses a triplet personality trend comparison dataset to learn single-sentence personality embeddings with desirable metric properties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance across various applications, including personality detection, personality retrieval, and emotion translation prediction. |
From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)
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Lei Yang, Leiyu Pan, Bojian Xiong, Renren Jin, Shaowei Zhang, Yue Chen, Ling Shi, Jiang Zhou, Junru Wu, Zhen Wang, Jianxiang Peng, Juesi Xiao, Tianyu Dong, Zhuowen Han, Zhuo Chen, Yuqi Ren, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks. |
Guiding the Flowing of Semantics: Interpretable Video Captioning via POS Tag (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of video captioning use a network and semantics are mixed into one feature. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Semantic Guidance Network which instantiates whole video semantics to different POS-aware semantics with supervision of part of speech (POS) tag. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed model is more efficient than state-of-the-art models. |
SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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Yuchun Fan, Yongyu Mu, YiLin Wang, Lei Huang, Junhao Ruan, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, Shujian Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant improvements in reasoning abilities, but these improvements are primarily focused on English, leading to inferior performance in non-English scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual reasoning alignment approach that fine-tunes the layers responsible for multilingual comprehension in one stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fine-tunes 6 of the 9 layers responsible for multilingual comprehension, while reducing training time by 4.1-11.9 compared to the two-stage method. |
Automatic Construction of Sememe Knowledge Bases via Dictionaries (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sememe knowledge bases (SKBs) are used to analyze natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to build sememe knowledge bases from an existing dictionary . they propose to use existing dictionaries to build an English and a French SKB . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to HowNet, the most widely used SKB that takes decades to build manually. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
DetectBench: Can Large Language Model Detect and Piece Together Implicit Evidence? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhouhong Gu, Lin Zhang, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Jiangjie Chen, Wenhao Huang, Yikai Zhang, Shusen Wang, Zheyu Ye, Yan Gao, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs' abilities to detect evidence in long contexts are far inferior to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' abilities in evidence and multi-step commonsense reasoning within a long context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of LLMs in evidence detection and commonsense reasoning. |
LogicGame: Benchmarking Rule-Based Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiayi Gui, Yiming Liu, Jiale Cheng, Xiaotao Gu, Xiao Liu, Hongning Wang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable capabilities across various tasks, showcasing complex problem-solving abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the rule-based logical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) they create simulated scenarios in which models execute or plan operations to achieve specific outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of large language models on a variety of scenarios with varying difficulty levels. |
ChemNER: Fine-Grained Chemistry Named Entity Recognition with Ontology-Guided Distant Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
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. |
FineRAG: Fine-grained Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text-to-image generation still exhibit limitations in terms of knowledge access. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained retrieval-augmented image generation model that breaks down the retrieval task into four critical stages: query decomposition, candidate selection, retrieval augmented diffusion, and self-reflection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces noise associated with retrieval-augmented image generation and performs better in complex, open-world scenarios. |
Multi-task Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Model with Few-shot Queries (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial text attacks rely on abundant access to shared internal features and numerous queries, limited to a single task type. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack that exploits the transferability of adversarial texts . they use a deep-level substitute model trained in a plug-and-play manner for text classification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack can target multiple tasks with minimal perturbations . it can target commercial APIs, large language models, and image-generation models . |
Sensitivity-LoRA : Low-Load Sensitivity-Based Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Hao Zhang, Bo Huang, Zhenjia Li, Xi Xiao, Hui Yi Leong, Zumeng Zhang, Xinwei Long, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a promising approach to adapting LLMs to specialized tasks . existing rank allocation techniques remain computationally inefficient and unstable . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adapted model that approximates model weight updates using low-ranked decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is limited by its uniform rank allocation to each incremental matrix . it leverages the second-order derivatives of the loss function to capture weight sensitivity . |
Advancing Fine-Grained Visual Understanding with Multi-Scale Alignment in Multi-Modal Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Wei Wang, Zhaowei Li, Qi Xu, Linfeng Li, YiQing Cai, Botian Jiang, Hang Song, Xingcan Hu, Pengyu Wang, Li Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multi-modal large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects . they use a pipeline that provides over 300K essential training data to enhance alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects, including texts, coordinates, and images. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
PHMOSpell: Phonological and Morphological Knowledge Guided Chinese Spelling Check (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | False gram and phonological errors make Chinese spelling check difficult . a novel end-to-end trainable model outperforms existing methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a trainable Chinese spelling check model that integrates phonological and visual information into a pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
“Yes, My LoRD.” Guiding Language Model Extraction with Locality Reinforced Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for model extraction attacks on large language models are inadequate . existing methods neglect the inconsistency between training tasks and LLM alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a model extraction algorithm that uses a policy-gradient-style training task to guide the crafting of preference for the local model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces query complexity while mitigating watermark protection . it can extract various state-of-the-art commercial LLMs while minimizing query complexity . |
KG-FPQ: Evaluating Factuality Hallucination in LLMs with Knowledge Graph-based False Premise Questions (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that assess this vulnerability rely on manual construction, resulting in limited size and lack of expandability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate false premise questions based on knowledge graphs . they modify true triplets extracted from KGs to create false premises . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates semantically rich FPQs using state-of-the-art GPTs. |
Are Your LLMs Capable of Stable Reasoning? (2025.findings-acl)
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Junnan Liu, Hongwei Liu, Linchen Xiao, Ziyi Wang, Kuikun Liu, Songyang Gao, Wenwei Zhang, Songyang Zhang, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation protocols and metrics do not capture the full spectrum of LLM capabilities, especially in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation metric that continuously assesses model performance across multiple sampling attempts, quantifying both the model’s potential capabilities and operational consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric measures model performance across multiple sampling attempts and provides comprehensive insights into their potential capabilities and operational consistency. |
Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that our model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural abstractive multi-document summarization model which captures cross-document relations and can guide the summary generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the WikiSum and MultiNews datasets and can be easily combined with pre-trained language models. |
MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)
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Jifan Yu, Gan Luo, Tong Xiao, Qingyang Zhong, Yuquan Wang, Wenzheng Feng, Junyi Luo, Chenyu Wang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular educational platform for advanced research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MOOCCube to build a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that they can facilitate research in MOOCs. |
HEAL: A Hypothesis-Based Preference-Aware Analysis Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yifu Huo, Chenglong Wang, Qiren Zhu, Shunjie Xing, Tong Xiao, Chunliang Zhang, Tongran Liu, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Preference optimization methods like DPO are often evaluated on a single response, overlooking other outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hypothesis-based PrEference-aware AnaLysis Framework that formulates preference alignment as a re-ranking process within hypothesis spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm re-ranks preference alignment as a reranking process within hypothesis spaces. |
T3-Vis: visual analytic for Training and fine-Tuning Transformers in NLP (2021.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual analytics tools have been shown to support the analysis and interpretation of deep learning models due to the inherent black-box nature of the models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use visual analytic framework to help researchers understand the model's intrinsic properties and behaviours through interactive visualization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights about the model’s intrinsic properties and behaviours through interactive visualization and a suite of built-in algorithms. |
Revisiting Scaling Laws for Language Models: The Role of Data Quality and Training Strategies (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws suggest augmenting model size and training data results in enhanced performance, but recent studies reveal deviations, particularly in large language models, where performance improvements decelerate—a phenomenon known as sub-scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a sub-optimal scaling law that better predicts performance in sub-scaling regimes by examining data quality and training strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling law better predicts performance in sub-scaling regimes, highlighting the importance of data quality and diversity. |
PILOT: Legal Case Outcome Prediction with Case Law (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | predicting legal case outcomes requires identifying relevant precedent cases . predicting case outcomes in case law systems presents unique challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for making legal case outcome predictions with case law . they propose to use two modules for relevant case retrieval and temporal pattern handling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant improvement over previous models based on civil law cases . it is crucial to identify relevant precedent cases that serve as evidence for judges . |
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. |
Black-Box Prompt Optimization: Aligning Large Language Models without Model Training (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are often not well aligned with human intents, which requires additional training. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Black-Box Prompt Optimization (BPO) to perform alignments on large language models that are not well aligned with human intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and is model-agnostic. |
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 . |
Towards Robust Evidence-Aware Fake News Detection via Improving Semantic Perception (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods lack sufficient semantic perception and are easily blinded by textual expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic training framework to improve the semantic perception of evidence-aware fake news detection by combining two kinds of data augmentations with synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the extended test set while achieving competitive performance on the original one. |
HyperAdaLoRA: Accelerating LoRA Rank Allocation During Training via Hypernetworks without Sacrificing Performance (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Zhang, Zhenjia Li, Yifan Gao, Xi Xiao, Heng Zhang, Shuyang Zhang, null Xiaoxincc, Bo Huang, Yuhang Wu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) assumes a uniform rank r for each incremental matrix, not accounting for the varying significance of weight matrices across modules and layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for faster convergence of low-rank adaptive models . they use a hypernetwork to prune the outputs of the hypernetworks to generate parameters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates convergence of AdaLoRA by leveraging a hypernetwork. |
From Long Videos to Engaging Clips: A Human-Inspired Video Editing Framework with Multimodal Narrative Understanding (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Xiangfeng Wang, Xiao Li, Yadong Wei, null Songxueyu, Yang Song, null Xiaxiaoqiang, Fangrui Zeng, Zaiyi Chen, null Liuliu, Gu Xu, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video editing rely on textual cues from ASR transcripts and segment selection, often neglecting rich visual context. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-inspired automatic video editing framework that leverages multimodal narrative understanding to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines across general and advertisement-oriented editing tasks. |
ARTIST: A Transformer-based Chinese Text-to-Image Synthesizer Digesting Linguistic and World Knowledge (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-Image Synthesis (TIS) is a popular task to convert natural language texts into realistic images. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based Chinese text-to-image synthesizer for high-resolution image generation that incorporates linguistic and relational knowledge facts into the model to ensure better performance without the usage of ultra-large models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in Chinese with linguistic and relational knowledge facts. |
Improving Neural Abstractive Document Summarization with Explicit Information Selection Modeling (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural abstractive methods for document summarization are not effective for document summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend basic neural encoding-decoding framework with an information selection layer to explicitly model and optimize the information selection process in abstractive document summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on document summarization tasks significantly. |
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Chen, Haoze Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Lirong Gao, Qi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads. |
Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xinda Wang, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang, null Yanbingren, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang, Feng Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent work on unsupervised reinforcement learning for mathematical reasoning using confidence-based endogenous rewards focuses on open-ended text generation, requiring either annotated data or powerful closed-source models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards the relative information gain between a specialist and a generalist reference policy, modulated by a probability-dependent correction mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on multiple writing benchmarks and model architectures without external supervision and validates generality across different generation tasks. |
Pre-training Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Alignment Information (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods are not effective for machine translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train a universal multilingual neural machine translation model . they use random aligned substitution technique to bring words and phrases with similar meanings closer in the representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves translation quality on low, medium, rich resource languages. |
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. |
Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Levina Li, Frank Wan, Xiao Liang, Sophia Yin, Yuchen Wu, Xinfeng Li, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks rely on static or rule-based topologies that fail to adapt to task requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that generates highly task-adaptive topologies . they validated the framework on multiple benchmarks and validated it on multiple platforms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks in task-adaptive communication topologies. |
ThinkNote: Enhancing Knowledge Integration and Utilization of Large Language Models via Constructivist Cognition Modeling (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Shi Yu, Zheni Zeng, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Ge Yu, Chenyan Xiong
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit suboptimal behaviors and inconsistencies when exposed to unfamiliar external information, underscoring their limitations in effectively leveraging such knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances the external knowledge utilization of Large Language Models through a two-stage constructivist cognitive modeling process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a 10% improvement over baseline methods on various question-answering benchmarks. |
P4: Plug-and-Play Discrete Prompting for Large Language Models Personalization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in following instructions, but manually prompting them to exhibit certain personalities may result in sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play prompting method to manipulate Large Language Models with distinct human-like personality traits by appending discrete personalized suffixes to query or dialog histories and focusing exclusively on influential tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other prompting methods and model editing methods on four models ranging from 1.1B to 13B and achieves 79.9% accuracy in customizing LLMs’ personalities. |
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. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
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. |
AdaReTaKe: Adaptive Redundancy Reduction to Perceive Longer for Video-language Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are limited by context length when processing long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that flexibly reduces redundancy by allocating compression ratios among time and model layers with theoretical guarantees. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on videoMME, MLVU, LongVideoBench, and LVBench show that AdaRETAKE outperforms existing methods by 2.3% and 2.8% for 7B and 72B models. |
Empirical Studies of Institutional Federated Learning For Natural Language Processing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | federated learning is a promising ideology to unite isolated datasets for machine learning problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use federated natural language processing networks to train a popular NLP model with applications in sentence intent classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is sensitive to imbalanced data load and tested against a federated model under imbalanced datasets. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
Dynamic Prefix-Tuning for Generative Template-based Event Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art classification-based model OneIE on ACE 2005. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative template-based event extraction method with dynamic prefix . they integrate context information with type-specific prefixes to learn a context-specific name for each context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art model OneIE on ACE 2005 and performs well on ERE. |
IIET: Efficient Numerical Transformer via Implicit Iterative Euler Method (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Liu, Bei Li, Jiahao Liu, Junhao Ruan, Kechen Jiao, Hongyin Tang, Jingang Wang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | High-order numerical methods enhance performance in tasks like NLP but introduce a performance-efficiency trade-off due to increased computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative implicit Euler Transformer which simplifies high-order numerical methods by iterating implicit Eule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and reduces inference overhead by 55% while retaining 99.4% of the original task accuracy. |
Capturing Minds, Not Just Words: Enhancing Role-Playing Language Models with Personality-Indicative Data (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing models focus on character knowledge and tones, but lack personality-indicative data to capture characters' minds. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance role-playing agents (RPAs) via personality-indicative data by asking psychological scales to capture broad aspects of personality traits in individuals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits advanced role-playing capabilities for both general and personality-related evaluations. |
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. |
A3: Android Agent Arena for Mobile GUI Agents with Essential-State Procedural Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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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
| 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. |
PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints and some are only accessible via APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter that integrates large language models as generators and trains them to refine the retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% compared to existing methods. |
Autoregressive Pre-Training on Pixels and Texts (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | pixel-based language modeling integrates visual and textual data to improve performance of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates visual and textual data into an autoregressive framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of pixel-based language models by incorporating visual and textual data. |
Human Guided Exploitation of Interpretable Attention Patterns in Summarization and Topic Segmentation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have investigated the multi-head self-attention mechanism of transformers. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-in-the-loop pipeline to discover task-specific attention patterns and inject them into transformer models to improve their accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the performance of transformer models by incorporating predefined patterns into their attention matrices. |
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. |
Efficient Integration of External Knowledge to LLM-based World Models via Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing attempts to enhance LLM-based world models through prompting or fine-tuning approaches are either requiring human knowledge or computationally extensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation to integrate external knowledge to LLM-based world models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and exhibits strong generalizability. |
ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | We show that language models can generate explicit, interpretable, and interactive world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a corpus of 32 reasoning-focused text games expressed as hundreds of lines of Python code to facilitate this task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed games can generate runnable games on unseen topics in 28% of cases. |
Aspect Sentiment Classification with Document-level Sentiment Preference Modeling (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies consider Aspect Sentiment Classification (ASC) as an independent sentence-level classification problem aspect by aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cooperative Graph Attention Networks approach for cooperatively learning aspect-related sentence representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in document-level sentiment classification. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
Astra: Activation-Space Tail-Eigenvector Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained models are limited due to suboptimal activation subspaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages tail eigenvectors of model output activations to construct low-rank adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods across 16 benchmarks and surpasses full fine-tuning in certain scenarios. |
PsyMem: Fine-grained Psychological Alignment and Explicit Memory Control for Advanced Role-Playing LLMs (2026.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing models rely on superficial textual descriptions or simplistic metrics, inadequately modeling both intrinsic and extrinsic character dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates fine-grained psychological attributes and explicit memory control for role-playing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in human-likeness and character fidelity. |
Identifying Tension in Holocaust Survivors’ Interview: Code-switching/Code-mixing as Cues (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Using CS/CM as a linguistic phenomenon could be a sign of tension in Holocaust survivors’ interviews. |
| Approach: | They annotated CS/CM codes and annotate silence situations in an open corpus . they found that most annotations were captured in the tension places . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that annotations are captured in the tension places . the study calls for more research endeavors on tension detection . |
Curse of Knowledge: Your Guidance and Provided Knowledge are biasing LLM Judges in Complex Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has focused on simple settings, but their reliability in complex tasks remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as judges to evaluate reliability in complex tasks . they use a challenge benchmark to expose and quantify Auxiliary Information Induced Biases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exposes and quantifies Auxiliary Information Induced Biases across 12 basic and 3 advanced scenarios. |
Mnemis: Dual-Route Retrieval on Hierarchical Graphs for Long-Term LLM Memory (2026.acl-long)
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Zihao Tang, Xin Yu, Ziyu Xiao, Zengxuan Wen, Zelin Li, Jiaxi Zhou, Hualei Wang, Haohua Wang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical messages are based on similarity-based mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates System-1 similarity search with a complementary System-2 mechanism, termed Global Selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on long-term memory benchmarks and 93.9 on LoCoMo and 91.6 on LongMemEval-S. |
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Yunze Xiao, Jen-tse Huang, Siyu Yuan, Rui Xu, Haoran Guo, Quan Tu, Yaying Fei, Ziang Leng, Wei Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Cheng Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate character fidelity of role-playing agents with psychological scales . they propose to use psychological scale to measure personality traits of RPAs based on personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reproduces character fidelity with psychological scales and shows that it is effective in measuring personality traits. |
IELM: An Open Information Extraction Benchmark for Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show pre-trained LMs store linguistic and relational knowledge . pre-training LM models can answer "fill-in-the-blank" questions based on pre-defined relations . |
| Approach: | They propose an open information extraction benchmark for pre-trained language models . they turn pre-trained LMs into zero-shot OIE systems to examine open relational information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms state-of-the-art methods on factual OIE datasets without training sets. |
Plug-and-Play Knowledge Injection for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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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
| 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. |
Neighborhood Matching Network for Entity Alignment (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Structural heterogeneity between knowledge graphs is an outstanding challenge for entity alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for entity alignment that uses a neighborhood matching module to combine neighborhood differences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on three datasets. |
PACE: Predictive Adaptive Context Extraction for Long-Horizon LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Lei Wei, Xiao Peng, null Tt, Guannan Zhang, Chenhao Jiang, Hongyu Li, Lanbo Lin, Yuanwu Xu, Jiayao Liu, Kesu Wang, Bin Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents struggle with ultra-long-horizon tasks requiring hundreds or thousands of interaction steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconceptualizes context management as a Next Step Prediction problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves task success rates and robust cross-lingual performance. |
SeqAR: Jailbreak LLMs with Sequential Auto-Generated Characters (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the potential misuse of large language models (LLMs) however, the ability to align LLMs with human values is still vulnerable to malicious attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a red-teaming strategy to enhance LLM safety by using a framework to design jailbreak prompts automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves attack success rates of 88% and 60% in cold-start scenarios. |
Utility-Oriented Visual Evidence Selection for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal retrieval-augmented generation rely on semantic relevance or surface-level similarity, which are often misaligned with the actual utility of visual evidence for downstream reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a latent notion of evidence usefulness and propose 'surrogate-accelerated' framework that efficiently estimates evidence utility using lightweight multimodal models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while achieving substantial reductions in computational cost. |
Beyond Transcription: Unified Audio Schema for Perception-Aware AudioLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Linhao Zhang, Yuhan Song, Aiwei Liu, Chuhan Wu, Sijun Zhang, Wei Jia, Yuan Liu, Houfeng Wang, Zhou Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs) excel at reasoning tasks, but struggle at elementary auditory perception. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes audio information into three explicit components in a unified JSON format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts fine-grained perception by 10.9% on MMSU over state-of-the-art models while preserving robust reasoning capabilities. |
Improved Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models via Knowledge Selection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on knowledge distillation have shown that not all knowledge is necessary for learning a good student model. |
| Approach: | They propose an actor-critic approach to selecting appropriate knowledge to transfer during the process of knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several strong knowledge distillation baselines significantly on the GLUE datasets. |
Language-Specific Layer Matters: Efficient Multilingual Enhancement for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models exhibit an imbalance in multilingual capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a training recipe that achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by Precise Language Specific layers fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by fine-tuning language specific layers. |
Forgetting Curve: A Reliable Method for Evaluating Memorization Capability for Long-Context Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Liu, Runsong Zhao, Pengcheng Huang, Chunyang Xiao, Bei Li, Jingang Wang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods, tasks and benchmarks to measure model’s effective memory length are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called forgetting curve to measure the memorization capability of long-context models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is robust to the tested corpus and experimental settings, and can be applied to any model size. |
Not All Citations Are Equal:Entropy-Guided Citation Selection for Noise-Resistant Medical LLM (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated extensive potential in medical applications . however, their practical deployment in healthcare faces significant challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free multi-turn reasoning framework and a post-training methodology that provides external knowledge support for large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework elicits internal thought, external thought, and fusion thought, with an entropy-based reward that encourages selective citation of beneficial external knowledge while penalizing noisy citations. |
World to Code: Multi-modal Data Generation via Self-Instructed Compositional Captioning and Filtering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language Models and the scarcity of high-quality multi-modal alignment data have inspired numerous researches on synthetic VLM data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal data construction pipeline that organizes the final output into a Python code format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves visual question answering and visual grounding benchmarks across different VLMs. |
Multi-layer Representation Fusion for Neural Machine Translation (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation systems require a number of stacked layers for deep models, but the prediction depends on the sentence representation of the top-most layer with no access to low-level representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-layer representation fusion approach to fusing stacked layers to learn a better representation from the stack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields 0.92 and 0.56 BLEU points over the strong Transformer baseline on IWSLT German-English and NIST Chinese-English MT tasks respectively. |
A Unified Knowledge Graph Augmentation Service for Boosting Domain-specific NLP Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
PrismRAG: Boosting RAG Factuality with Distractor Resilience and Strategized Reasoning (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Mohammad Kachuee, Teja Gollapudi, Minseok Kim, Yin Huang, Kai Sun, Xiao Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Nirav Shah, Yue Liu, Aaron Colak, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve factuality of large language models (LLMs) rely on human-engineered instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that trains the model with distractor-aware QA pairs mixing gold evidence with subtle distractor passages and instills reasoning-centric habits that make the LLM plan, rationalize, and synthesize without extensive human engineered instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art solutions across 12 open-book RAG QA benchmarks and is being deployed in production. |
Non-Autoregressive Translation by Learning Target Categorical Codes (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive text generation models still fall behind in translation quality . authors propose a model that learns implicitly categorical codes as latent variables . |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive Transformer model that implicitly categorizes latent variables into decoding . they find it improves translation quality by introducing more informative decoder inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or better performance in machine translation tasks than strong baselines. |
Task-Related In-Context Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Standard in-context learning assumes identical output spaces between test and retrieval datasets . however, in practice, these datasets can be fully aligned, partially alignes, or fully disjoint in label space . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for in-context learning under output-space mismatch . they identify demonstrations relevant to the test label space via a Bayesian probabilistic criterion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results across three LLMs, three task types, and four datasets. |
RouterHGC: Optimized Router for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems via Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs)-driven Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable scalability and generalizability across complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework for routing using large language models . they formalize routing as node selection through edge-weight prediction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the best single LLM and baselines on five datasets . it achieves 0.80%–6.17% accuracy gains on MATH and HotpotQA while reducing inference cost by 27.40%. |
SgSum:Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive multi-document summarization methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel framework for extractive multi-document summarization that selects a sub-graph as the summary instead of selecting salient sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods on multi-document datasets and human evaluations show it produces more coherent and informative summaries. |
Chart2Code53: A Large-Scale Diverse and Complex Dataset for Enhancing Chart-to-Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Tianhao Niu, Yiming Cui, Baoxin Wang, Xiao Xu, Xin Yao, Qingfu Zhu, Dayong Wu, Shijin Wang, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing Chart2code-related training datasets suffer from limited scale, limited type coverage, and inadequate complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize chart2code-related training datasets using web plotting code and chart images to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset exhibits the greatest diversity and higher complexity compared to other open-source Chart2code related datasets. |
Joint Training of Candidate Extraction and Answer Selection for Reading Comprehension (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Various advanced neural models have been proposed for reading comprehension, but most models ignore its relations with other answer candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose to model reading comprehension as an extract-then-select two-stage procedure . they first extract answer candidates from passages, then select the final answer by combining information from all candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves state-of-the-art performance on open-domain reading comprehension datasets. |
ViDove: A Translation Agent System with Multimodal Context and Memory-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Yichen Lu, Wei Dai, Jiaen Liu, Ching Wing Kwok, Zongheng Wu, Xudong Xiao, Ao Sun, Sheng Fu, Jianyuan Zhan, Yian Wang, Takatomo Saito, Sicheng Lai
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in Machine Translation (MT) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation agent system designed for multimodal input that leverages visual and contextual background information to enhance the translation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed translation agent achieves significantly higher translation quality in subtitle generation and general translation tasks compared to previous state-of-the-art systems. |
SentiX: A Sentiment-Aware Pre-Trained Model for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to cross-domain NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, but fine-tuning them on the source domain tends to overfit, leading to inferior results on the target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train a sentiment-aware language model (SentiX) via domain-invariant sentiment knowledge from large-scale review datasets and utilize it for cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks without fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in all the cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks and can be trained with only 1% samples and better than BERT with 90% samples. |
Effective Contrastive Weighting for Dense Query Expansion (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Verbatim queries that do not adequately express the user's search intent are often lexical inadequacies. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive weighting model that learns to select the most useful expansion embeddings for semantic search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods while maintaining its efficiency. |
Multi-Task Label Embedding for Text Classification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work treats labels of each task as independent and meaningless one-hot vectors, which cause a loss of potential label information. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine multi-task learning with semantic vectors to convert labels into vectors . their results are based on extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets based in chinese . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can improve performance on five benchmark datasets on text classification tasks. |
Word-Conditioned 3D American Sign Language Motion Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Sign words are the building blocks of any sign language. |
| Approach: | They propose a word-conditioned 3D American Sign Language (ASL) generation model that synthesizes real-time motion sequences for sign words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model in the task of sign word generation. |
How Do Large Language Models Perform in Dynamical System Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent data-driven methods often use graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn interactions between objects. |
| Approach: | They propose prompting techniques for dynamical system modeling and evaluate their performance . they find that large language models demonstrate competitive performance without training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show competitive performance without training compared to state-of-the-art methods in dynamical system modeling. |
UCFE: A User-Centric Financial Expertise Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuzhe Yang, Yifei Zhang, Yan Hu, Yilin Guo, Ruoli Gan, Yueru He, Mingcong Lei, Xiao Zhang, Haining Wang, Qianqian Xie, Jimin Huang, Honghai Yu, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their potential applications in finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the ability of large language models to handle financial tasks using human expert evaluations and task-specific interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the ability of large language models to handle complex financial tasks and combines human expert evaluations with dynamic, task-specific interactions to simulate the complexities of evolving financial scenarios. |
LEAF: Large Language Diffusion Model for Time Series Forecasting (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has applied large language models (LLMs) into time series forecasting, but they lack an understanding of holistic temporal patterns with potential error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that marries Larg e Langu age Diffusion Model with time series forecasting (LEAF) they propose converting time series into tokens and adopting language diffusion models to capture temporal dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates future predictions with a diffusion model from a holistic view. |
MICO: Selective Search with Mutual Information Co-training (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Selective search is designed to reduce the latency and computation in modern large-scale search systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a mutual information CO-training framework for selective search with minimal supervision using the search logs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing competitive benchmarks on multiple metrics and significantly outperformed existing baselines. |
PartialFormer: Modeling Part Instead of Whole for Machine Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing feed-forward neural networks have significant computational and parametric overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient Transformer architecture that utilizes multiple smaller FFNs to reduce parameters and computation while maintaining essential hidden dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces computational and parameter overhead while maintaining essential hidden dimensions. |
MDC-Bench: A Multidisciplinary Causal Benchmark Based on Causal Structures for Evaluating Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Peng Wang, Yuxiong Yan, Xiao Ding, Kai Xiong, Bibo Cai, Chao Peng, Yutai Hou, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing causal datasets focus on the commonsense domain, but LLMs perform poorly when answering complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multidisciplinary causal evaluation benchmark to assess LLMs' knowledge and skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in domain specialization, structural diversity, and task complexity. |
AgentReview: Exploring Peer Review Dynamics with LLM Agents (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of peer review analysis do not address multivariate nature of the process, account for latent variables, and are constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model based peer review simulation framework which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses privacy concerns. |
AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evaluation benchmarks based on predefined domains and human-labeled data face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated information retrieval benchmark based on predefined domains and human-labeled data . AIR-Bench is automated and Heterogeneous with three key features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data. |
Self-Evolving GPT: A Lifelong Autonomous Experiential Learner (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to provide LLMs with textual task-solving experience rely on manual efforts to acquire and apply such experience for each task. |
| Approach: | They propose a lifelong autonomous experiential learning framework based on LLMs that learns and accumulates experience through experience transfer and induction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs reliably in each intermediate step and improves GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on widely used NLP datasets. |
HAIC: Improving Human Action Understanding and Generation with Better Captions for Multi-modal Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Xiao Wang, Jingyun Hua, Weihong Lin, Yuanxing Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Jianlong Wu, Di Zhang, Liqiang Nie
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that high-quality video captions can improve MLLMs' performance on videos involving human actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a data annotation pipeline to collect videos featuring clear human actions from the Internet and annotate them in a standardized caption format that uses human attributes to distinguish individuals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline combines two datasets to evaluate human action understanding. |
Parsing Natural Language into Propositional and First-Order Logic with Dual Reinforcement Learning (2022.coling-1)
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Xuantao Lu, Jingping Liu, Zhouhong Gu, Hanwen Tong, Chenhao Xie, Junyang Huang, Yanghua Xiao, Wenguang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to parse natural language into structured logical expressions have limitations due to paucity of labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a scoring model to automatically learn a model-based reward . they also propose introducing a Chinese-PL/FOL dataset to compensate for paucity of labeled data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competitors on several datasets. |
HighMATH: Evaluating Math Reasoning of Large Language Models in Breadth and Depth (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yan Liu, Minghui Zhang, Bojian Xiong, Yifan Xiao, Yinong Sun, Yating Mei, Longyu Zeng, Jingchao Yang, Yang Wang, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | a gap in math models' accuracy has been widened with the development of large language models (LLMs) . a new study aims to bridge this gap by evaluating a set of high-level math reasoning models . |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate large language models on existing math benchmarks to bridge this gap . they collect 5,293 problems from Chinese senior high school mathematics exams . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on o1-like models and a high-level model. |
FedCSR: A Federated Framework for Multi-Platform Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation with Dual Contrastive Learning (2025.coling-main)
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Dongyi Zheng, Hongyu Zhang, Jianyang Zhai, Lin Zhong, Lingzhi Wang, Jiyuan Feng, Xiangke Liao, Yonghong Tian, Nong Xiao, Qing Liao
| Challenge: | Existing federated frameworks for cross-domain sequential recommendation rely on user alignment, which increases communication costs and privacy risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated cross-domain sequential recommendation framework that eliminates the need for user alignment between platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework eliminates the need for user alignment between platforms. |
ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haiquan Zhao, Lingyu Li, Shisong Chen, Shuqi Kong, Jiaan Wang, Kexin Huang, Tianle Gu, Yixu Wang, Jian Wang, Liang Dandan, Zhixu Li, Yan Teng, Yanghua Xiao, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application for reducing stress and providing emotional guidance. |
| Approach: | They re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards to define roles of role-players . they train a specific role- playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4, and the model performs better than GPLs. |
LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset (2022.findings-acl)
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Feng Yao, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Cunchao Tu, Juanzi Li, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing legal event detection datasets only cover incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese legal event detection dataset . they use legal events as side information to promote downstream applications . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves 2.2 points precision in low-resource judgment prediction and 1.5 points precision for unsupervised case retrieval. |
UCTG: A Unified Controllable Text Generation Framework for Query Auto-Completion (2025.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to control text generation (CTG) are essentially challenging to adapt to various control objectives and constraints, which results in mixed success. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified controllable text generation framework which integrates a control module, a prompt module, and a generation module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves query accuracy and coherence in tasks with different objectives and constraints. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
Training Flexible Depth Model by Multi-Task Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multitask learning can support decoding in 24 depth configurations and is superior to individual training. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multi-task learning to train a flexible depth model that can adapt to different depth configurations during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can support decoding in 24 depth configurations and is superior to the individual training and another flexible depth model training method——LayerDrop. |
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Li, Rui Xu, Jian Yang, Junnan Liu, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Likang Xiao, Ming LI, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that modulates the contribution of each source model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model merging framework outperforms strong baselines on multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages. |
Semantic-Space Exploration and Exploitation in RLVR for LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fanding Huang, Guanbo Huang, Xiao Fan, Yi He, Xiao Liang, Xiao Chen, Qinting Jiang, Faisal Nadeem Khan, Jingyan Jiang, Zhi Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that balances exploration and exploitation in the hidden-state space of response trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields consistent improvements across models, algorithms and reasoning benchmarks. |
SPS: Steering Probability Squeezing for Better Exploration in Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifu Huo, Chenglong Wang, Ziming Zhu, Shunjie Xing, Peinan Feng, Tongran Liu, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) training typically improves single-sample success rates but limited exploration of diverse reasoning trajectories. |
| Approach: | They propose a training paradigm that interleaves conventional RL with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) they propose 'Steering Probability Squeezing' to enhance exploration without external supervision . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm improves Pass@k and improves exploration of diverse reasoning trajectories without external supervision. |
Ground Every Sentence: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LLMs with Interleaved Reference-Claim Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance credibility and verifiability of large language models (LLMs) mainly focus on passage-level or paragraph-level references or citations, which fall short in verifikatability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides sentence-level citations in LLM-generated responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 90% accuracy in long-form question-answering tasks. |
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention (2025.acl-long)
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Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Yuxing Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
| Challenge: | Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, but high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a natively trained Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithms with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. |
Layer-Wise Multi-View Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural machine translation are limited to the topmost encoder layer’s context representation and cannot perceive the lower encoder layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise multi-view learning approach to solve this problem by incorporating an auxiliary view into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve stable results over multiple strong baselines and is agnostic to network architectures. |
CMB: A Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)
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Xidong Wang, Guiming Chen, Song Dingjie, Zhang Zhiyi, Zhihong Chen, Qingying Xiao, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great breakthrough in medicine, says a new study . existing studies on LLMs leverage subjective evaluation, but evaluation in medicine is professional . |
| Approach: | They propose a localized medical benchmark in Chinese rooted in native Chinese . they propose to use traditional Chinese medicine to evaluate large-scale LLMs . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark is developed to evaluate large-scale LLMs in china . the proposed model is rooted in the native Chinese linguistic and cultural framework . |
A Simple and Effective Approach to Coverage-Aware Neural Machine Translation (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are used to solve translation problems using long-term models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to seek a better balance between model confidence and length preference for Neural Machine Translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks. |
Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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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
| 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. |
LLaSE-G1: Incentivizing Generalization Capability for LLaMA-based Speech Enhancement (2025.acl-long)
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Boyi Kang, Xinfa Zhu, Zihan Zhang, Zhen Ye, Mingshuai Liu, Ziqian Wang, Yike Zhu, Guobin Ma, Jun Chen, Longshuai Xiao, Chao Weng, Wei Xue, Lei Xie
| Challenge: | Recent advances in language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in semantic understanding and contextual modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLaMA-based language model that incentivizes generalization capabilities for speech enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model outperforms prior task-specific discriminative and generative models in acoustic enhancement tasks. |
MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-Agent Inner Dialogue (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujia Chen, Changsong Li, Yiming Wang, Tianjie Ju, Qingqing Xiao, Nan Zhang, Zifan Kong, Peng Wang, Binyu Yan
| Challenge: | Mental health issues are worsening in today’s competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent inner dialogue paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
Language Model Adaption for Reinforcement Learning with Natural Language Action Space (2024.acl-long)
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| 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. |
RLHFPoison: Reward Poisoning Attack for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to poison large language models by using annotators to rank a set of collected responses to generate longer tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate longer tokens without harming the original safety alignment performance. |
Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are inherently dual-use and can be leveraged for both beneficial and harmful purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves tighter alignment on WMDP Bio and RWKU benchmarks. |
bert2BERT: Towards Reusable Pretrained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
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Cheng Chen, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Yujia Qin, Fengyu Wang, Zhi Wang, Xiao Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Pre-training large language models can be expensive and wasteful. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and a two-stage learning method to further accelerate the pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model. |
Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human States (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess basic Theory of Mind abilities but neglect temporal evolution of mental states in real-world social contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate Large Language Models' ability to understand and track the temporal progression of mental states across interconnected scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks underperform humans by 44.7% and show that they can model the dynamic nature of human mental states better than existing models. |
DREAM: Disentangling Risks to Enhance Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Jianyu Liu, Hangyu Guo, Ranjie Duan, Xingyuan Bu, Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Hui Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Yucheng Wang, Chenchen Jing, Xingwei Qu, Xiao Zhang, Pei Wang, Yanan Wu, Jihao Gu, Yangguang Li, Jianke Zhu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose unique safety challenges due to their integration of visual and textual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to disentangle risks through step-by-step reasoning within multimodal inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves safety alignment in MLLMs by fine-tuning and iterative Reinforcement Learning from AI feedback. |
Empirical Analysis of Decoding Biases in Masked Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Pengcheng Huang, Tianming Liu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Tong Xiao, Zulong Chen, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing MDMs employ uncertainty-based decoding strategies that limit their reasoning ability and ultimately degrade generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that regularizes uncertainty-based decoding by incorporating two complementary priors to shape global decoding trajectories and promote content informativeness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing decoding strategies by more than 7% while achieving comparable performance to autoregressive models of similar parameter scales. |
Train in Vain: Functionality-Preserving Poisoning to Prevent Unauthorized Use of Code Datasets (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuan Xiao, Jiaming Wang, Yuchen Chen, Wei Song, Jun Sun, Shiqing Ma, Yanzhou Mu, Juan Zhai, Chunrong Fang, Jin Song Dong, Zhenyu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dataset poisoning require full-dataset poison, which breaks code compilability. |
| Approach: | They propose a functionality-preserving poisoning approach that injects short, compilable weak-use fragments into executed code paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method contaminates 10% of the dataset while maintaining 100% compilability and functional correctness. |
GRASP: Replace Redundant Layers with Adaptive Singular Parameters for Efficient Model Compression (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that many layers are functionally redundant in large language models (LLMs), enabling model compression by removing these layers to reduce inference cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that removes redundant layers to reduce inference cost by preserving sensitivity-aware singular values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in 90% of the original model under a 20% compression ratio. |
On Continual Model Refinement in Out-of-Distribution Data Streams (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing continual learning (CL) problems cannot cover real-world scenarios such as out-of-distribution errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a continual model refinement problem formulation to solve this problem . they extend several existing continual learning approaches to the CMR problem based on a general sampling algorithm . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model refinement solution improves on existing models and their performance metrics. |
UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework for joint learning . they propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves visual and visual semantic alignment on images and texts. |
AIGT: AI Generative Table Based on Prompt (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data is an essential resource for many fields, but current methods do not fully utilize the rich information available in tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes metadata information to generate tabular data . they propose long-token partitioning algorithms that enable AIGT to model tables of any scale . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on 14 out of 20 public datasets and two real industry datasets within the Alipay risk control system. |
Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study (2023.emnlp-main)
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Boxin Wang, Wei Ping, Peng Xu, Lawrence McAfee, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Yi Dong, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Bo Li, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar, Bryan Catanzaro
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that retrieval-augmented LMs can improve text generation quality and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that reproduces RETRO parameters while retrieving a text corpus . they find RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with less repetition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard retrieval-augmented GPT and retrieval augmented GTP on text generation and accuracy tasks. |
Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)
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Bo Wang, Heyan Huang, Xiaochi Wei, Ge Shi, Xiao Liu, Chong Feng, Tong Zhou, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction neglect grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting . et al., 2004; Ahn, 2006) show that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extracting compared with the state-of-the-art. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for event extraction that generates additional training data and iteratively selects the effective subset from the generated training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more diverse representations of training data and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art. |
Shallow-to-Deep Training for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that deep training is 1:4 faster than training from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose a shallow-to-deep training method that learns deep models by stacking shallow models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 1:4 faster than training from scratch and achieves BLEU scores of 30:33 and 43:29 on two translation tasks. |
FashionKLIP: Enhancing E-Commerce Image-Text Retrieval with Fashion Multi-Modal Conceptual Knowledge Graph (2023.acl-industry)
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Xiaodan Wang, Chengyu Wang, Lei Li, Zhixu Li, Ben Chen, Linbo Jin, Jun Huang, Yanghua Xiao, Ming Gao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in visual-language pre-trained (VLP) models have greatly improved cross-modal retrieval performance . however, the fine-grained interactions between objects from different modalities are far from well-established . e-commerce domain lacks sufficient training data and fine-granular cross-modulal knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-language pre-trained (VLP) image-text retrieval model that integrates cross-modal knowledge into the model to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on e-commerce image-text retrieval task by a large margin. |
RoCoIns: Enhancing Robustness of Large Language Models through Code-Style Instructions (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in following human instructions and solving NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use code style instructions to replace typically natural language instructions to provide more precise instructions and strengthen the robustness of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms natural language models on eight robustness datasets and achieves an improvement of 5.68% in test set accuracy and a reduction of 5.66 points in Attack Success Rate (ASR). |
Enhancing Multimodal Named Entity Recognition through Adaptive Mixup Image Augmentation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Current named entity recognition methods struggle with text-image mismatch problem due to a lack of visual context. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive mixup image augmentation method that generates augmented images based on matching score between text and image . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be integrated into existing models and demonstrate consistent performance improvements. |
Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Geometry Solving with Efficient Heuristic Auxiliary Constructions (2026.acl-long)
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Boyan Duan, Xiao Liang, Shuai Lu, Yaoxiang Wang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Mao Yang, Weizhu Chen, Yeyun Gong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for geometry theorem proving in Euclidean geometry are challenging and require a neural network to perform. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for adding auxiliary points in geometry that runs on CPUs without relying on neural network-based inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves silver-medal-level human performance on IMO-30 benchmark. |
MirageBackdoor: A Stealthy Attack that Induces Think-Well-Answer-Wrong Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing CoT backdoor attacks manipulate intermediate reasoning steps to steer the model toward incorrect answers, but these corrupted reasoning traces are readily detected by prevalent process-monitoring defenses. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack that exploits the model's post-output space to preserve clean CoTs while selectively steering the final answer toward a specific target. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MirageBD achieves over 90% success rate across four datasets and five models with a poison ratio of only 5%. |
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. |
Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yijia Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Yushi Bai, Yue Wu, Xianjun Yang, Xiao Luo, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Quanquan Gu, Haifeng Chen, Wei Wang, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic comprehension and generation capability, but when applied to specialized industries, they face challenges such as hallucination, insufficient domain knowledge, and failing to incorporate the latest domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model protects private data while enhancing the model's knowledge. |
LRBench and Judge-R1: Principled Evaluation and Training of LLM-Based Judges for Long-Context Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) under long contexts are underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) that combines reinforcement learning with multi-turn search to enable grounded and principle-aware evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-turn baselines across domains and principles. |
Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users’ interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a goal-adaptive supervised fine-tuning framework that generates proactive guidance for users to click for the next turn of the conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 86.10% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95% over baseline) and 25.28% CTR in online deployment (149.06% relative improvement). |
InternLM-Law: An Open-Sourced Chinese Legal Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | InternLM-Law is a large language model (LLM) tailored for addressing diverse legal tasks related to Chinese laws. |
| Approach: | They introduce a large language model (LLM) tailored for addressing diverse legal tasks related to Chinese laws. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models in a variety of legal tasks related to Chinese laws. |
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. |
BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for Seq2Seq as it does not analyze long-distance relations in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure. |
Noise Robust Named Entity Understanding for Voice Assistants (2021.naacl-industry)
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Deepak Muralidharan, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Sida Gao, Xiao Yang, Justine Kao, Stephen Pulman, Atish Kothari, Ray Shen, Yinying Pan, Vivek Kaul, Mubarak Seyed Ibrahim, Gang Xiang, Nan Dun, Yidan Zhou, Andy O, Yuan Zhang, Pooja Chitkara, Xuan Wang, Alkesh Patel, Kushal Tayal, Roger Zheng, Peter Grasch, Jason D Williams, Lin Li
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition and Entity Linking are challenging for voice assistants . utterances are relatively short, so there is not much context to help disambiguate . |
| Approach: | They propose a Named Entity Understanding system that combines NER and EL in a joint reranking module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves NER accuracy by up to 3.13% and EL accuracy by 3.6% in F1 score . it also leads to better accuracies in other natural language understanding tasks . |
Data Augmentation with Hierarchical SQL-to-Question Generation for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Parsing (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to parse text-to-SQL data are lacking labeled data for unseen evaluation databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing SQL queries by automatically producing large numbers of SQL queries based on an abstract syntax tree grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can produce high-quality natural language questions over strong baselines. |
CritiqueLLM: Towards an Informative Critique Generation Model for Evaluation of Large Language Model Generation (2024.acl-long)
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Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Andrew Feng, Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Jiale Cheng, Shengyuan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing models for NLP evaluations lack the ability to generate informative critiques in pointwise grading and pairwise comparison especially without references. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can acquire pointwise grading critiques with pseudo references and revise these critiques via multi-path prompting to obtain informative evaluation data in different tasks and settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all open-source models and even GPT-4 in system-level correlations of pointwise grading. |
Taming Language Models for Text-attributed Graph Learning with Decoupled Aggregation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning text-attributed graphs neglect interaction between textual and structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates textual and structural information into TAG learning . they propose combining semantic aggregation and structural aggregations to improve learning a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art learning methods while requiring less resources. |
SpiderFlow: Efficient Topology-Aware Scheduling for LLM Training Across Decentralized GPU Clusters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training large language models lack topologyaware task scheduling mechanisms and model parallelization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology-aware scheduling system specifically designed for decentralized GPU clusters . they propose heuristic methods at the inter-cluster level with ILP-based optimization within clusters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces job completion time by 1.2-1.3 and improves throughput by 1.12-1.25 . it also reduces scheduling overhead by 20-90 on average compared to state-of-the-art scheduling systems. |
InfoPO: On Mutual Information Maximization for Large Language Model Alignment (2025.naacl-long)
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Teng Xiao, Zhen Ge, Sujay Sanghavi, Tian Wang, Julian Katz-Samuels, Marc Versage, Qingjun Cui, Trishul Chilimbi
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that direct preference optimization and its variants can be useful for fine-tuning large language models with human preferences data. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference fine-tuning algorithm that effectively and efficiently aligns large language models using preference data. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms established baselines on reasoning tasks. |
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Inversion Learning for Highly Effective NLG Evaluation Prompts (2026.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating natural language generation systems is challenging due to the diversity of valid outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an inversion learning method that learns effective reverse mappings from model outputs back to their input instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method requires only a single evaluation sample and eliminates manual prompt engineering. |
TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive and difficult to efficiently execute on resource-restricted devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer distillation method that performs Transformer distillations at pre-training and task-specific learning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method accelerates inference and reduces model size while maintaining accuracy. |
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Yan Liu, Haoxiang Jia, Enyu Zhou, Limao Xiong, Junjie Shan, Caishuang Huang, Xiao Wang, Xiaoran Fan, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Ji, Rui Zheng, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
Disambiguated Lexically Constrained Neural Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to LCNMT assume that pre-specified lexicon constraints are contextually appropriate. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that disambiguates constraints based on contexts at first and integrates them into LCNMT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline approaches on benchmark datasets and comprehensive experiments in multiple target constraints. |
SEMIROUTER: Sparse-Data Enhanced Routing for Adaptive Multi-LLM System (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing routing methods suffer from poor scalability and dependence on datasets for training . energy footprint is also considered in the decision to implement our new LLM routing framework . |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM routing framework that dynamically allocates queries to the most appropriate LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves data efficiency, adaptability, and routing accuracy compared to existing methods. |
Effective In-Context Example Selection through Data Compression (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning has been validated in large language models, but the mechanism and selection strategy for in-cont example selection lacks systematic and in-depth research. |
| Approach: | They propose a data compression approach to select in-context examples using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows a significant improvement of 5.90% across five real-world datasets using four language models. |
FreeAL: Towards Human-Free Active Learning in the Era of Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern machine learning models require a huge collection of precisely labeled data, which can be labor-intensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative learning framework that interactively distills and filters the task-specific knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves zero-shot performance on eight benchmark datasets without human supervision. |
Jointly Learning Entity and Relation Representations for Entity Alignment (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment is a viable method for integrating heterogeneous knowledge among different knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Graph Convolutional Network-based framework for learning relation representations by embedding relation seeds into entities and incorporating relation approximation into entities to iteratively improve alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three real-world cross-lingual datasets. |
Light Up the Shadows: Enhance Long-Tailed Entity Grounding with Concept-Guided Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) are knowledge graphs that integrate and align information from diverse modalities (e.g., text and images). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates image-text pairs of long-tailed entities and a concept guidance module that offers explainability and enables human verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of recognizing long-tailed image-text pairs compared to baselines and also offers flexibility and explainability. |
BOOKWORLD: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Story Creation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled social simulation through multi-agent systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for constructing and simulating book-based multi-agent societies that simulates established fictional worlds and characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality stories while maintaining fidelity to the source books, surpassing previous methods with a win rate of 75.36%. |
POINTS-Reader: Distillation-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Document Conversion (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Liu, Zhongyin Zhao, Le Tian, Haicheng Wang, Xubing Ye, Yangxiu You, Zilin Yu, Chuhan Wu, Zhou Xiao, Yang Yu, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training document conversion models with manual annotation are costly and time-consuming, and training student models by distilling outputs from teacher models can significantly limit their performance in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automated framework for constructing high-quality document extraction datasets and models capable of handling diverse document formats and layouts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and improves on annotated documents. |
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. |
Bridging Internal Consistency and External Alignment: A Causal and Dynamic Interpretability Framework for LLM Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing interpretability methods focus on internal and external aspects of the model . existing explanations often focus on surface correlations or static dependencies . |
| Approach: | They propose a causal and dynamic interpretability framework for Large Language Models . they characterize backdoor-adjusted causal effects of generated prefix and prompt . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a unified causal view of internal consistency and external alignment in LLM generation dynamics. |
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. |
Learning from Textual Radiology Reports: A Benchmark Dataset for Coronary CT Angiography (2026.acl-industry)
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Sudharshan Balaji, Zhiyu Liu, Zhengyuan Jiang, Shuo Lei, Yimin Chen, Yang Xiao, Shone O. Almeida, Mathew Joseph Karivelil, Christopher Malanga, Ning Wang
| Challenge: | CCTA reports provide an assessment of coronary disease severity to guide patient management. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that decouples structuring from classification by an LLM-based parser . CCTA-RADS is the largest publicly available dataset of CCDA reports . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the F1-score by 6%-13% compared with direct methods. |
Coarse-to-Fine Grounded Memory for LLM Agent Planning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance LLM with offline experiences or online trajectory analysis focus on single-granularity memory derived from dynamic environmental interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that grounds coarse-to-fine memories with LLM to enable flexible adaptation to diverse scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on AlfWorld, Webshop and ScienceWorld show that the proposed framework outperforms baselines and comprehensively optimizes memory-enhanced LLM Agent system. |
Multi-Grained Knowledge Distillation for Named Entity Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained big models have delivered top performance in Seq2seq modeling, but their deployments in real-world applications are often hindered by excessive computations and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation scheme to efficiently transfer knowledge from big models to their cheaper counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme maximizes the assimilation of knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. |
MedCite: Can Language Models Generate Verifiable Text for Medicine? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based medical question answering systems lack citation generation and evaluation capabilities, raising concerns about their adoption in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates the design and evaluation of LLM citations for medical tasks and a retrieval-citation method that generates high-quality citation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior citation precision and recall improvements compared to strong baseline methods and correlates well with annotation results from professional experts. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
Chain-of-Reasoning: Towards Unified Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via a Multi-Paradigm Perspective (2025.acl-long)
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Yiyao Yu, Yuxiang Zhang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiao Liang, Hengyuan Zhang, Xingxing Zhang, Mahmoud Khademi, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Junjie Wang, Yujiu Yang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that LLMs rely on single-paradigm reasoning that limits their effectiveness across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that integrates multiple reasoning paradigms to enable synergistic collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms current SOTA models in theorem proving tasks and the MATH benchmark in arithmetic tasks. |
Improving Neural Abstractive Document Summarization with Structural Regularization (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in document summarization fail to capture long-term structure of documents and multi-sentence summaries, resulting in information loss and repetitions. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage structural information of documents and multi-sentence summaries to improve document summarization performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on document summarization tasks. |
RePD: Defending Jailbreak Attack through a Retrieval-based Prompt Decomposition Process (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are still susceptible to jailbreak exploits despite rigorous pre-training and fine-tuning focused on ethical alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-based attack Retriest-based Prompt Decomposition framework that decomposes harmful queries embedded within user prompts into a one-shot learning example to effectively teach the LLM to discern and separate malicious components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is capable of decomposing harmful queries from the original query and enhancing the resilience of large language models against jailbreak attacks without compromising their performance. |
Enhancing Dual-Encoders with Question and Answer Cross-Embeddings for Answer Retrieval (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve question answering (QA) problems are limited by the need for text generation and answer retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce QA interaction features in scoring function but at the cost of low efficiency in inference stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method on multiple answer retrieval datasets. |
Different Data, Different Modalities! Reinforced Data Splitting for Effective Multimodal Information Extraction from Social Media Posts (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent multimodal information extraction approaches overestimate the significance of images. |
| Approach: | They propose a general data splitting strategy to divide social media posts into two sets to achieve better performance under information extraction models of the corresponding modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on two different multimodal information extraction tasks. |
TokenShapley: Token Level Context Attribution with Shapley Value (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have strong capabilities in in-context learning, but verifying the correctness of their generated responses remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level attribution method that combines Shapley value-based data attribution with KNN-based retrieval techniques to improve attribution accuracy. |
| Outcome: | TokenShapley outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four benchmarks . it achieves an 11–23% improvement in accuracy on the benchmarks. |
Large Margin Representation Learning for Robust Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to name entity recognition neglect distribution skewness and pseudo-label bias . despite promising results, current approaches neglect these problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes an adaptively reweighted contrastive loss to handle class skewness and pseudo-label bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks. |
APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Dongliang Chen, Xinlin Zhuang, Junjie Xu, Luojian Xie, Zehui Wang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Haolin Yang, Liang Dou, Xiao He, Xingjiao Wu, Ying Qian
| Challenge: | APEX optimizes for text-to-image generation by combining learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that stabilizes heterogeneous rewards and dynamically schedules objectives . they propose a method that achieves better Pareto trade-offs across four heterogenous objectives based on P3 Adaptive Priorities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves better pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy. |
GuiLoMo: Allocating Experts and Ranks for LoRA-MoE via Bilevel Optimization with GuidedSelection Vectors (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xinrong Chen, Hengyuan Zhang, Yingmin Qiu, Xiao Liang, Ziyue Li, Guanyu Wang, Weiping Li, Tong Mo, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) methods are efficient for a large language model with reduced computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise expert numbers and ranks allocation strategy with GuidedSelection Vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior or comparable performance to all baselines on three backbone models. |
Dialect-SQL: An Adaptive Framework for Bridging the Dialect Gap in Text-to-SQL (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Text-to-SQL research focuses on specific database systems, limiting adaptability to different dialects. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs Object Relational Mapping (ORM) code as an intermediate language to bridge this gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods that generate SQL queries directly. |
FaithfulRAG: Fact-Level Conflict Modeling for Context-Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing faithful RAG approaches enforce strict context adherence, but they forcibly suppress the model’s parametric knowledge, which undermines the model's internal knowledge structure and increases the risk of misinterpreting the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that resolves knowledge conflicts by explicitly modeling discrepancies between the model’s parametric knowledge and retrieved context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in knowledge conflict cases and identifies conflicting knowledge at the fact level and designs a self-thinking process. |
ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to model coarse-grained linguistic information do not integrate coarse-gram information into pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance integration of coarse-grained linguistic information into pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tunes on 19 downstream tasks. |
RouteLMT: Learned Sample Routing for Hybrid LLM Translation Deployment (2026.acl-industry)
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Yingfeng Luo, Hongyu Liu, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Chenglong Wang, Bei Li, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing routing strategies rely on heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation to capture whether the large model provides a worthwhile improvement over the small one. |
| Approach: | They propose a budget allocation problem for routing large model to large model . they propose heuristics, external predictors, or absolute quality estimation to determine the optimal signal for budgeted decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms heuristics, quality/difficulty estimation baselines and achieves a superior quality–budget Pareto frontier. |
AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Keyu Li, Junhao Shi, Yang Xiao, Mohan Jiang, Jie Sun, Yunze Wu, Dayuan Fu, Shijie Xia, Xiaojie Cai, Tianze Xu, Weiye Si, Wenjie Li, Dequan Wang, Pengfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single agentic capability, failing to capture long-horizon real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates 6 agentic capabilities across 32 real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that closed-source models outperform open-source model (48.4% vs 32.1%) integrating models with advanced scaffolds to form autonomous agents is a paradigm shift. |
Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models have advanced the previous state-of-the-art by learning mappings between sequences via neural networks and attention mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use layer normalization to pass the combination of previous layers to the next layer to improve the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the shallow Transformer-Big/Base baseline model on English-German and Chinese-English tasks by 0.4-2.4 BLEU points. |
RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shengyu Mao, Yong Jiang, Boli Chen, Xiao Li, Peng Wang, Xinyu Wang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved to enhance document retrieval by reformulating queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training query rewriting models that leverages a reranker framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides ranking feedback aligned well with the rewriting objectives without needing signals from annotations and supports both online and offline training models. |
CONSTRUCTURE: Benchmarking CONcept STRUCTUre REasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiwei Zha, Xiangru Zhu, Yuanyi Xu, Chenghua Huang, Jingping Liu, Zhixu Li, Xuwu Wang, Yanghua Xiao, Bei Yang, Xiaoxiao Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to perceive the visual world with a deep concept structure cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-level benchmark to assess MLLMs’ hierarchical concept understanding and reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in concept structure reasoning evaluation. |
DocFusion: A Unified Framework for Document Parsing Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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Mingxu Chai, Ziyu Shen, Chong Zhang, Yue Zhang, Xiao Wang, Shihan Dou, Jihua Kang, Jiazheng Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document parsing often employ multiple models, limiting performance . Existing models often employ discrete tokens, whereas recognition relies on continuous coordinates . |
| Approach: | They propose a Gaussian-Kernel Cross-Entropy Loss (GK-CEL) that unifies detection and recognition by enabling generative frameworks to handle both tasks simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs competitively across four core document parsing tasks. |
iTool: Reinforced Fine-Tuning with Dynamic Deficiency Calibration for Advanced Tool Use (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yirong Zeng, Xiao Ding, Yuxian Wang, Weiwen Liu, Yutai Hou, Wu Ning, Xu Huang, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Synthesizing tool-use data through real-world simulations is effective for enhancing large language models (LLMs) however, training gains decay as synthetic data increases, and the model struggles to benefit from more synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative reinforced fine-tuning strategy to improve LLMs with external tools to augment their capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 13.11% better performance than the same-size base model and outperforms larger open-source and closed-source models. |
Investigating Inference-time Scaling for Chain of Multi-modal Thought: A Preliminary Study (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Inference-time scaling of chain-of-thought (CoT) has been demonstrated as a promising approach for addressing multi-modal reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate visual and textual modalities within the reasoning process . they adopt a consistency-enhanced verifier to ensure effective guidance for both methods across different thought paradigms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms text-only reasoning on 10 tasks spanning diverse domains and requires higher token consumption for processing richer visual inputs. |
Can Language Models Serve as Text-Based World Simulators? (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have pointed towards an alternative approach by leveraging the huge amount of knowledge contained in their pre-training datasets. |
| Approach: | They build and use a benchmark to quantify how well text-based simulators can serve as text-driven world simulators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to quantify how well language models can serve as world simulators. |
Pi-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Fine-Grained Guidance from Pivot Programming Languages (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based methods craft meticulous text guidelines and examples to facilitate SQL generation, but their accuracy is hindered by the large semantic gap between the texts and the low-resource SQL programs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Python as a pivot to bridge between natural language query and SQL program. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the execution accuracy of the best-performing baseline by up to 3.20. |
SADA: Bridging In-Context Learning and Fine-Tuning via State-Aligned Distillation Adapters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based in-context learning and parameter fine-tuning are dominant paradigms for incorporating external information into large language models, but they incur high inference costs or require expensive retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert prompts into temporary adapter weights to bridge this gap by converting prompts to temporary adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on long-context language modeling and downstream NLU and summarization benchmarks while significantly reducing memory footprint and latency. |
QueryAttack: Jailbreaking Aligned Large Language Models Using Structured Non-natural Query Language (2025.findings-acl)
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Qingsong Zou, Jingyu Xiao, Qing Li, Zhi Yan, Yuhang Wang, Li Xu, Wenxuan Wang, Kuofeng Gao, Ruoyu Li, Yong Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to bypass security defenses of large language models (LLMs) are not effective, but QueryAttack can be jailbroken. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to examine generalizability of safety alignment by translating malicious queries into structured non-natural query languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve high attack success rates and jailbreak various defense methods on mainstream LLMs. |
CVE-Bench: Benchmarking LLM-based Software Engineering Agent’s Ability to Repair Real-World CVE Vulnerabilities (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM agents have demonstrated significant potential in this domain by understanding descriptions in natural language and generating corresponding formal code. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that provides LLM agents with a test environment that simulates the real-world vulnerability repair process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can repair 21% of vulnerabilities at its best, but lacks expert knowledge . the evaluation framework can only repair 29% of vulnerabilities, but it can be used in real-world scenarios . |
Online Iterative Self-Alignment for Radiology Report Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for RRG rely on supervised fine-tuning based on data pairs of radiological images and corresponding radiologist-annotated reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that performs supervised fine-tuning on data pairs of radiological images and corresponding radiologist-annotated reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics. |
CSR-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents in Deployment of Computer Science Research Repositories (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advances in computer science research . current agent-related applications include code writing, code base generation, code correction and more. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose GitHub agent framework that automates deployment of GitHub repositories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the deployment of GitHub code repositories and thereby boosts developer productivity. |
Transparent and Scrutable Recommendations Using Natural Language User Profiles (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on implicit or explicit feedback from users to suggest new items, resulting in a lack of transparency and a user's ability to scrutinize and modify their preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a natural language (NL) user profile to summarize a user's preferences and then use it to fine-tune a LLM using only NL profiles to make transparent and scrutable recommendations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on two benchmarking rating prediction datasets and is comparable to existing models. |
Contrastive Learning for Many-to-many Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual machine translation approaches focus on English-centric directions, while non-English directions lag behind. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual machine translation system with an emphasis on non-English directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on English-centric and non-English directions on multilingual translation benchmarks. |
SudoLM: Learning Access Control of Parametric Knowledge with Authorization Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing preference alignment is a one-size-fits-all alignment mechanism, where the part of the large language model parametric knowledge with non-preferred features is uniformly blocked to all the users. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that lets LLMs learn access control over parametric knowledge for users with different credentials via authorization alignment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two application scenarios show that the proposed framework effectively controls the user’s access to parametric knowledge and maintains its general utility. |
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. |
Concise and Organized Perception Facilitates Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experimental results on several popular logical benchmarks (ProofWriter, PrOntoQA, PrONtoQA-OOD, and FOLIO) and mathematical benchmark (DI-GSM) show that COP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning approach called Concise and Organized Perception (COP) that carefully analyzes the given statements to identify the most pertinent information while eliminating redundancy efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several popular logical benchmarks and mathematical benchmarks. |
Enhancing Visual-Language Modality Alignment in Large Vision Language Models via Self-Improvement (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xiyao Wang, Jiuhai Chen, Zhaoyang Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Yiyang Zhou, Huaxiu Yao, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein, Parminder Bhatia, Taha Kass-Hout, Furong Huang, Cao Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual and language alignment depend on external models or data, leading to uncontrollable and unstable results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances visual and language alignment without external dependencies by incorporating an in-context self-critic mechanism that constructs preference pairs for tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and improves performance on 14 hallucination and comprehensive benchmarks. |
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. |
CMNEE:A Large-Scale Document-Level Event Extraction Dataset Based on Open-Source Chinese Military News (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current research focuses on the general news or financial domains, with relatively few studies for military domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate Chinese military news events from documents using a schema for the military domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is large-scale, document-level open-source for the military domain . it contains 17,000 documents and 29,223 events, which are all manually annotated . |
DeepStruct: Pretraining of Language Models for Structure Prediction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models perform structural understanding tasks that focus on understanding one aspect of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for improving the structural understanding abilities of language models by pretraining them to generate structures from the text on task-agnostic corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on 21 of 28 datasets. |
On Hallucination and Predictive Uncertainty in Conditional Language Generation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Modern deep neural network models have brought drastic improvements in generation quality measured by standard metrics on different natural language generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a beam search extension to reduce hallucination in conditional language generation by adding a prediction extension to beam search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension improves trading performance on standard metric for less hallucination with the proposed beam search variant. |
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. |
SOLAR-RL: Semi-Online Long-horizon Assignment Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jichao Wang, Liuyang Bian, Yufeng Zhou, Han Xiao, Yue Pan, Guozhi Wang, Hao Wang, Zhaoxiong Wang, Yafei Wen, Xiaoxin Chen, Shuai Ren, Lingfang Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training GUI agents on dynamic tasks are based on SFT or Behavior Cloning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates global trajectory insights directly into offline learning . they reconstruct diverse rollout candidates from static data and detect first failure point . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves long-horizon task completion rates and robustness compared to baselines. |
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. |
Generative Personality Simulation via Theory-Informed Structured Interview (2026.eacl-long)
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Pengda Wang, Huiqi Zou, Han Jiang, Hanjie Chen, Tianjun Sun, Xiaoyuan Yi, Ziang Xiao, Frederick L. Oswald
| Challenge: | Personality structured interviews are often lacking in advancing social science research. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate psychological insights into LLM simulations . they use a measure theory grounded evaluation procedure to evaluate reliability and validity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves human-like heterogeneity in LLM-simulated personality data and predicts personality-related behavioral outcomes. |
HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns (2026.acl-long)
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Xintao Wang, Jian Yang, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xie, Jen-tse Huang, Jun Gao, Shuai Huang, Yueping Kang, Yuanli Guo, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that treats psychological patterns as interacting causal forces and synthesizes 113 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4 fewer parameters. |
DANCE: Diversity-attended Dynamic Caching with Asymmetric Quantization for Test-time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to test-time adaptation of vision-language models measure prediction entropy but these samples tend to approach prototypes with limited coverage of data distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach for test-time adaptation of vision-language models . they construct a dynamic cache to store diversity-aware test samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is more efficient than current methods on augmented visual models. |
How Do Large Language Models Perform on PDE Discovery: A Coarse-to-fine Perspective (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify partial differential equations using large language models suffer from performance degradation under extreme data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to use large language models to identify underlying partial differential equations out of very limited observations of a physical system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a coarse-to-fine paradigm to discover PDEs out of very limited observations of a physical system. |
TinyJudge: Unverifiable Constraint Alignment via Lightweight Specialist Ensembles (2026.acl-long)
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Yirong Zeng, Yufei Liu, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Wu Ning, Haonan Song, Dandan Tu, Qixun Zhang, Yuxiang He, Bibo Cai, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Instruction Following (IF) is a core capability of LLMs, requiring strict adherence to diverse constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses tiny language models to evaluate instruction following . they propose to use a set of specialized tiny language model to provide rewards for soft constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models by 12% and speeds up training time by 3. |
Gen-SQL: Efficient Text-to-SQL By Bridging Natural Language Question And Database Schema With Pseudo-Schema (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shifted paradigms and leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle the challenging task of Text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate SQL queries . they exploit prior knowledge from the LLM to enhance embedding-based retriever . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves embedding-based retriever and reduces cost. |
Dialogue-RAG: Enhancing Retrieval for LLMs via Node-Linking Utterance Rewriting (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have demonstrated significant potential on tasks across multiple domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight IUR model for query rewriting to complete key information in dialogue to enhance retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves retrieval and generation ability of RAG system in multi-round dialogue scenarios. |
IDEAW: Robust Neural Audio Watermarking with Invertible Dual-Embedding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Traditional methods for embedding watermarks into audio have low capacity and unsatisfactory imperceptibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-embedding wa- termarking model for efficient locating and a model that can withstand attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can withstand attacks with higher capacity and more efficient locating ability compared to existing methods. |
DP-CRE: Continual Relation Extraction via Decoupled Contrastive Learning and Memory Structure Preservation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning relational knowledge are replay-based and prioritize data uniformly . a pronounced bias towards new tasks can be caused by the introduction of new tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples the process of prior information preservation and new knowledge acquisition. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the framework outperforms baselines across two datasets. |
QCRD: Quality-guided Contrastive Rationale Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on smaller, task-specific models enhanced by distilling knowledge from LLMs, but the diversity and quality of negative knowledge remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-guided contrastive rationale distillation framework that aims to enhance reasoning capabilities through contrastive knowledge learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently outperforms existing distillation techniques yielding higher-quality rationales. |
Ensuring Readability and Data-fidelity using Head-modifier Templates in Deep Type Description Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative methods overlook grammatical structure or make factual mistakes in generated texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based method to ensure the readability of generated type descriptions . they also propose measurable metrics to measure the readibility of the generated type description . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves substantially compared with baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. |
Contrastive Learning with Adversarial Examples for Alleviating Pathology of Language Model (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing interpretation methods fail to obtain faithful attributions on these models, thereby failing to reveal potential flaws and biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive learning regularization method which calibrates the sentence representation of out-of-distribution examples and utilizes adversarial examples to introduce direction information in regularization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the model pathology while impacting generalization ability on in-distribution examples and thus helps interpretation methods obtain more faithful results. |
Optimizing Chinese Lexical Simplification Across Word Types: A Hybrid Approach (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Expensive large language models outperform small models in simplifying complex content words and Chinese idioms from the dictionary. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a retrieval-based interpretation augmentation strategy to refine small models to simplify complex content words and Chinese idioms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large language models in Chinese Lexical Simplification (CLS) and improves on OOD models. |
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
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering lack effective control over reasoning paths, leading to astray results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-hop question answering that trains an end-to-end reasoning path navigator to provide a powerful sub-question decomposer by fine-tuning the Llama3.1-8B model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework trains an end-to-end reasoning path navigator . it is able to provide a powerful sub-question decomposer by fine-tuning the Llama3.1-8B model . |
Explaining Length Bias in LLM-Based Preference Evaluations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhengyu Hu, Linxin Song, Jieyu Zhang, Zheyuan Xiao, Tianfu Wang, Zhengyu Chen, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Jianxun Lian, Kaize Ding, Hui Xiong
| Challenge: | a preference evaluation metric is often biased towards longer responses, revealing a reliability problem . a decomposition of the preference evaluation into two components is needed to understand this bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the preference evaluation metric into two key components . the first component is length-dependent and related to trustworthiness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric is based on two components: desirability and information mass. |
Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chenyu Shi, Xiao Wang, Qiming Ge, Songyang Gao, Xianjun Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Xun Zhao, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted a tendency among large language models to refuse to answer benign queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach to reduce excessive attention to harmful words like ‘kill’ and a method to decode the next-token predictions by contrastive decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the refusal rate by 20% while having little impact on safety. |
Character is Destiny: Can Persona-assigned Language Models Make Personal Choices? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Rui Xu, Xintao Wang, Jiangjie Chen, Siyu Yuan, Xinfeng Yuan, Jiaqing Liang, Zulong Chen, null Xiaoqingdong, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent research has demonstrated the potential of using LLMs to develop role-playing language agents (RPLAs) however, imitative decision-making necessitates a more nuanced understanding of personas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses persona-based memory retrieval to improve RPLAs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly advances RPLAs on this task. |
Combating Security and Privacy Issues in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | a tutorial aims to provide a summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . a number of studies have focused on security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Approach: | This tutorial seeks to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . authors will discuss security, privacy and copyright aspects of LLMs . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in large language models . it will also outline emerging challenges in security, privacy and reliability of LLMs . |
Flow-Based Page Unique Semantic Mapping Architecture for Document Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) aims to generate answers by understanding textual, layout, and visual elements within document images. |
| Approach: | They propose a Flow-Based Page Unique Semantic Mapping Architecture to solve the distinguishability problem among semantically similar pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in evidence localization and answer generation. |
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Jian Yang, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
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Ke Xu, Siyang Xiao, Ming Liang, Yichen Yu, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing parallel code localization agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate . specialized localization agent that operate as dedicated search components is needed to achieve high localization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel code localization system that reframes parallel code execution as a quality–efficiency co-optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches SOTA performance while being 93.6% faster. |
Nash CoT: Multi-Path Inference with Preference Equilibrium (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-path inference is an improvement on multi-path reasoning, but there is no optimal setting for the number of inference paths. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question-related role templates to guide LLMs into relevant roles to reduce the dependence on the number of inference paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can achieve comparable or better results than self-consistency with the same number of paths. |