Papers by Xin Cao

42 papers
Progra: Progress-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Turn Function Calling (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for multi-turn function calling are limited by redundancy and lack explicit integration of progress awareness into training.
Approach: They propose a framework that explicitly integrates progress awareness into LLM training for multi-turn function calling.
Outcome: Empirical results show that Progra outperforms existing methods on two public benchmarks.
SILO-BENCH: A Scalable Environment for Evaluating Distributed Coordination in Multi-Agent LLM Systems (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks conflate coordination ability with role-based priors.
Approach: They propose a role-free benchmark for evaluating free-form collaboration under information silos.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark systematically probes coordination capabilities under information silos using 54 configurations and 3 frontier LLMs.
ScaleBox: Enabling High-Fidelity and Scalable Code Verification for Large Language Models (2026.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing code sandboxes fail to provide accurate verification and efficiency under high-concurrency workloads.
Approach: They propose a high-fidelity code verification system that provides sandbox feedback for RL training and evaluation.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms heuristic-matching baselines on LiveCodeBench and training stability on high-concurrency workloads.
DialogQAE: N-to-N Question Answer Pair Extraction from Customer Service Chatlog (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing work on question-answer extraction fails to integrate incomplete utterances from dialog context for composite QA retrieval.
Approach: They propose a task where questions and corresponding answers might be separated across different utterances.
Outcome: The proposed methods perform well on 5 customer service datasets and set a benchmark for N-to-N DialogQAE with utterance and session level evaluation metrics.
RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: recurrent neural networks struggle to match the performance of Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability.
Approach: They propose a model architecture that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs.
Outcome: The proposed model performs on par with similarly sized RNNs, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models.
LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-Context QA (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current long-context large language models lack citations to support their responses, making verification difficult due to potential hallucinations.
Approach: They propose to use off-the-shelf LLMs to automatically construct long-context QA instances with precise sentence-level citations and leverage this pipeline to construct a large-scale SFT dataset for LQAC.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline can generate responses with fine-grained citations on the fly, surpassing existing models including GPT-4o.
MDERank: A Masked Document Embedding Rank Approach for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Keyphrase extraction (KPE) extracts phrases in a document that provide a concise summary of the core content.
Approach: They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method that ranks candidates by similarity between embeddings of source document and masked document.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on six benchmarks . it achieves average 3.53 improvement over the existing method .
Knowledge-augmented Self-training of A Question Rewriter for Conversational Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent rise of conversational applications has promoted the development of conversation KBQA (ConvKBQA).
Approach: They propose a framework to produce a full-fledged rewritten question based on conversation history and then reason the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models.
Outcome: The proposed framework produces a full-fledged rewritten question based on the conversation history and reasoned the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models.
MAIN: Mutual Alignment Is Necessary for instruction tuning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Instruction tuning has enabled large language models to achieve remarkable performance, yet its success heavily depends on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs.
Approach: They propose a mutual alignment framework which enforces coherence between instructions and responses through mutual constraints.
Outcome: The proposed framework generalizes well across model architectures and sizes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on LLaMA, Mistral, and Qwen models across diverse benchmarks.
Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Program induction for complex questions over knowledge bases relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB, but the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult.
Approach: They propose an approach to leverage program annotations on rich KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for low-resourced KB.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP.
Latent Suicide Risk Detection on Microblog via Suicide-Oriented Word Embeddings and Layered Attention (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to detect suicidal ideation on social media are limited to a small group of people.
Approach: They propose to use tree holes to embed words into microblogs to strengthen the sensibility of suicide-related lexicons and to use a two-layered attention mechanism to grasp intermittently changing points from individual's open blog streams.
Outcome: The proposed approach can achieve over 91% accuracy with the use of suicide-oriented word embeddings and attention on a large-scale well-labelled suicide data set.
Critic-CoT: Boosting the Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Model via Chain-of-Thought Critic (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to improve the reasoning performance of large language models rely on intuitive instance-level feedback, which limits the reasoning capabilities.
Approach: They propose a framework that pushes LLMs toward System-2-like critic capability by using a step-wise CoT reasoning paradigm and automatic construction of weak-supervision data without human annotation.
Outcome: The proposed model significantly improves task-solving performance by filtering out invalid solutions or iterative refinement.
LongReward: Improving Long-context Large Language Models with AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: In recent years, significant advancements have been achieved in the development of long-context large language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a method that utilizes an off-the-shelf LLM to provide rewards for long-context model responses from four human-valued dimensions: helpfulness, logicality, faithfulness, and completeness.
Outcome: The proposed method improves models’ long-context performance and enhances their ability to follow short instructions.
MAGRET: Machine-generated Text Detection with Rewritten Texts (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on detecting machine-generated text in open-source models, but their performance on closed-source large models is limited.
Approach: They propose a method to detect rewritten text from large language models using a BERT encoder and propose to refine it to achieve semantic alignment.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three text-generated datasets.
DocAgent: A Multi-Agent System for Automated Code Documentation Generation (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating documentation using Large Language Models (LLMs) produce incomplete, unhelpful, or factually incorrect outputs.
Approach: They propose a novel collaborative system that uses topological code processing for incremental context building to generate documentation by agents.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms baselines in completeness, helpfulness, and truthfulness evaluations.
LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks on longcontext large language models fail to reflect their deep understanding capabilities across diverse tasks.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of long-context large language models to handle long-text problems.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 50.1% accuracy when directly answering the questions . human experts achieve only 53.7% accuracy under a 15-minute time constraint .
DialogUSR: Complex Dialogue Utterance Splitting and Reformulation for Multiple Intent Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: DialogUSR is a plug-in and domain-agnostic module that empowers multi-intent detection for chatbots . a single user query triggers inquiries on highspeed train ticket price and weather of destination.
Approach: They propose a dialog utterance splitting and reformulation task that splits multi-intent user query into multiple single-intention sub-queries and recovers all coreferred and omitted information in the sub-questions.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to split multi-intent user queries into multiple sub-queries . it can be trained in two stages and perform in-depth analyses on the proposed models .
KoRC: Knowledge Oriented Reading Comprehension Benchmark for Deep Text Understanding (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for deep text understanding have encountered two major limitations . most require human annotation of knowledge, which leads to limited knowledge coverage .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to help readers understand a document with prior knowledge . they use massive knowledge bases to guide annotators and large language models to construct knowledgable questions .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks have limited knowledge coverage and use choices or spans as answers, which results in narrow answer space.
Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought reasoning.
Approach: They propose a method to solve complex questions with a tree-of-thought approach using parametric knowledge and retrieved external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting.
HyperEdit: Unlocking Instruction-based Text Editing in LLMs via Hypernetworks (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches treat instruction-based text editing as a generic text generation problem. Existing methods either over-edit or fail to apply modifications consistently.
Approach: They propose a framework that processes each editing request to best align with it.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 9% improvement over the state-of-the-art model.
Are Missing Links Predictable? An Inferential Benchmark for Knowledge Graph Completion (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) are unsatisfactory .
Approach: They propose to use rule-guided train/test generation instead of conventional random split to ensure that each testing sample is predictable with supportive data in the training set.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on existing benchmarks in inferential ability, assumptions, and patterns.
Evidence-Augmented Policy Optimization with Reward Co-Evolution for Long-Context Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Evidence-Augmented Policy Optimization (EAPO) improves long-context reasoning performance . Xu et al., 2025): large language models are a critical part of NLP .
Approach: They propose an Evidence-Augmented Reasoning paradigm that uses a group-relative reward to improve evidence quality.
Outcome: EAPO significantly improves long-context reasoning performance compared to baselines.
Enhancing Chinese Pre-trained Language Model via Heterogeneous Linguistics Graph (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that pre-trained Chinese language models ignore linguistics knowledge to learn representations.
Approach: They propose a task-free enhancement module to integrate linguistics knowledge into Chinese pre-trained language models.
Outcome: The proposed model improves Chinese pre-trained language models on 6 tasks with 10 benchmark datasets.
Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. Existing work in XQA focuses on integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources.
Approach: They propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms SOTA methods on complex QA datasets.
Improving the Language Understanding Capabilities of Large Language Models Using Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Instruction-fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) under 14B parameters underperform on NLU tasks . we explore a framework to improve the NLU capabilities of LLMs .
Approach: They propose to use Proximal Policy Optimization to improve NLU capabilities . they frame NLU as a reinforcement learning environment and optimize for reward signals .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms supervised fine-tuning on GLUE and superGLUE tasks.
Too Consistent to Detect: A Study of Self-Consistent Errors in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing detection methods fail to account for **self-consistent error** . study identifies self-consistency errors and evaluates them .
Approach: They propose a method that fuses hidden state evidence from an external verifier LLM to detect self-consistent errors.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly enhances performance on self-consistent errors across three LLM families.
Is Multi-Hop Reasoning Really Explainable? Towards Benchmarking Reasoning Interpretability (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for multi-hop reasoning are not able to evaluate their interpretability . a recent study found that many paths are unreasonable .
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate the interpretability of multi-hop reasoning models . they annotate all possible rules and establish a benchmark .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models in terms of performance and interpretability.
CEPT: A Contrast-Enhanced Prompt-Tuning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Emotion recognition in conversation research suffers from data imbalance and the presence of similar linguistic expressions for different emotions.
Approach: They propose a Contrast-Enhanced Prompt-Tuning framework that transforms an ERC task into a Masked Language Modeling task and generates the emotion for each utterance in the conversation.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on all three benchmark datasets and excels in recognizing minority emotions.
Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models capture factual knowledge from massive texts . but they are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance .
Approach: They propose to use open-world assumption to evaluate PLM-based knowledge graph completion models . they propose to convert each triple and its support information into natural prompt sentences .
Outcome: The proposed model is more accurate under the open-world assumption (OWA) this setting manual checks the correctness of knowledge that is not in KGs.
Global Context or Local Detail? Adaptive Visual Grounding for Hallucination Mitigation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large vision–language models suffer from object-existence hallucinations when multi-step deliberation decouples from visual evidence.
Approach: They propose a framework that allocates visual computation by uncertainty . they propose highlighting retains global context, while selective zoom-in performs local verification.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces the complexity of multimodal reasoning by minimizing the operator trade-off.
Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Framework (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) is of importance in multimodal retrieval applications.
Approach: They propose a two-stage pruning and merging frameworks that combine pruning and merge techniques to achieve higher compression rates.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on 29 visual document retrieval datasets.
When 20 Agents Fail to Sort: The Distributed Sorting Benchmark for Scalable Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: MAS-BENCH isolates coordination under explicit communication constraints . CAMOC significantly improves coordination success and efficiency across backends .
Approach: They propose a distributed-sorting benchmark that isolates coordination under explicit communication constraints.
Outcome: MAS-BENCH improves coordination success and efficiency across backends . CAMOC significantly improves efficiency under shared-state interaction .
Code to Think, Think to Code: A Survey on Code-Enhanced Reasoning and Reasoning-Driven Code Intelligence in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent breakthrough models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 show powerful task-solving capabilities, particularly advances in reasoning.
Approach: They propose future research directions that may deepen the synergy, ultimately advancing LLM performance in both complex reasoning and code intelligence.
Outcome: The proposed research may deepen the synergy, ultimately advancing LLM performance in both complex reasoning and code intelligence.
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge base question answering systems that parse natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL) .
Approach: They propose a knowledge base question answering system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug queries.
Outcome: The proposed system can debug and edit knowledge base questions on a million-entity-level . it provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer.
OpenKE: An Open Toolkit for Knowledge Embedding (D18-2)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge embedding tools are available for embeddable knowledge graphs.
Approach: They propose a unified framework and various fundamental models to embed knowledge graphs into a continuous low-dimensional space.
Outcome: The toolkit and pre-trained embeddings are available on http://openke.thunlp.org/.
CORN: Co-Reasoning Network for Commonsense Question Answering (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing work uses two independent modules to model QA content and external commonsense knowledge graph (KG) Existing research uses two separate modules to create QA contextual text representations and relationships between QA entities.
Approach: They propose a commonsense question answering (QA) model that uses two independent modules to model QA contextual text representation and relationships between QA entities in KG.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on QA benchmarks in the CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA datasets.
FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks, but their security capabilities in the financial domain have not been explored.
Approach: They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities.
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing intention-based studies on recommendation tasks are limited and use models to implicitly model the intention memberships.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages the generation power of large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the intention knowledge graph.
Outcome: The proposed framework can model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications.
DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for natural language understanding are based on a well-defined intent 1 ontology.
Approach: They propose to retrain the natural language understanding model as new data from real users are merged into existing data.
Outcome: The proposed model shows that the semantically entangled intents can be recognized with an automatic workflow.
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain.
Approach: They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task .
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision.
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to train dense passage retrieval have a large data gap between upstream and downstream relevance.
Approach: They propose a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlinks within Web documents.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods under different scenarios and in the open-domain question answering domain.
Untangle the KNOT: Interweaving Conflicting Knowledge and Reasoning Skills in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have explained to what extent LLMs extract conflicting knowledge from the provided text, but they neglect the necessity to reason with conflicting information.
Approach: They construct a dataset for knowledge conflict resolution examination in the form of question answering that divides reasoning with conflicting knowledge into three levels.
Outcome: The proposed dataset enables analysis of reasoning with conflicting knowledge in the form of question answering.

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